The Jewish Musical Experience in the Czech Land

This lecture explores music on the ”outer edges” of the set of Czech Jewish music in order to ask whether such a set actually exists. Some time ago I was asked to write a chapter for a History of Music in the Czech Lands on “Jewishness and Music in the Czech Lands.” It was only after accepting this assignment that I realized I had no idea of what these terms meant. I had written a good deal about Czechness and music, concluding, rather problematically, that such a thing was, like Schrödinger’s cat, both real and unreal. Adding Jewishness into the mix made the situation even more muddled. Part of the problem is that any time you try to make a set of things (say, Czech Jewish music) you will find things that seem to firmly belong in that set, say a particular rendering of the musaf from 15th century Prague, and then things that are outside the set, like “Yesterday” by the Beatles. Easy enough. But what about such things as Ignaz (Isaac) Moscheles’ variations on “Já mám koně,“ or Viktor Ullmann’s “Emperor of Atlantis?” Ullmann was a native German speaker who had been brought up as a Christian until he became an anthroposophist, but ended up in Terezin as a result of German racial policy. Do those pieces belong in the set of Jewish music? The danger, in such investigations, is that one often ends up privileging the “obviously” Jewish material, like the musaf as “really Jewish” and Ullmann’s music as either “less Jewish” or “not Jewish at all.” When one adds “Czechoslovak” into the mix (for Ullmann and the other Terezin composers spent their formative years in Czechoslovakia) the stakes go up even higher if our work in this area is to have any meaning.

Michael Beckerman is Carroll and Milton Petrie Chair and Collegiate Professor of Music at New York University. He has written many studies and several books on Czech music topics, including New Worlds of Dvořák (W.W. Norton, 2003), Dvořák and His World (Princeton University Press, 1993), Janáček and His World (Princeton, 2004), Janáček as Theorist (Pendragon Press, 1994), and Martinů's Mysterious Accident (Pendragon, 2007), as well as Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges (Open Book Publishers, 2021). He has also written articles on such subjects as Mozart, Brahms, film scoring, music of the Roma (Gypsies), exiled composers, and music in the camps. He has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times and was a regular guest on Live from Lincoln Center and other radio and television programs in the United States, Europe, and Japan and lectures throughout Europe and North America. He is a recipient of the Dvořák Medal and the Janáček Medal from the Czech Ministry of Culture, and is also a Laureate of the Czech Music Council; he has twice received the Deems Taylor Award. He served as a Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University (2011–2015) and was The Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic (2016-17). In 2014, Dr. Beckerman received an honorary doctorate from Palacký University in the Czech Republic. In 2021, he was awarded the Gratias Agit Award from the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Harrison Medal from the Society of Musicology in Ireland, and in 2022 he received an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.

Suggested donation $15.

The event will be filmed and accessibe later on the SHCSJ YouTube channel.

The event is organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews with support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.

Host or Publisher Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews