The Jewish National Revival in Art Music

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries many Jewish composers sought to create a distinctly Jewish national sound in their music. Notable among these were the composers of the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folkmusic. Led by composer-critic Joel Engel, these graduates of the St. Petersburg and Moscow Conservatories rediscovered their Jewish national roots, and created a new genre of Jewish art music. Inspired by the nationalist movement in Russian music, exemplified by Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and others, these Jewish composers set out to the "Shtetls" - the Jewish villages of Russia - and meticulously recorded and transcribed thousands of Yiddish folksongs. They then set these songs to both vocal and instrumental ensembles. The resulting music is a marriage between often melancholy and "krekhtsen" (moaning) melodies of the Shtetl with late Russian romantic harmonies of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff.

The Jewish national revival in music was not only in Russia. A number of Western European composers took an interest in their Jewish musical roots, and tried to create a unique Jewish art style. Ernest Bloch (1880–1959), a Swiss composer who emigrated to the United States, composed Schelomo for cello and orchestra, Suite Hebraique for violin and piano, and Sacred Service, which is the first attempt to set the Jewish service in a form similar to the Requiem, for full orchestra, choir and soloists. Bloch described his connection to Jewish music as intensely personal:

It is not my purpose, nor my desire, to attempt a 'reconstitution' of Jewish music, or to base my work on melodies more or less authentic. I am not an archeologist... It is the Jewish soul that interests me... the freshness and naiveté of the Patriarchs; the violence of the Prophetic books; the Jewish savage love of justice...[5]

Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) was one of the leaders of the French modernist school. As a child in Aix-en-Provence, Milhaud was exposed to the music of the Provençal Jewish community. "I have been greatly influenced by the character" of this music, he wrote[6]. His opera Esther de Carpentras draws on this rich musical heritage.

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968), an Italian composer who immigrated to America on the eve of World War II, was strongly influenced by his Sephardic Jewish upbringing. His second violin concerto draws on Jewish themes, as do many of his songs and choral works: cantatas Naomi and Ruth, Queen of Sheba, and the oratorio The Book of Jonah, among others. Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote a number of songs in Ladino, which was the language of Sephardic Jews.