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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 June 2022
A travelogue of an Israeli musicologist, descendant of German Jewish émigrés, her real and imaginary sonic journey roams between ruins and rubble in Germany and Israel/Palestine. She takes ruins as iconic, allegoric, and reverberating; partially resisting the ravages of time, enshrining sounds and memory. She deems rubble as formless, plain, and voiceless, devoid of identity, transient, and forgetful. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce by the Romans is her starting point, and the currently occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli armed forces is where she ends. The imaginary soundscapes she unfolds resonates forlorn heavenly voices, Nazi youth's ditties, Israeli pop songs, operatic voices, and redemptive and subversive German and Israeli oratorios.
I extend my thanks to Galit Hasan-Rokem, Avishai Margalit, Yudith Oppenheimer, and Barbara Schmutzler for their good advice and useful comments on this article.
1 From the Hebrew: Bath Kol: A heavenly or divine voice which proclaims God's will or judgement, or that of the ‘Shekhina’ (a feminine entity, denoting the dwelling or settling of the divine presence). The meaning of the word is small ‘sound’, ‘resonance’. The Christian Italian Cabbalist Alessandro Farra identified Bathchol with the divine Echo, a symbol of the spirit of God. Farra, Allessandro, Settenario dell'humana (Casalmaggiore: Appresso il Farra di Bartoli, 1571), 224Google Scholar.
2 Talmud b Brachot 3a.
3 Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. Osborne, John (London: Verso, 1998), 159–235Google Scholar.
4 ‘The ruins of modernity, as viewed from a 21st century perspective, point at possible futures that never came to be’, writes Svetlana Boym, inspired by George Simmel. See Svetlana Boym, ‘Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins’, in Atlas of Transformation (2008), http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ruinophilia/ruinophilia-appreciation-of-ruins-svetlana-boym.html.
5 The King James Version and Christian tradition at large depict Job sitting on a dunghill. This follows the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) but has no evidence in the canonical Hebrew version.
6 Translated by Alter, Robert, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes (New York: Norton, 2010), 17Google Scholar.
7 The earliest manifestation of this tradition is found in the pseudo-epigraphic Testament of Job, and later, in visual representations in northern Europe, in particular between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. I am currently preparing a study exploring the metamorphoses of Joban music, from antiquity to modern times.
8 In a way, she seemed to react to what Hannah Arendt, who toured through Germany a few years later, famously diagnosed in the following sentences: ‘Amid the ruins, Germans mail each other picture postcards still showing the cathedrals and market places, the public buildings and bridges that no longer exist. And the indifference with which they walk through the rubble has its exact counterpart in the absence of mourning for the dead, or in the apathy with which they react, or rather fail to react, to the fate of the refugees in their midst. This general lack of emotion, at any rate this apparent heartlessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality, is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn, and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.’ Hannah Arendt, ‘The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany’, Commentary 10 (October 1950), 343.
9 For decades it was wrongly believed that the work is a memorial to the rubbled Munich. In 1993, Timothy Jackson compellingly contended that the work related to Munich is rather Strauss's München, ein Gedächtniswalzer (Munich Memorial Waltz), which he drafted in the same notebook whereby he began sketches of the Metamorphosen. Jackson and others connect the composition with Strauss's preoccupation at the time with two Goethe poems, which might hint, in their view, at a confessional element of Strauss's previous accommodation with the Nazi regime. See Jackson, Timothy L., ‘The Metamorphosis of the Metamorphosen: New Analytical and Source-Critical Discoveries’, Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Gilliam, Bryan, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
10 Kennedy, Michael, Richard Strauss, rev. edn. (London: J.M. Dent, 1988), 112Google Scholar. According to Jackson, this quotation was given, courtesy of the Strauss family, to Kennedy, sometime between 1976 and 1988. Jackson, ‘The Metamorphosis of the Metamorphosen’, 235. Strauss's diaries have apparently not been made public in their entirety until today.
