The Cantor of Leipzig

Musings on Jews & J.S. Bach

“The greatest cantor who ever lived was Johann Sebastian Bach.”

A noncontroversial statement. Except, perhaps, when uttered by a Jewish choral conductor.

When I recently heard this quip, I knew this wasn’t just a dig at cantors. It also suggested that musical excellence of Bach’s caliber — both in composition and performance — was rarely (if ever) to be found in the parochial milieu of the synagogue.

Today, this is mostly true. Precious few houses of worship are oriented towards artistry or musical depth. The primary work of a synagogue, after all, is teaching Judaism, creating community, and, on a practical level, keeping the lights on — not creating beauty. With the current lack of vision (and budget) to connect music with these basic religious goods, most musical specialization in Jewish life has been pushed outside of the shul into post-denominational nonprofits like the Zamir Choral Foundation, Rising Song Institute, Songleader Bootcamp, Milken Archive, and Sing Unto God.¹ This shows the perseverance of the communal desire for serious musical engagement within Jewish religious and cultural life.

The music of J.S. Bach remains part of the regular diet of many high-level Jewish musicians, especially composers and cantors. For some it is part of their daily practice to develop their piano skills; for others, it is music to which they return regularly for inspiration. Many of these Bach-loving yidn were raised in the musical heyday of the mid-late 20th century, where Bach’s music was not just lauded in American culture, but in that of suburban synagogues which supported sophisticated music and large ensembles worthy of executing sacred masterworks.

Our era is, of course, a mere shadow of that time. My colleagues who remember it still feel this bitter loss of heritage, like a broad musical beach once brimming with a symphony of notes like countless grains of sand, now eroded after decades of decay to a thin strand, barely wide enough to hold a melody.

But whither Bach himself? How is it that Jewish cantors or conductors should hold a Baroque master up as a hero? Such a question requires us to take a deep dive into the Jewish adaptation of Western aesthetics, nationalism, and musical aspirations.

An important caveat: I am not a Bach scholar. Such a field of study represents over a century of transcontinental human inquiry at the musicological, sociological, and even theological level. People spend their entire careers trying to understand this one man. No, I’m just a regular cantor armed with a quiver of street rhetoric and biblical associations, trying to figure out what Bach means, if anything, for Jews.

On what textual basis would one make a comparison? Is Bach to twentieth-century Jewish art music proponents what Aristotle was to Maimonides? Or John Dewey to Mordechai Kaplan? Or Yitro to Moses?

I’m not sure if any of these hold up. But what is true is that Bach represents a number of things in Western music to which many Jews (and cantors) have long aspired.

Rebecaca Cypess & Nancy Sinkoff’s 2018 book on Sara Levy and the Jewish engagement with Western music & Bach in Enlightenment Berlin.

I. Jews as Bach Advocates

J.S. Bach lived in Leipzig — a city with no Jewish residents. Banned in the 15th century and only permitted brief sojourns in the town, the few Jews who visited Leipzig were the merchants (or musicians) attending its annual trade fair.² Jews were nevertheless very much a part of Lutheran religious discourse in Leipzig— namely, as the baddies of the New Testament, excoriated for their sins across the vast corpus of eighteenth-century anti-Jewish preaching. As Bach scholar Dr. Michael Marissen maintains, there is every reason to assume that Bach was privy to the same antisemitic views as the Lutheran theologians of his time, as is evident from his personal library, church practices, and compositions.³

Yet Bach’s early legacy was largely preserved and advanced by Jews. Long before Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) helped to instigate the “Bach revival” of the 19th century, Mendelssohn’s aunt, Sara Levy (1761-1854), was studying pianoforte with Bach’s sons and commissioning new works from them, collecting J.S.Bach’s manuscripts, and hosting musical salons in 18th-century Berlin with Bach’s music at the center. Levy’s excellent keyboard skills were even cited as an important example of the Jewish contribution to German culture, part of the fast-advancing case for Jewish emancipation in Germany. As Dr. Rebecca Cypess has masterfully researched, Sarah Levy’s multifarious musical activities and patronage made a huge impact in her own musical environment, and shaped the perpetuation of J.S. Bach’s music for generations to come.

The worship of Bach grew further in the nineteenth century as part of German nationalism, to which Bach represented an essential font of musical genius and creativity. The ability of Jews to contribute to this growing nationalistic spirit animated much of their musical activity, even as later generations (like that of Theodore Herzl) would hypothesize that Jewish participation in such nationalism was ultimately insolvent.

But the mastery of music conveyed more than national identity. In a way, Jews were a major part of the canonization process of “classical” music in Europe. Just as Levy and Mendelssohn collected and championed J.S. Bach, Jews were also among the nineteenth century’s foremost worshippers and collectors of Beethoven, including Ignaz Moscheles, Ferdinand Hiller, Joseph Fischhof, Joseph Joachim, and Heinrich Beer. As David Conway writes: “No firmer identification with the greatness of European music could be conceived than by paying homage to the Master by collecting his papers and personalia.”⁴

What this reflects, to my mind, is an inherently Jewish way of thinking about canon. With their long-honed skills in studying Torah, Talmud, and commentaries, Jews knew all about the rehearsal and mastery of a written textual tradition. As new Europeans adapting to a majority culture, they negotiated this in a similar way — only this time with music as holy writ revealed through the genius of composers, who were the new prophets of culture. Thus Bach took his place at the canonical core —or Torah — of European music. It is no small irony then that the Leipzig school — the most conservative, canon-driven, and classically-oriented movement of Romantic music— was also the one most populated by Jews.⁵

II. The Real and the Ideal

Due to his compositional genius, his beautiful adornment of Christian sacred music, and his status as a pillar of the classical music pantheon, Bach is often treated as a saint. Yet this idealized picture of Bach is far from historical. As

