Showing Results 1 - 10 of 15
Charles-Valentin Alkan composed this setting of Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon”) in 1859, the same year that his friend Franz Liszt composed a setting for the same biblical verses. Unlike Liszt…
Robert le diable (Robert the Devil) is an opera in five acts composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer between 1827 and 1831. One of the first grand operas, it caused a sensation when it debuted at the Paris…
Tales of Hoffmann, an opéra fantastique, is the final work of composer Jacques Offenbach, who died four months before its premiere in Paris in 1881. At the time of Offenbach’s death, the opera was…
This engraving depicting a Jewish man in Cairo, Egypt is from Cornelis de Bruyn’s travelogue, Reizen van Corn. de Bruyn door de vermaardste deelen van Klein Asia, de eylanden Scio, Rhodus, Cyprus enz…
The music for “Se’u She‘arim (Lift Up Your Heads, O Gates)” resembles the choral marches found in grand opera. The words are from Psalm 24: O gates, lift up your heads! Up high, you everlasting doors…
Salamone de Rossi (1570–1630), composer, singer, violinist, and musician in the Gonzaga court in Mantua, is best known for his introduction of polyphony into synagogue music. Composer Samuel Naumbourg…
Mané-Katz may have painted this picture of a traditional Jewish klezmer band from memory, from his childhood in the Russian Empire. By the late 1940s, his previously dark palette had begun to shift to…
La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein is an opéra bouffe (French comic opera), composed by Jacques Offenbach when his career was at its height. It premiered in 1867 and had performances at the Paris…
Aggudat Shirim (Collection of Songs) was one of several collections of synagogue music published by Samuel Naumbourg between 1847 and 1874. It included a scholarly article about Jewish music.
Arthur Kolnik dedicated his illustrations of Y. L. Peretz’s story, “A gilgl fun a nign” (The Transmigration of a Melody), to his brother, who, along with his family, was murdered in the Holocaust…
