Leo Levi—The Man with the Nagra by Yaala Levi Zimmerman (review)

Leo Levi—The Man with the Nagra is a film that will appeal to several audiences, exploring as it does the diverse yet profoundly interwoven passions of Leo Levi’s life (1912–1982). One of those passions, the ethnomusicology of Italian Jewry, will be of particular interest to readers of this journal, especially since his ethnomusicological work was a unique, single-handed salvage operation, undertaken at the last possible moment. Levi’s story is all the more engaging because his was a committed ideological life in which the collection, transcription, preservation, and analysis of traditional music brought together all the other threads of his life and became his most fulfilling and fruitful labor.

Leo Levi was not just an ethnomusicologist of Italian Jewry; he was virtually the only collector of traditional Italian Jewish music. He mainly recorded synagogue melodies—hymns, chants, blessings, holiday prayers, the Torah cantillations, and other liturgical music. He also collected non-liturgical folk songs, including local variations of widespread Passover songs like Had Gadya/Capretto (“One Little Goat”). Italy is famous, of course, for its distinct regional folk cultures, and Italian Jews, being as much regional Italians as Jews, replicated patterns of regional variation even in their religious expressive culture. Their communities consisted of descendants of both those who had come (or had been brought as slaves) from ancient Judea to Rome (the “Italkim”) and generations of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews who had been expelled from Spain, Portugal, France, and Germany. The proportions of this ethnic mix varied according to the community, a city like Livorno being completely Sephardic and a city like Venice having roughly equal numbers of Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Italkic Jews. Three small cities in Piedmont—Asti, Fossano, and Moncalvo—preserved a liturgy from France. The different musical traditions from these sources mixed in various ways in each synagogue and were passed on orally/aurally. Thus, musical traditions varied not only between regions, but even between synagogues within the same cities.

Leo Levi’s gift to the world began with his realization, after World War II, that although much of this repertoire had already disappeared, and many singers who knew the melodies were old and were the last singers of particular traditions, it was still possible, if he acted quickly, to save a great deal of it. He convinced RAI, the Italian state-owned public broadcasting station, to fund his fieldwork as part of Italy’s folklore (a hard sell in postwar, pre-boom Italy, as Israeli ethnomusicologist Edwin Seroussi points out in the film). Subsequently, during the 1950s and early 1960s, Levi succeeded in recording over 1,000 melodies from 27 different liturgical traditions. During his lifetime, he disseminated articles in scholarly publications, and in 2002, these articles were collected in an anthology, Canti tradizionali e tradizioni liturgiche: Ricerche e studi sulle tradizioni musicali ebraiche e sui loro rapporti con il canto cristiano,¹ edited by Roberto Leydi, the leading Italian ethnomusicologist with whom Levi sometimes collaborated. Two sets of Levi’s field recordings are available in archives, one at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the other at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2001, thanks to the work of Francesco Spagnolo, who is interviewed in the film, a selection of Leo Levi’s recordings became available to the public. (See Italian Jewish Musical Traditions from the Leo Levi Collection 1954–1961.²) Although Levi’s greatest achievement was the rescue of Italian Jewish liturgical music, he also recorded other Jewish musical traditions, for instance, traveling as far as Cochin, India, to document the music of the Bene Israel as well as Christian liturgical music of the Mediterranean basin.

Just as Leo Levi turned back time by traveling to the former ghettos of Italy, France, and Greece to record Italian Jewish music, Yaala Levi Zimmerman, his daughter and director of the film, turned to people who had known him in Fascist Italy and Mandate...