Ted Gioia

wrote concerning Bach’s personal life:

“I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t aware of the time he was imprisoned for a month. They never learned about Bach pulling a knife on a fellow musician during a street fight. They never heard about his drinking exploits—on one two-week trip Bach billed his church for beer, and the amount he demanded was enough to purchase eight gallons—or that his contract with the Duke of Saxony included a provision for tax-free beer from the castle brewery; or that he was accused of consorting with an unknown, unmarried woman in the organ loft; or about his reputation for ignoring assigned duties without explanation or apology…They don’t know about the constant disciplinary problems Bach caused, or his insolence toward students, or the many other ways he found to flout authority. This is the Bach branded as “incorrigible” by the councilors in Leipzig, who grimly documented offense after offense committed by their stubborn and irascible employee.”⁶

This may sound surprising to some Bach devotees, but is not surprising when you think of the reputations of many big time musicians, past or present. You could even fruitfully compare Bach to the “Father of the Modern Cantorate,” Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890). Both of them were prolific composers. Both sired large families — Bach, twenty children; Sulzer, sixteen.⁷ Both were colorful personalities — while no beer-guzzler like Bach, Sulzer was a daredevil equestrian, and reportedly once got in a fight with a policemen during the revolution of 1848. Both were censured by their employers — Bach for his incorrigible offenses, Sulzer for his dalliances with secular singing. Although Sulzer ended up more celebrated in his own lifetime than Bach, both demonstrated the wilder aspects of the musical artist, even when domesticated by the life of a cantor.⁸

III. Anti-Semitism and the Bach Legacy

The idealization of Bach thus stands at odds with both the realities of his sometime transgressive personality and the unequivocally anti-Jewish sentiments at the heart of his greatest works, especially the St. John Passion. A wonderful panel hosted by the Washington Bach Consort and Bethesda Jewish Congregation recently convened to discuss this complex legacy, and included Dr. Michael Marissen, Dr. Rebecca Cypess, WBC artistic director Dana Marsh, Rabbi Eric L. Abbott, rabbinical student/early music singer Alicia dePaolo, and moderated by cantorial student and professional bass-baritone, Ian Pomerantz.

Among the heaviest subjects covered by the panel was how to ultimately deal with the anti-Judaism in Bach’s works. For Dr. Cypess and other panelists, the sacralization of Bach was often a dangerous pretext for glossing over the glaring anti-Jewish parts of these beloved masterworks. Ms. DePaolo spoke of the“cognitive dissonance” felt by her and her fellow Jewish classical musicians when performing these anti-Jewish texts, even in a concert setting, and Mr. Pomerantz entertained the altering of such texts in the St. John Passion in order to match a more universalist telling of the story. While potential solutions were proposed and welcomed, what was emphatically rejected was ignoring the problem.

I wondered if the Western musical canon could perhaps learn something from Judaism’s own approach to its musical heroes — that is to lionize them in prayer, but humanize them in study. The primary the example of this is King David: In the prayerbook, he is regarded as the legendary king of Israel, from whose line the Messianic redemption will one day emerge. But in practice, we only read about him in synagogue from the prophetic books of Samuel and Kings, which are very emphatic about King David’s moral failures. So perhaps the panelists are tapping into something traditional when it comes to legacies like those of King David & Bach— the practice of celebrating symbol without sainthood.

As for changing the words of Bach’s texts— from my own research, I feel that nothing could be more Jewish. The centuries-long practice of creating Jewish music is very much like metallurgy — Jews ultimately take received forms, melt them down, and retool them with their own spiritual purposes in mind. This could mean adopting a melody by giving it new words, changing its rhythm or totally removing its set meter, or transforming its “intonation” according to Jewish linguistic and cultural norms.

I’m not sure that Bach׳s St. John Passion will soon, let’s say, be adapted into Yiddish. But I do believe that there are legitimate creative possibilities beyond the orthodoxies of historically-informed performance practice. For the greatness of Bach lies not the content of his character, nor necessarily in the texts that he set, but in the music itself. Cantors and singers of all faiths should have gratitude for these harmonic revelations, but ultimately must return to their own musical metallurgy, retool, and forge ahead.

1. Large synagogues are exception to this trend, as they have the level of staffing able to assign musical specialists (cantors, songleaders, etc) to more specialized roles.

2. My colleague at Northwestern, Paul Feller-Simmons, has been reading these fair registers in detail as part of his current dissertation project: "Jewish Musicianship, Cultural Mobility, and Jewish-Christian Exchanges in the Northwestern Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands (ca. 1650-1750)." So details on the Jews of Bach’s Leipzig appear to be on the horizon (b’ezrat hashem).

3. See details on this in Michael Marissen, Bach Against Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023): 137-145, and more extensively in Marissen, Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach’s St. John Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

4. David Conway, Jewry in Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 44.

5. I owe this insight to discussions with Dr. Amanda Ruppenthal Stein, whose has done fascinating research on the relational networks of Jews in nineteenth-century German classical music.

6. Ted Gioia, Music: A Subversive History (New York: Basic Books, 2019): 241.

7. It is said that “Bach’s organ had no stops.” Perhaps one could fittingly say that “Sulzer advocated for his organ.”

8. Sulzer was also the first to take on the title “cantor,” which came into general use to describe the office of the hazzan. Christian cantors across the Europe, from small towns to large cities, were typically organists and choir directors who also saw to the musical education of children. As Geoffrey Goldberg describes in Between Tradition and Modernity, this also also translated into a distinct change in training for German cantors, as mid and late-nineteenth century cantors were required to train like their Christian counterparts.