Art Song with the Coen Brothers
What A Serious Man tells us about the intimate genre of Jewish art song
The Coen Brothers have been haunting me for the past month.
Maybe I should call my aunt, who used to babysit them as kids, to tell them to stop. But that wouldn’t change the effect of their excruciatingly well-done film, A Serious Man (2009).
This dark comedy follows the misfortunes of a Jewish math professor, Larry Gopnick, who is tragically unable to stand up for himself as his marriage, job, and life fall apart. Embodying the archetype of the emasculated Jewish male, the protagonist reaches out to a series of friends and rabbis to help make sense of his life. Their ersatz authority and hollow advice only deepens Gopnick’s own impotence, as he finds himself dependent upon empty symbols.
I have a lot to say about this movie, particularly its picture-perfect portrayal of 1960s suburban Judaism and its simultaneously savage takedown of its pretenses.1 But what sparked my musical interest was the soundtrack of Larry Gopnick’s cyclical failures—a Yiddish art song.
{Performed by Ian Pomerantz, bass-baritone & Bryan Schenkman, piano}
Not idly did the Coen brothers choose this melody. Dem Milners Trern (“The Miller’s Tears”) was written by the Yiddish songster Mark Warshawsky (1840-1907), who was discovered by none other than Sholem Aleichem and who wrote a number of Yiddish songs that are still sung today. The lyrics of Dem Milners Trern reflect the sad fate of Jews in the shtetl — a fitting match to dark heart of A Serious Man, which proffers the cyclical, wheel-turning inevitability of suffering with no ready answer in sight:
“The Miller’s Tears” by Mark Warshawsky, trans. Joseph & Eleanor Mlotek
Oh, how many years
have gone by
since I’ve been a miller here?
The wheels turn,
the years pass,
and I have grown old, grizzled and gray.There are days
when I want to ask myself,
have I ever had even a bit of luck?
The wheels turn,
the years pass,
no answer comes back.I have heard tell
they are going to drive me
out of the village and away from the mill.
The wheels turn,
the years pass,
without purpose and without an end.Where will I live,
Who will take care of me?
I am old and I have grown tired;
The wheels turn,
the years pass,
and along with them, the Jew passes on.
I’m not sure what it is about millers in art songs. Like Schubert’s subject in Die Schöne Müllerin, they always seem to meet tragic ends. But what struck me hearing this song in the film was, in fact, its beauty. One of music’s great secrets is how it clothes deep and pathos-filled messages in entertaining or beautiful garments — sometimes to fool us, and sometimes to teach us.2
Whether those messages are obscured or illuminated can depend a lot on the person singing.
An illuminating musician and worthy interpreter of this song is the bass-baritone Ian Pomerantz, whose new album Art Songs of the Jewish Diaspora drops on all platforms this coming Purim (3/23/24). In this sensitive and wide-ranging recording, Pomerantz and pianist Byron Schenkman capture the yearning of the Jewish spirit as it refracts through a multilingual prism of Jewish art song.
In the intimacy of the art song genre, kavannah (intention) really matters. Whereas for some singers a song is merely a vehicle for beauty and expression, Pomerantz’s vulnerable and attentive vocalism reveals a profound intellectual and spiritual connection to the yiddishkeit emanating from within the music — and himself. A veteran oratorio singer and regular bass-baritone soloist with the Washington Bach Consort, Pomerantz simultaneously maintains a fierce scholarly practice as a cantorial student at Abraham Geiger Kolleg in Berlin and a PhD Candidate at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales at the Sorbonne.3 The result is a new, worthwhile album overflowing with nuance and intentionality, which invites the listener into the deeper mysteries of the Jewish soul.
{‘Ven y Veras’ from Three Sephardic Songs by Performed by Ian Pomerantz, bass-baritone & Byron Schenkman, piano}
This very idea of the “Jewish soul” is actually fundamental to the historical origins of the art song genre, and in its trenchant presence in A Serious Man. Is Jewish art song, like Gopnick’s failed rabbis, stumping impressively for a broken, empty system? Or is it a source of something transcendent and profound — the revelation of the Jewish soul?
