Song Settings for the Poet Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies
Isaac Nathan
1815
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Hebrew Melodies was a collaboration between the English poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) and his friend, the Jewish composer Isaac Nathan. It is a collection of thirty poems by the poet, set to music by Nathan. The tunes Nathan composed were based on a variety of forms, including synagogue music, martial music, German lieder, and an oratorio. Byron is said to have been sympathetic to the Jews because of their precarious civic and social status in England and Europe at the time.
Credits
London: J. Fentum for the Proprietor, n.d., plates 102–5.
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 6.
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He was home from the East, this pilgrim.
He had left to seek a perfumed flower
that Solomon, whose hands grew dark
from constant prayers for beauty,
had planted in the gardens of En Gedi,
fashioned…
Asleep in songs and lullabies
Asleep in songs and lullabies was my heart, while I was dreaming, imagining myself amidst poets, as eloquent and intelligent as the finest wine yeast.From my drunken slumber an illustrious man awoke…
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O Russians, you who love your fellow men! You would shudder from the bottoms of your kind hearts if you saw the effect of that terrible accusation which Jews who were eyewitnesses to the unjustified…