Translating Jewish Themes into Art Music in 1920s Vilna: Coda or Continuation?

• In Event: Translation and Cultural Nationalism in Jewish Vilna, 1915-1923

Abstract

In spite of the growing academic interest in art music on Jewish themes and the spate of new books on the Tsarist-era Society for Jewish Folk Music, most of the scholarship concentrates on St. Petersburg and focuses primarily on the pre-1917 period, implying that this Jewish nationalist musical movement effectively ended with the Russian Revolution, and a series of musical codas took place in different cities as Russian-Jewish composers fanned out across the world.

In this paper, I explore this musical movement’s legacy in the Vilna of the early 1920s. Using thick description of the musical life of the city during this period, I explore the question of whether Vilna represents a coda to a pre-1917 story or an entirely new chapter that requires reconstruction if we are to create a comprehensive account of the life of Russian-Jewish music in the post-1917 period.

Beginning in 1922–23, performances of art music on Jewish motivic material burst upon Vilna’s cultural scene. An earlier attempt by the society—in 1913–14 —to interest Vilna in the genre had met with little success; only two persons in the city had joined the organization, and three orchestral concerts that season were poorly attended. But by the early 1920s, there was enthusiasm in Vilna for new institutions and an openness to secular nationalism. Concerts of art music translating themes from Jewish folk and liturgical music into a Russian/European idiom responded to that enthusiasm and openness.

What explains this new positive reception? In this paper, I consider several different factors driving the presentation and reception of Jewish art music in Vilna in the early 1920s. Focusing my analysis around a cluster of musical figures that include composer Leo Zeitlin, producer Srol Zeitlin (his brother), and poet and journalist A.I. Grodzenski, and drawing on concert programs and newspaper coverage, I ask what this music meant to Jewish Vilna and what Vilna meant to Jewish music.

author

• Paula Eisenstein Baker, University of St. Thomas, Houston