Israel and Jewish Classical Art Music

The Preclassical, Classical, Romantic and 20th-Century composers
Jewish musicians in the Western European classical tradition have long debated the question of what is Jewish music. Most musicians of Jewish origin in the 19th century composed music that could not be considered Jewish in any sense, either by critics or by the musicians themselves. For example, Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880), a leading composer of opera and operetta in the 19th century, was the son of a cantor, and grew up steeped in traditional Jewish music. Yet there is nothing about his music which could be characterized as Jewish in terms of style, and he himself did not consider his work to be Jewish. As another example, Felix Mendelssohn, the grandson of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, continued to identify himself as a Jew, even though he was baptized as a Lutheran at the age of seven. Yet, while he occasionally draws inspiration from Christian sources (one of the themes in his second piano trio, opus 66, is the Lutheran doxology), there is nothing characteristically Jewish about any of his music. "Music written by Jews is not necessarily Jewish music", wrote Erich Werner in 1938 in a seminal essy on the subject in the journal "Musica Hebraica". Salamone Rossi (1570–1630) as court composer in Mantua was instrumental in the development of the Baroque trio sonata form. Rossi composed a song cycle called "The Songs of Solomon", which drew on Jewish liturgical and biblical texts.

Composers who drew on Jewish subjects include

Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote the oratorio "Elijah". While Mendelssohn never acknowledged that his choice of a topic was influenced by his Jewish origins, it is probable that his intimite familiarity with the biblical text came from his childhood.
Fromental Halévy was a well-known composer of opera in the second half of the nineteenth century. He drew occasionally on Jewish themes for his operas, most notably, La Juive.
Giacomo Meyerbeer, also a leading opera composer, arranged a number of liturgical songs, including a motet arrangement for double choir a capella of Psalm 91.
Gustav Mahler used Klezmer-influenced motives in the third movement of his first symphony (though ostensibly imitating the sound of a local Moravian town band).
Arnold Schoenberg composed a number of works on Jewish themes including Kol Nidre (chorus and orchestra), A Survivor from Warsaw (male chorus and orchestra), Psalm 130 “De Profundis”, Prelude to Genesis Suite (chorus and orchestra), and the opera Moses und Aron [Moses and Aaron], in three acts (1930–32, unfinished).
Leonard Bernstein incorporated Jewish material into his symphonies no.1 (Jeremiah) and no. 3 (Kaddish).