Representations of Jews in the Musical Theater of the Habsburg Empire (1788–1807) by David J. Buch (review)

In Die Juden, a short work of musical theatre composed at the turn of the nineteenth century by the Moravian composer Paul Wranitzky, a rabbi, appalled at the squabbling of two Jewish merchants, sings: ‘What will the Christians say? . . . Don’t make a scene before the goys’ (p. 50). Wranitzky’s libretto mocks the rabbi’s self-conscious anxiety about his own difference, while it simultaneously offers derogatory stereotypes of Jewish behaviour, representing what many non-Jews did in fact say about their Jewish neighbours in the major cities of the Habsburg Empire. The non-Jewish perception of Jewish speech and music in Central Europe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is the subject of David J. Buch’s brief volume, a critical edition of six excerpts from five rare works of musical theatre, several of which were previously available only in the archives. These materials provide a valuable documentary source for scholars and musicians seeking to understand public perceptions of Jewish culture and music at this time, and the ways varied perspectives on the Jewish presence in Habsburg society were depicted in the composition of music for opera and other theatrical genres.

Buch’s work opens with an introductory essay that addresses the historical context and stylistic characteristics of the music he has compiled, followed by transcriptions of the librettos and scores of dramatic numbers containing Jewish characters and thematic material, and a discussion of the extant sources and editorial methods. This critical edition is the ninth volume of the Yuval Music Series, founded in 1989 by the Jewish Music Research Centre, which also publishes essay collections and monographs about musical traditions of Jewish communities around the world in its Yuval Studies of the Jewish Music Centre and Yuval Monographs Series. Previous volumes of the Yuval Music Series have included compilations of Yiddish and Sephardic songs, Israeli klezmer, and music of the Italian synagogue of Casale Monferrato, among other repertories. With Buch’s collection, the editors have expanded the scope of their valuable set of anthologies to include representations of Jewish music and characters in the works of non-Jewish composers.

Jewish characters proliferated in the theatre under the Habsburg reign in the eighteenth century. Depictions of Jews were customarily negative, and Jewish characters often played secondary roles in dramatic narratives, typically portrayed by non-Jewish actors who specialized in caricatures and comic roles such as servants, peasants, confidence men, and simpletons, as well as Jews. Around mid-century the idealized character type of the ‘noble Jew’ had also begun to develop in literature and theatre, exemplified most famously in the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. As demonstrated by the scores in Buch’s collection, both positive and negative representations of Jews persisted in German drama, and were adapted in new operas and musical theatre.

Looking at surviving evidence in the form of theatrical texts and published descriptions of plays and dramatic performances, Buch shows that many of these stage works focused on parodies of Jewish wedding traditions and major festivals such as Purim and Sukkot, and were set in Jewish villages or the Jewish sector of Prague, which had the largest Jewish population of the major Habsburg cities. The sites and festivals of Jewish tradition were exploited as sources of humour; as one poster exclaimed, ‘The ridiculous Jewish Synagogue will make this work extraordinarily funny’ (p. 15). The texts spoken by Jewish characters were often peppered with words adapted from Yiddish and Hebrew. Many of the musical numbers in scenes of Jewish rituals appear to have incorporated an exoticist idiom that bore little or no resemblance to Jewish liturgical music of the time.

By the close of the 1700s, however, audiences were becoming increasingly familiar with Jewish musical traditions, through personal encounters in regions with larger Jewish populations, as well as through the organization of public performances of Jewish instrumental and vocal...