{"id":1607,"date":"2019-05-17T13:19:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T18:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/yiddish-stage\/?p=1607"},"modified":"2023-05-18T14:57:30","modified_gmt":"2023-05-18T19:57:30","slug":"grand-opera-for-yiddish-speakers-in-early-twentieth-century-america-who-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/yiddish-stage\/grand-opera-for-yiddish-speakers-in-early-twentieth-century-america-who-knew\/","title":{"rendered":"Grand Opera for Yiddish Speakers in Early Twentieth-Century America! Who Knew?!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

IN THE SPRING\u00a0of 1904, New York witnessed the unlikely spectacle of a musical-dramatic adaptation of\u00a0Richard Wagner<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0Parsifal<\/a><\/em>\u2014in Yiddish. In the fall of that same year, Lower East Side audiences were offered a season of grand operas in Yiddish translation.1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Over the next twenty years, many Yiddish newspapers and magazines in the US published all manner of articles about\u00a0opera<\/a>. Two Yiddish books, one from 1907 and one from 1923, featured synopses of dozens of operas. In the 1920s, a weekly radio program presented abridged operas translated into Yiddish. This is merely a small sample of the evidence pointing to Yiddish speakers\u2019 interest in opera in early twentieth-century America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These endeavors to bring opera to a Yiddish-speaking public might seem at odds with the genre\u2019s notorious elitism. Since the late 1800s, opera in America has been widely viewed as a refined and exclusive form of high culture, patronized by social and cultural elites. This highbrow reputation has spurred countless efforts to popularize opera over the last century, some of which were aimed specifically at Yiddish speakers. The approach to these various Yiddish-language undertakings moved in tandem with broader trends in democratizing opera at the time, shifting gradually from a Progressive Era<\/a> emphasis on so-called \u201ccultural uplift\u201d in the first two decades of the twentieth century to an emphasis on the integration of high and popular culture as mass media changed the cultural landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cEducational Alliance, East Broadway, New York.\u201d Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In early Progressive Era New York\u2014America\u2019s undisputed cultural center cultural center and hub of Jewish life\u2014there was a brief surge of interest in opera in Yiddish translation. The frenzy surrounding the Metropolitan Opera\u2019s controversial premiere of\u00a0Parsifal\u00a0<\/em>in December 1903 spurred\u00a0Boris Thomashefsky<\/a>\u2019s Yiddish version at the People\u2019s Theatre a few months later.2<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Not to be outdone, his rival, \u201cProfessor\u201d\u00a0Moyshe Hurwitz<\/a>, staged nine weeks of opera in Yiddish translation in the fall of 1904 at the Windsor Theatre. Referring to the Windsor as the \u201cYiddish Metropolitan Opera House,\u201d Hurwitz offered Yiddish versions of\u00a0La Juive<\/em>,\u00a0Il Trovatore<\/em>,\u00a0Carmen<\/em>,\u00a0Cavalleria rusticana,<\/em>\u00a0Pagliacci<\/em>,\u00a0Aida<\/em>, and\u00a0Rigoletto<\/em>. These productions appear to have cut and modified the originals, turning the recitative into spoken dialogue, and including only a handful of sung arias and ensembles. (Although few traces remain of these productions, libretti for two different Yiddish versions of\u00a0Carmen\u00a0<\/em>have survived, offering a window into what some of these productions might have been like.)<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cThe new stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, rebuilt for the production of \u2018Parsifal.\u2019\u201d Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Yiddish speakers at the time were also evidently interested in opera in languages besides Yiddish. As early as 1904, Jewish Lower East Side residents were known for attending performances at the Metropolitan Opera.3<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Ads for opera in English also appeared in the Yiddish press, such as the 1906 notice in the\u00a0Fraye arbeter shtime<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Free Voice of Labor) for the\u00a0Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company<\/a>, an all-black troupe. From 1913 to 1915, the\u00a0Zuro Opera Company<\/a>, which appears to have sung in Italian, also performed in Lower East Side theatres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Books about opera as well as articles in newspapers and magazines provided growing opportunities for the Yiddish-speaking public to read and learn about the genre. In 1904, the literary journal\u00a0Di Tsukunft\u00a0<\/em>(The Future) ran a biographical article about Verdi (a translation of a book chapter by Elbert Hubbard), coinciding perfectly with the first of the Windsor\u2019s Yiddish-language Verdi productions.