The idea of the musical “soul of a nation” dramatically swept into the West in the eighteenth century with the German theorist Johann Gottfried Herder, who coined the word volkslied (“folk song”) in the 1770s.4 Here, rather than the aristocracy or the church defining musical value, he articulated that the third estate - the people – were the source of musical authenticity and authority.
With the dawning of Emancipation, Jews poured their energies into participating in the grand and emerging countries of Europe. But at a certain point, the Europeans, followed by the Jews themselves, began to consider that the Hebrew nation might have separate roots for its national spirit. Thus a European trope of Jews as innovators of other nations’ music took root and spread throughout the nineteenth century. An early advocate was none other than the famous pianist, Franz Liszt, in the Jewish chapter from his book Die Zigeuner und ihre Musik in Ungarn (The Gypsies and their Music in Hungary, 1861:
“The Jews have cultivated the arts, too, until they have taken over every last bit of that field. What they have accomplished there is like what they accomplished earlier in astrology: they have practiced and produced without belief in what they are doing. They have never realized how art--by grace of inspiration--creates. For when "art" is uttered, so, too, is "creation." The difference between creation and innovation is the same as that between genius and talent; between Bach and Mendelssohn; between Beethoven and Meyerbeer.
The Israelites have never discovered new forms. They have never created any tradition of architecture, painting, music, song, or poetry that expressed the inner sensitivities of these people so that one could consider them national arts. More than any other art-form, they have appropriated music, and what brilliant success they have had with it! Limiting their ambitions to skillful imitation, they determined to imitate the best of what we possess--and they knew it when they saw it. The Jews are very clever in arranging the elements of what we create.
One would like to believe that the Israelites possessed their own arts before they rose to power as an independent tribe. If that were the case, inspiration would shine through in their works; their perceptions and their passions would take on life in the world of artistic ideals.
One time only did we have the fearsome experience of seeing and hearing what Jewish art could become when the Israelites pour out the full splendor of their fantasy and dreams into forms created by their asiatic genius, with the intensity of feeling and of their suppressed passions. Then the glow of their fire appeared--this intense fire, which they intentionally cover with ashes so that we think it is cold...”5
The accusation of Jews having no “national” music to be ennobled in art, of being imitators of styles not their own, will animate much of the Jewish national music movement half a century later. But Liszt experienced one example of such music from a Jewish art song singer he knew well - a font of the Jews “asiatic genius,” none other than Cantor Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890).
Sulzer was known among a circle of musical cognoscenti as an amazing singer, and many elite in the Viennese classical world, as Liszt himself reports, went to hear him in the Seitenstettengasse synagogue. Sulzer’s musical innovations there, whether consciously or not, thus also followed the European paradigm of musical nationalism. In taking traditional Jewish chant, paring it down to its folk essence, and using Western musical tools to recreate it artistically, Sulzer revealed to Liszt the “glow” of the Israelites’ fire — a witness to the passion and particularism of Jewish national sound.
This same process was taken up nearly fifty years later by a movement of musical Jews in the Russian Empire. In an era where Jews were an overwhelmingly large percentage of Russian conservatory students, the timing was right for a mass movement of Jewish musical production. An article in 1909 described the then lamentable situation of Jewish music:
“They say that we Jews are the most musical nation, that the violin is our national instrument; we have given the world composers of genius; we have more professional musicians among us than any other people. And at the same time, you will hardly find another nation whose national music has been so much neglected as ours.”
Yet even by then, the seeds had already begun to bear prodigious fruit. In November of 1908, a group of young Jewish composition graduates from Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s class at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, together with senior Jewish members of the St. Petersburg musical establishment, joined together to form the Gezellschaft far Jiddische Volksmusik – The Society for Jewish Folk Music. Their goal was to apply the tools of ethnography and classical composition to the music of the Jewish nation. They went out to the shtetls and towns in the Pale of Settlement to record the authentic voices of the Jewish soul - Yiddish folk songs, nigunim, davening, klezmer music, etc. Then they “set” these folk songs in artistic forms, published them in sheet music, and programmed them in public concerts. The Society, which lasted ten years and spawned many chapters across the Russian Empire, succeeded in giving Jewish pride to a generation of young artists and creating beautiful works of Jewish music that flew the Jewish flag in the halls of Western music.
