From Jewish Life (1925)

Prayer

Supplication

Jewish Song

A constant factor in Ernest Bloch’s creativity was the inspiration he found in his Jewish faith. This applies at every stage in his career and wherever he was – in Switzerland where he was born and spent much of his early life, in the United States where he settled in 1916 , becoming an American citizen eight years later, or temporarily back in Europe during the 1930s. Biographers identify a so-called “Jewish period” from 1912 to 1917, during which he wrote his celebrated “Hebrew rhapsody” for cello and orchestra, Schelomo, but his monumental Sacred Service dates from the early 1930s and ten years before that he wrote three characteristic chamber works – Baal Shem for violin and piano and two scores for cello and piano, From Jewish Life and Méditation hébraïque.

Just how the Jewish experience became such an essential feature of his style he was never able to explain: “I have but listened to an inner voice,” he said, “a voice that seemed to come from far beyond myself and which surged up in me on reading certain passages of the Bible.” It seems fairly clear, however, that the music of the synagogue, the fourths of the call of the shofar and the micro intervals of Hebrew chant, left a lasting impression on him. Certainly, one need look no further for the melodic and harmonic orientation of the lyrically contemplative Prayer, the first of the three pieces From Jewish Life, least of all in its passionate closing bars. Supplication, though shorter and more agitated, is scarcely less characteristic, while Jewish Song makes particularly expressive use of the exotically inflected quarter tones Bloch had first used to such eloquent effect in Schelomo.

Jewish Song

Supplication

Prayer

A constant factor in Ernest Bloch’s creativity was the inspiration he found in his Jewish faith. This applies at every stage in his career and wherever he was – in Switzerland where he was born and spent much of his early life, in the United States where he settled in 1916 , becoming an American citizen eight years later, or temporarily back in Europe during the 1930s. Biographers identify a so-called “Jewish period” from 1912 to 1917, during which he wrote his celebrated “Hebrew rhapsody” for cello and orchestra, Schelomo, but his monumental Sacred Service dates from the early 1930s and ten years before that he wrote three characteristic chamber works – Baal Shem for violin and piano and two scores for cello and piano, From Jewish Life and Méditation hébraïque.

Just how the Jewish experience became such an essential feature of his style he was never able to explain: “I have but listened to an inner voice,” he said, “a voice that seemed to come from far beyond myself and which surged up in me on reading certain passages of the Bible.” It seems fairly clear, however, that the music of the synagogue, the fourths of the call of the shofar and the micro intervals of Hebrew chant, left a lasting impression on him. This is particularly clear in Jewish Song (which is actually the third of the three pieces From Jewish Life as published but which is being performed first on this occasion): the quarter tones he had used first in Schelomo are to be heard in the exotically inflected, vocally expressive cello part here too. After Supplication a more agitated, more outwardly passionate piece, the meditative mood returns in the lyrically melodious Prayer, which is developed enough to extend to a nicely balanced example of ternary form.