<\/em>In 1907, William Edlin published a 300-page book entitled\u00a0Velt-berihmte operas\u00a0<\/em>(World-Famous Operas), featuring detailed descriptions and discussions of the plots, music, and historical context of twenty-five Italian, French, and German operas.4<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0That same year, Philip Krantz published a biography of\u00a0Giacomo Meyerbeer<\/a>, entitled \u201cMeyerbeer: The Opera King.\u201d In 1908, the Jewish Libretto Publishing Company printed five-cent booklets of opera libretti such as\u00a0Faust<\/em>,\u00a0Carmen<\/em>, and\u00a0La Traviata\u00a0<\/em>translated into Yiddish by Hillel Vikhnin, which also included commentary on the operas. From November 1909 through April 1910, Thomashefsky\u2019s\u00a0Di Yiddishe bihne\u00a0<\/em>(The Jewish Stage), a weekly newspaper focusing on drama and music, with special attention to Yiddish theatre and Jewish artists, published around two dozen articles on opera topics.5<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Countless other opera-related articles appeared in general interest Yiddish newspapers like\u00a0Morgen-zhurnal<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(The Morning Journal) and the\u00a0Forverts<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Forward) in the first two decades of the century.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cGiacomo Meyerbeer.\u201d Music Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

These many endeavors formed part of broader Progressive Era efforts to democratize opera and other forms of high culture. During this period, impresarios, producers, and other cultural leaders promoted greater access to opera, often underscoring its ability to uplift audiences\u2014that is, to enlighten, educate, and refine. Organizations like the Educational Alliance<\/a> provided immigrants in particular with a wide array of lectures and courses on uplifting high-culture topics, including opera. By the 1910s, the Jews of the Lower East Side had a reputation for being avid consumers of such educational offerings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The widely-held belief in art\u2019s capacity for uplift extended well beyond mainstream American culture. In the 1890s, a small group of socialist and anarchist Russian-Jewish elites began a movement to reform the Yiddish theatre, seeking to replace\u00a0shund\u00a0<\/em>(trash) entertainment with more highbrow offerings\u2014both new creations and adaptations of the best European dramas. According to the movement\u2019s leader, the playwright\u00a0Jacob Gordin<\/a>, Yiddish theatre reformers wanted to \u201cutilize the theatre for higher purposes; to derive from it not only amusement but education, not merely entertainment but the highest aesthetical enjoyment.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new technology of recording that emerged around 1900 further increased access to high culture such as opera, bringing it into the sphere of mass media. During these years, records of opera arias were popular among Yiddish speakers: phonograph ads often listed the most recently released opera recordings, including ones in Yiddish.7<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0The Yiddish-speaking public\u2019s interest in opera can also be seen in the comparisons of prominent cantors to opera singers\u2014at least three cantors,\u00a0Joseph Schmidt<\/a>,\u00a0Gershon Sirota<\/a>, and\u00a0Yossele Rosenblatt<\/a>, all of whom also sang operatic music, were at times referred to as \u201cthe Jewish Caruso.\u201d Some cantors in the 1920s, including\u00a0Joseph Shlisky<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Joseph Winogradoff<\/a>, made recordings of opera arias, a few of which were in Yiddish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cEducational Alliance Auditorium. Announcement of the Concert and Dramatic Series, 1904-1905.\u201d Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cFaust\u201d. Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cTraviata.\u201d Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cKarmen.\u201d Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The advent of radio offered yet another avenue for democratizing opera. Many radio programs of the twenties and thirties featured opera excerpts, and some presented abridged operas in both English and other languages, including Yiddish.8<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0For a few months in late 1929, listeners could tune into the weekly\u00a0Robert Burns Yidishe Shtunde\u00a0<\/em>(Robert Burns\u2019 Yiddish Hour).9<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Advertised in the\u00a0Forverts\u00a0<\/em>with the big headline, \u201cOperas in Yiddish,\u201d these broadcasts appear to have been abridged versions of grand operas, probably with a narrator reading out the storyline in Yiddish and singers (from the Marbini-Marchetti Opera Company) performing selected arias accompanied by an orchestra.10<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0The program also featured a lecture in Yiddish on topics of general Jewish interest, or sometimes even a comic monologue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A further instance of Yiddish-language opera popularizing efforts during this period is Dr. A. Muzikant\u2019s 1923\u00a0Dos naye opera bukh\u00a0<\/em>(The New Opera Book), which contained concise synopses of forty grand operas.11<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0In