11 The ‘period ear’ (as Neil Gregor and others term such a collective sensibility following Baxandall's renowned ‘period eye’) of post-war listeners indulged precisely on that grandeur, as we learn from Gregor's comprehensive analysis of the work's reception. That generation, born around 1900, consider the work as ‘not so much in terms of the wartime narrative of bombing but rather, in a metaphorical sense, as embodying a memory of place – the bildungsbürgerliche habitus in which Strauss had lived and worked since the late nineteenth century’ he argues. See Gregor, Neil ‘Music, Memory, Emotion: Richard Strauss and the Legacies of War’, Music & Letters 96/1 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (I thank Emily Richmond-Pollock for the reference). Arendt, touring the country in 1950, perceived the sensibility underlying this receptive attitude most poignantly, as we have seen. The receptive attitude of the post-war generation, Germans and others, was eloquently expressed by young Michael P. Steinberg in 1992 (like myself, Steinberg is a descendant of German Jewish émigrés). He found that ‘[s]pirit [subjectivity], [cultural] ground, and the stable communication between the two have been relinquished [in the work], in a loss that equal the loss of German culture’. Steinberg, Michael P., ‘Richard Strauss and the Question’, in Richard Strauss and His World, ed. Gilliam, Bryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 184Google Scholar.
12 The Mughrabi (Moroccan) Quarter was established in 1193 by Saladin's son al-Malik al-Afḍal Nurud-Dīn ’Ali, for the Moroccan immigrants. Nazmi Jubeh, about my age at the time, vividly brings his memory of the quarter before the war, and the horror of its razing just after it. See Jubeh, Nazmi, ‘Childhood Memories of a Jerusalemite’, Jerusalem Quarterly 73 (2019)Google Scholar.
13 To mention a few: ‘At Sharm a Sheikh’ (‘You are Sharm a Sheikh’); ‘Hakotel’ (‘The Wailing Wall’); ‘Shuv lo nelekh’ (‘We Will Never Leave’, a song on Rachel's tomb); and the most adored song of them all, ‘Yerushalayim shel zahav’ (‘Jerusalem of Gold’).
14 ‘Khirbe’ – a ruin in Arabic, ‘ḥurva’ (ruin), and ‘ḥurban’ (destruction) in Hebrew derive from the same Semitic root.
15 Known for his failed attempt, on 20 July 1944, to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
16 ‘Zekher la-ḥurban’ refers in Judaism to a group of regulations connected with commemoration of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem; a prevalent costume is to leave a piece of unpainted wall in one's house.
17 For the debate in the 1950s concerning the reconstruction of the Bayerische Staatsoper, see Emily Richmond Pollock, Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 174–212.
18 While in contemporary works (literary and musical) Echo is mostly a female figure, Alessandro Striggio, L'Orfeo's librettist, rendered the figure male.
20 See Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel Against the Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2012), 66–70.
21 The king is Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who commissioned it as part of a series of six frescoes portraying crucial stages in the historical development of mankind for the Neue Museum's stairwell, destroyed when the museum was badly damaged during the war. The oil rendition of the painting (by the artist) at the Neue Pinakothek was commissioned by the Bavarian King Ludwig I. See Schwinghammer, Renate, Weltgeschichte als ‘Nationalepos.’ Wilhelm von Kaulbachs kulturhistorischer Zyklus im Treppenhaus des Neuen Museums Berlin (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1994)Google Scholar.
22 Förster, Ernst, ‘Neue Kunstleistungen in München. 4. Oelmalerei,’ Kunstblatt 23 (19 March 1844)Google Scholar; 24 (21 March 1844); 25 (26 March 1844); here 101.
23 The composer, Emil Naumann (1827–88), appointed as Director of Church Music at the court of Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1850, wrote a cantata expressly based on Kaulbach's Destruction of Jerusalem (first performed in 1856, libretto by Eduard Schüller). Almost half a century later, an oratorio by August Klughardt (1847–1902), a composer who gravitated around Wagner and Liszt, followed (first performed in 1899, libretto by Leopold Gerlach). The theme was quite popular with other oratorios on the subjects, whose connection to the painting is not clear, but which mostly explain the destruction of the city as punishment for the Jewish deicide. Some of them are discussed, but with no reference to Kaulbach's painting, in Howard E. Smither, A History of the Oratorio vol. 4: The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 106, 113, 119.
24 The Stolpersteine constitute ‘the palpable atlas of Jewish life and suffering’, as the Hebrew University art historian, Galit Noga-Banai, put it. www.stolpersteine-muenchen.de/english/ .
25 Just as I finished my article the volcano erupted, causing more rubble and killing. Still in Ramadan, riots broke in Damascus gate and Temple Mount, accompanied later by rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israeli airstrikes targeted in turn the Gaza Strip, destroying multi-story and other buildings. Tens of thousands were displaced. Children in Gaza, to date (November 2021) are still roaming through the rubble, awaiting restoration.
26 The story of Naboth of Jezreel, whose vineyard was coveted by King Ahab (1 Kings 21:1–16).
27 Uri Agnon, ‘On Political Audiences: An Argument in Favour of Preaching to the Choir’, Tempo 75 (2021).