But who really decides what is “Jewish” music? The paradoxes of the Society’s ideology were captured by Dr. James Loeffler in a recent YIVO lecture called “The Master’s Tools.” For while Sholom Aleichem loved the music of Dem Milners Trern composer, Mark Warshawsky, the luminaries of the Society for Jewish Music did not. One of its most prominent voices, Joel Engel, took umbrage at the idea that Jewish folk music (especially Warshawsky’s big hit, “Oyfn Pripichik”) could be created whole-cloth by an amateur composer and then be called “folk music.” Engel lamented that this would give the impression that “Jews just sing polkas, mazurkas, and quadrilles, all in the dominant or modern musical scales,” not essentially different from “organ grinder music.” Sholem Aleichem shot back at Engel, accusing him of speaking melochim-sproch — the language of the rulers. After all, who was he to use the artistic outlook and tools of hegemonic Western culture to evaluate the authenticity of Jewish music?6
Then, as now, Jewish music cannot be contained or controlled by elites with well-researched ideologies. Folk music is not simply in the past, a mummified spontaneity of immutable culture. Music is a living, breathing thing, as are the “folk” today that practice it. What hangs in the balance, with art song as with other genres, is the coherence of our intergenerational, transnational sonic family. Already feeling that this was slipping away, members of the Society turned these oral traditions into written ones, embellished with musical beauty like the rich illustrations of an illuminated manuscript.
So what of art song? Is it simply a beautiful edifice which ultimately distances us from the tornado of engaging in a real life? After all, there is a huge difference between singing a song about Shabbat and making Shabbat. Between using a klezmer tune in a piano piece, and making klezmer music to celebrate a wedding. Between setting a niggun for a symphony, and singing it in shul to come closer to God. If one could change the proverb from the subject of spouses to that of songs: “Grace is deceptive, Beauty is illusory; it is for fear of the LORD that a musician is to be praised.”7
Beauty is like the body. It is natural, and to be found among all the peoples of the world. And it tends creates families — or in the cases of music, cultures. But goodness with music is what you do with it. The power of the Jewish art song tradition, therefore, requires both dedication and trust. One can use art song, like any music, to create beauty. It can even purport to convey something essential about the Jewish people. But it fundamentally requires an intentional artist, like Ian, to know the soul of its words and whose life and singing manifest the real-life stakes of the music. Someone who will not just sing about the miller’s tears, but cry with the miller, give him hope, and help settle him in his new home.
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I have not seen a film take a more nihilistic view of the heart of suburban Judaism than this one. Many who had depressing Hebrew school experiences will laugh at the comic moments around Jewish religious life. They made me laugh too, but the pit in my stomach grew as the movie went on. The dybbuk rabbi of the film’s Yiddish introduction serves as scathing metaphor for the film’s religious authorities — hiding empty words behind a veil of respectability, and portending the nefarious danger of deference and inaction. The only similar tale of matching sophistication and nihilism that I have encountered is Cythnia Ozyk’s short story, The Pagan Rabbi.
I have this experience every time I hear Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana — the most devastating and entertaining choral rejection of Western morality ever put on stage.
The subject of Ian’s dissertation is “La musique ou l’harmonie fondatrice de l’identité sépharade ibérique, de 1992 à nos jours“ (Eng: The Role of Sephardic music in Contemporary Iberia).
For an excellent volume on this, see Phillip Bohlman, Song Love the Masses: Herder on Music & Nationalism (University of California Press, 2017).
Translation by Dr. Caroline Sawyer.
Adapted from Prov. 31:30.
Of course, Dem Milners Trern in the Coen Brothers film was sung by the great Sidor Belarsky, whose Yiddish art singing is unsurpassed.