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ussian-Jewish pianist Jascha Nemtsov was born in  in Magadan. He studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and has lived in Berlin since . In addition to the classic-romantic piano repertoire and music of the th century, he places great emphasis on the works of Jewish composers. His new CD contrasts Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies with works of Juliusz Wolfsohn. Wolfsohn was born in  in the Russian Warsaw and died in  in New York. After studying piano and composition in Moscow, he continued his studies as a pianist in Paris and Vienna. He emigrated to the USA in . His works focus exclusively on Jewish music and Yiddish folklore.

Gipsy Soul – Jewish Heart

In 1859, a French-language book entitled “The Gypsies and Their Music in Hungary” was published in Paris. Its author was none other than the famous Franz Liszt, who had written this book as a sort of literary counterpart to his 15 Hungarian Rhapsodies, which he had published some years before. These works, which were already known throughout Europe, were a successful attempt at adapting the musical style of the Hungarian gypsy bands. Liszt had studied the particularities of gypsy music such as dynamics, meter, accentuation, rhythm, the color of its typical instruments, its harmonic structure etc. during his stay in Hungary in the 1840s with the meticulousness of a folklorist.

Liszt was not only fascinated by the music of the gypsies, but also with their entire way of living, whose most important element, according to him, was their “search for unbridled freedom”.

Strangely enough, Liszt dedicated the second chapter of his book to another topic, entitled “The Opposite of the Gypsy: The Israelite”. In addition to some of the prejudices about Jews that were typical of the time, this chapter also contains some noteworthy passages that show Liszt’s liking of and interest in the Jews, their history and their culture. One such passage is dedicated to Jewish music:

“We had one single opportunity to get an impression what Judaic art could be like if the Israelites would reveal all the intensity of the feeling alive in their being in the form of their own soul. We became acquainted with Cantor Sulzer in Vienna. (…) In order to hear him, we went to the synagogue where he was the musical director and cantor. We have seldom experienced such an overwhelming vibration of all strings of the worship of God and human sympathy as on this evening. In the glow of candlelight resembling stars in the ceiling, a bizarre choir of somber, guttural voices – as though every breast was a dungeon from whose depths the voice rang in order to praise the God of the Ark of the Covenant from misery and confinement, to call him with an enduring faith, full of certainty of redemption from endless slavery. (…) It was impossible not to join in with all sympathy of the soul in the great call of this choir, which carried the weight of so many thousands of years of tradition and divine blessings, so much indignation and castigation and such unshakable hope, as though carried by huge shoulders.”

Gypsies and Jews: two peoples in a foreign world and their music

The historical fate of gypsies and Jews has clear parallels. Both peoples originally come from the Orient (Jews from the Middle East, gypsies from India), they were treated as outsiders in Europe for centuries and were subject to persecution. The climax of this persecution was the Nazi period in Germany, when millions of Jews and ten-thousands of Sinti and Roma were murdered only because of their heritage.

Jews migrated to Europe during Roman times; gypsies in the late Middle Ages. During this long Diaspora among other peoples and despite great pressure to assimilate, both peoples were able to maintain the typical features of their national characters. These features could also be seen in their folk music.

Jewish klezmer bands and gypsy bands are two phenomena that decisively shaped the musical landscape in eastern – and above all, in southeastern – Europe. Here, too, the parallels between the two cannot be overlooked: a perfect mastery of improvisation, free, rhapsodic musical forms, rich ornamentation and last but not least, the characteristic modes with their augmented seconds. Similarly, their bands – which were instrumental ensembles without singers – consisted usually of two to five, but sometimes of up to twelve instruments. Their instrumentation was also essentially the same: violin or clarinet as the solo instrument, accompanied by hammered cymbalon.

In addition, both klezmer as well as gypsy musicians had an enormous ability to absorb the folklore of the peoples living around them and adapt it in their own manner. The repertoire of Hungarian gypsy bands was overwhelmingly based on Hungarian folksong melodies, which they brilliantly ornamented and transformed into basic thematic material for large-scale rhapsodic compositions. Their most important means were variation and ornamentation. These were also features of Jewish klezmer music, which adapted primarily Moldavian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Polish and Hungarian folksongs and dances.

It is thus not surprising that Jewish and gypsy musicians often performed together. An expert on eastern European Jewish music, François Lilienfeld, writes, “The art of the klezmorim was also highly prized by non-Jews, and they were also hired for non-Jewish celebrations, which strongly influenced their repertoire; a good klezmer musician was just as at-home in Jewish music as in the music of his guest country. There had been a special relationship between Roma musicians and klezmorim for ages. This might go back to their common fate as persecuted peoples and their traveling lifestyle. But musical parallels are apparent as well: an oral-music tradition, the proximity of mourning and happiness and the use of old Oriental modes are also found in gypsy music.”