seeking, as he explains, \u201cto give the readers of the book the\u00a0essence, the whole\u00a0substance, the whole\u00a0sap, the whole\u00a0soul\u00a0of each opera text,\u201d he takes an unorthodox approach.12<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Rather than paraphrasing the plots and providing contextualizing historical information, Muzikant presents a sort of play-by-play of selected events, including some of the most important arias nearly verbatim. This strategy vividly highlights the key elements of the stories, thus emphasizing opera\u2019s capacity for dramatic and dynamic storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The democratization of high culture via mass media heralded the beginning of the ideological move away from uplift toward integration, as purveyors of opera or opera-related material sought to incorporate it into the popular sphere, often avoiding drawing attention to opera\u2019s elite associations. In both Yiddish and wider American circles, this meant changing the genre to make it fit within the parameters and expectations of popular culture, such as by disseminating it as excerpts (usually arias), significantly abridging or otherwise modifying it, or combining and juxtaposing it with unmistakably popular cultural forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether Yiddish was the language of the opera or the language of discussion about opera performed in other languages, there was clearly interest in the genre among Yiddish-speaking immigrants in America in the early years of the twentieth century. The existence of this Yiddish-language opera scene also reveals a tension between a desire to maintain ties to a minority-group linguistic tradition, and an impulse to fit into broader American culture. Hearing and learning about opera in the mame-loshn <\/em>mixed past and present, foreign and familiar, Old World and New.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
    \n
  1. The term \u201cgrand opera\u201d during this period referred to canonic Continental European operas sung throughout (as opposed to light opera that included spoken dialogue).<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. <\/a>For more details on the Yiddish Parsifal, see Daniela Smolov Levy, \u201cParsifal in Yiddish? Why Not?\u201d, The Musical Quarterly 97, no. 2 (2014): 140-80, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/musqtl\/gdu007.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. In 1904, the New York Sunday Telegraph <\/em>observed that \u201cthe East Side patronage of [the Metropolitan Opera], [\u2026], as is well known, has always been a very heavy one.\u201d Bernard G. Richards, \u201cReal Grand Opera in New York\u2019s Ghetto,\u201d New York Sunday Telegraph<\/em>, September 18, 1904. Regarding Jews\u2019 interest in opera on popular price nights at the Metropolitan Opera, see Edmund J. James, The Immigrant Jew in America <\/em>(New York : B.F. Buck, 1907), 224.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Many of these opera summaries had already appeared as newspaper articles in the Yiddish newspaper Der Amerikaner <\/em>over the course of 1907.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. These included not only reporting on the most prominent affairs of the American opera world of the day, but also singer and composer biographies, musical criticism, and even technical discussions of voice quality, voice production, and singing style.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. Cited in Judith Thissen, \u201cReconsidering the Decline of the New York Yiddish Theatre in the Early 1900s,\u201d Theatre Survey <\/em>44, no. 2 (2003): 177.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. Ari Kelman, Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States <\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 247, fn. 72.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  8. The Metropolitan Opera\u2019s broadcasts of complete operas, which began in the 1930s, were an exception to the usually short length of radio programs.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  9. For a discussion of the broader cultural context of this and other radio programs in Yiddish, see Kelman, Station Identification<\/em>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  10. The productions were directed by Rubin Goldberg, who was among the first major stars on Yiddish radio. Instrumental music was provided by an orchestra called the \u201cHomophonic Ensemble,\u201d conducted by Nathan Tsiganeri. The Marbini-Marchetti Opera Company also gave stage performances of popular-price grand opera in addition to appearing on the radio on the \u201cVim Hour.\u201d Given the Italian names of the singers in the company, it would be surprising if all the arias on the Robert Burns show were performed in Yiddish translation, but the September 17, 1929 Forverts <\/em>ad, for example, explicitly states that \u201carias will be sung in Yiddish.\u201d<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  11. A. Muzikant was one of the many pen names of Shaye Rozenberg.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  12. Emphasis in the original.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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