Schelomo

Hebraic Rhapsody for cello and orchestra

A profoundly original work and a quite extraordinary creation for a Swiss composer living in Geneva in 1916, Schelomo has no precedent. Bruch’s Kol Nidrei has little more in common with it than a Hebrew title and a solo cello part. It contains moreover no conscious quotation of Jewish music. “I have but listened to an inner voice,” Bloch wrote, “deep, secret, insistent, ardent, and instinct much more than cold and dry reason, a voice which seemed to come from far beyond myself, far beyond my parents…a voice which surged up in me on reading certain passages in the Bible: Job, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, the Prophets. This entire Jewish heritage moved me deeply; it was reborn in my music.”

The immediate inspiration for Schelomo (which is the Hebrew name for Solomon) was Bloch’s meeting in Switzerland in 1915 with the Russian cellist Alexander Barjansky and his wife Catherine, a sculptor who was working on a statuette of King Solomon at that time. This seemed to crystallise the composer’s long cherished but unformed ideas about writing a work based on Eccliastes: Schelomo was written in two months, dedicated to the Barjansky, first performed in New York in 1916 (with Hans Kindler as soloist) and published in 1918.

Bloch’s study of Solomon is in three continuous movements, each section introduced by a cadenza and surmounted by a highly coloured orchestra climax. The opening cadenza is thoughtful in expression and exotic in the chromatic inflections of its language. But there is also a physical quality in the dance rhythms in the middle of the cadenza, and it is this aspect of the Solomon personality which is developed in the first characteristic section (Andante moderato) of the work. Although the solo cellist is more reflective than the muted violas which introduce the main theme, the sensuous element persists in the side-drum rhythms in particular and in the percussion colouring in general. Here too, in trumpets and trombones, are the primitive-sounding parallel fourths and fifths later exploited in innumerable biblical-epic film scores and, in the exclusively orchestral passages, unmistakable indications of armed aggression and regal splendour.

If that first section reflects the passions and the glory of Solomon the temporal king, the second must represent Solomon the spiritual leader. The two sections are linked by echoes of the most thoughtful part of the opening cadenza alternating with two new melodies introduced by woodwind - one chanted by bassoon and oboe, the other sung in a kind of chorale. These together with allusions to the all-pervasive cadenza and the earlier dance rhythms, are the thematic material of the central Allegro.

In the last section, headed Andante moderato, Solomon the thinker quietly reviews the foregoing - sometimes ruefully (with one particularly painful quarter-tone in the soloist’s opening soliloquy), sometimes serenely but finally, in a last echo of the cadenza, coming to some such Solomonic conclusion as “All is vanity and vexation of the spirit” or “In wisdom is much grief.”

Gerald Larner©