The use of the augmented second, which presumably comes from the Orient, as well as other common musical features, was discussed by composer and cellist Joachim Stutschewsky, who, like so many distinguished Jewish musicians, came from a well known klezmer family. “A certain ‘relationship’ between ‘gypsy’ and ‘ghetto’ music can first be seen in the fact that both are basically for one voice: the melody dominates. Furthermore, both gypsy and Jewish music – as true fellow sufferers – are rich in emotion, expression and rhythmic anomalies. They disregard all rules and theoretical considerations; they are far from the evolution and diverse influences of western music. Both here and there, the music is free, acts from a pure natural drive and is the product of uninhibited natural talents.”

The stylistic parallels in klezmer and gypsy music can be explained by three essential factors: first, their Oriental origin; second, they were the result of mutual inspiration and common music-making; third, they were at home in the same geographic area and surrounded by the same cultural influences. The last applies above all to the Romanian-Moldavian instrumental music with its Doina as the main genre. The Doina is a longer, two-part composition in which the first slow part has a contemplative and melancholy minor character and the second is a fast, virtuosic dance. This form was taken over both by Jewish as well as gypsy musicians and intensively practiced. Liszt immortalized the Doina in his Hungarian Rhapsodies.

The first, slow part – an improvisatory fantasia often without a given meter – was designated as a “taksim” in Jewish music. This word is Turkish in origin and was also used by gypsy bands. It may have been brought to southeast Europe by Jewish musicians; it may also be that Romanians, Jews and gypsies took the word from the Turkish tradition independently of each other.

However, it is often impossible to find out who influenced whom in individual cases anyway. It is certain, however, that folk music in southeastern Europe was a mixture without equal, in which countless European and Oriental influences melded with each other. Jewish and gypsy music were important components of this culture; not only did they assume elements of the folklore of other peoples; they also made their own highly significant contribution.

Although Hungarian gypsy music had inspired other composers before Liszt, e.g. Haydn, Beethoven or Schubert, Liszt was the first who succeeded in authentically representing its spirit in the form of piano music.

Juliusz Wolfsohn

Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies became the model for one Jewish composer who had taken it upon himself to do something similar for Jewish folk music: Juliusz Wolfsohn. Like Liszt, Wolfsohn was not only a composer, but first and foremost a piano virtuoso. And writing for piano was naturally his first preference.

Wolfsohn was born in 1880 in Warsaw and studied piano and composition at the Conservatory there before continuing at the Moscow Conservatory, and then in Paris with Raoul Pugno. He finally came to Vienna, where he became a student of Theodor Leschetitzky. This makes him, so to speak, a “grand-student” of Liszt.

Wolfsohn remained in Vienna and rapidly made a name for himself, above all as an outstanding Chopin interpreter. He undertook numerous concert tours in various European countries and the USA, all of which brought him great recognition and established his position in the international musical scene.

As a composer, Wolfsohn worked exclusively in the area of Jewish music. His first larger work – the Jewish Rhapsody from 1912 – picks up from its famous Hungarian predecessor, beginning with the title, of course. A critic in “Die Musik” journal noted at the time about the work: “Prof. Wolfsohn has written a gratifying – albeit not easy to conquer – piano work, which is just as distinguished by the depth of its feeling as by the pianistic attractions obtained from the thematic material. Psalm melodies and chorales, wedding dances and dinner table songs mesh like links in a chain, and when the wedding song eventually begins at the end, it is only natural – after the triumphant lifting up that it takes – that it is a joy which one experiences with one laughing and one weeping eye.”

By 1920, Wolfsohn had also written 12 Paraphrases on Old Jewish Folk Songs, which were published in three volumes by Universal Edition Vienna in several print runs. The themes of these paraphrases were well-known Yiddish songs such as the Chassidic song “Der Rebbe hot geheißen frejlech sein” in Wedding Song. This melody had also been popularized outside the Chassidic milieu by klezmer bands who had assumed it in their repertoires and played it above all at weddings.

Wolfsohn’s most important published work is the Hebrew Suite, which was first composed in 1926 and later arranged for piano and orchestra. All of these works were highly popular during the 1920s and 1930s; they were not only performed by Wolfsohn himself, but also by other Jewish and non-Jewish pianists. One music critic enthusiastically wrote about Wolfsohn’s music: “The foreign and completely closed world of the eastern European Jew rises mysteriously from the limitless sadness or bizarre-grotesque merriment of these songs. These folk songs are ancient, and it requires a great degree of spiritual and artistic sensitivity not to destroy their individual qualities. Wolfsohn has brilliantly solved this uncommonly difficult task. (…) How it sounds, how elegant, how ingenious and delicately intimate it is, how truly pianistic it sounds and has been conceived!” Wolfsohn belonged to the protagonists of the Vienna Society for the Promotion of Jewish Music, for which he did a great deal, including reviewing for the two Vienna Jewish newspapers “Die Stimme” and “Die neue Welt”.

After the annexation of Austria into Hitler- Germany, Wolfsohn fled to the USA in 1939, where he was unable to work musically and died in 1944. His name became completely forgotten; until now none of his works has ever been commercially recorded.