Salamone Rossi (long)

[SamWeiss <SamWeiss...>]

The following is from this week's Forward.  "Read Or Delete."
-S.W.

MEET EUROPE'S HOTTEST COMPOSER, C. 1600: A DEVOUT GHETTO DWELLER NAMED ROSSI
By Raphael Mostel

If someone told you that one of the most important, influential and 
best-selling composers in Europe around 1600 was an observant Jew living in 
a ghetto, you'd probably think it was a joke. We are just now beginning to 
learn how far from a joke this Jew's story is.

With the same broad smile he'd worn the whole evening, Matthew Lazar halted 
the standing ovation of the capacity crowd at New York City's Merkin Hall 
the weekend before last. Lazar, who conceived the two-day Salamone Rossi 
Festival and asked that the applause be directed not to him or the superb 
performers but to Rossi and his manifestly glorious music ? "After all, 
he's waited a long time for this!"

Four hundred years, to be exact. Though largely unfamiliar to modern 
audiences, Rossi (circa 1570-1630) is one of the greatest figures in the 
music of Italy, bridging the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of 
the Baroque eras. One of the biggest-selling composers of his time, he was 
the primary instrumentalist at court in Mantua, even more famous that his 
fellow composer, the great Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) ? who was perhaps 
music's equivalent of William Shakespeare. He championed what was then a 
new instrument, the violin, established the first school for its study and 
used it for his invention, the trio sonata, which became the most popular 
form of chamber music until Haydn invented the string quartet almost two 
centuries later. As if these distinctions weren't enough, Rossi was also a 
Jew who was proud of his heritage and was the first to compose polyphonic 
music to Hebrew texts. He was the first Jewish composer in European history 
to participate and contribute proudly and profoundly in both worlds without 
converting ? and even in the centuries since then there have been precious 
few who displayed his strength of character and identity.

In celebrating all these spheres of Rossi ? secular, instrumental, vocal 
and Jewish sacred ? the concert at Merkin Hall was the centerpiece of a 
two-day conference that was nothing short of revelatory. At the center of 
the festivities was Don Harrán, the Artur Rubinstein professor of 
musicology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who has made the study of 
Rossi his life's work and has just published a landmark series of books, 
the full 13-volume critical edition of Rossi's complete works (American 
Institute of Musicology), as well as a new book, "Salamone Rossi: Jewish 
Musician in Late Renaissance Mantua" (Oxford University), which is 
indispensable for anyone interested in the history of renaissance and 
baroque music or in Jewish or multicultural history.

Mantua in Rossi's time was one of the most liberal, enlightened places in 
Italy, ruled by the Gonzaga family. In the famous joke of noted historian 
Jacob Burckhardt, the Gonzaga family was one of the only Renaissance 
princely families able to hold open-casket funerals ? ruling so wisely they 
avoided the back-stabbings, poisonings and other gruesome murders that 
riddled most of the other Italian city-states. Even so, an old Jewish woman 
was burned at the stake for being a witch and a group of Jewish teenagers 
was hanged for teasing their Christian neighbors. Amid such an atmosphere 
Rossi, a direct descendant of one of the oldest Jewish families in Italy 
(his ancestors were brought to Rome as slaves by the emperor Titus after 
the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem ? pre-dating Christianity!), had 
to learn the limits of asserting his Jewish heritage.

About Rossi's upbringing and education we know essentially nothing. By the 
time he enters into the history of the period, he was full-grown and so 
famous that he was accorded the rare privilege of being allowed to go 
outside the ghetto as he liked without having to wear a yellow star. He 
could easily have converted, but he chose rather to honor his Jewish 
heritage with his new art, and became the first composer to create 
polyphonic music settings of biblical Hebrew texts ? his famous 
best-selling book of 1628, "Songs of Solomon" (HaShirim asher L'Shlomo), a 
punning reference to King Solomon's Song of Songs (Shir HaShirim). (The 
"Songs" is available in an inexpensive three-volume performing edition 
published by Theodore Presser, edited by Fritz Rikko).

The late Renaissance/ early Baroque was a time of tremendous change. In 
music, it was the period that first gave rise to the early form of major 
and minor chordal harmony we use today. Triadic harmony, which nowadays is 
a given, was such a new idea ? inspired by the idea of the trinity for 
Christians and by the kabbala for Rossi ? that it was considered a 
dangerous heresy. Famously defending it, Monteverdi dubbed his new style 
the "seconda prattica" as opposed to the old style for church music, which 
he deferentially called the "prima prattica."

Monteverdi was reacting to criticism for his own astonishingly vital and 
erotic settings of biblical texts, such as his "Nigra Sum" ("I am black but 
beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem" from the Song of Songs). And if a 
Christian could get into trouble with the church for such musical 
liberties, imagine what trouble Rossi as a Jew could get himself into!

Rabbi Leo of Modena (whose son, incidentally, was among these teenagers who 
were hanged in the above-mentioned incident) wrote a book in order to 
justify Rossi's music in a Jewish context. After all, most rabbinical 
authority banned music-making as inappropriate after the destruction of the 
Temple. Harrán quotes the rabbi as wanting to counter the contemporary 
antisemitism, as when Christian critics described synagogue music as a 
"braying of asses." The new music is so harmonious and pleasing to 
Christians, showing that Jews know beauty too ? and shouldn't Jews also 
consider it pleasing to God to offer up such beautiful song, and hasten the 
coming of the messiah and the return to the Temple in Jerusalem?

Rossi also had to solve several practical problems, not least of which was 
that music reads left to right, and Hebrew right to left. Ingenious as ever 
(and perhaps symbolic of his own life), Rossi has each going its own way, 
but the Hebrew words are put in sequence left to right.

In his book, Harrán apologizes for the lack of extravagance and 
chance-taking in Rossi's music, judging that he was a lesser composer than 
Monteverdi. Well, yes, but even Beethoven has a hard time when compared to 
Monteverdi. To me, Rossi needs to be seen in a different context: It was 
difficult enough for a Christian composer like Monteverdi to be 
flamboyantly creative at that time, much less a Jewish one. (Perhaps the 
most creative was Carlo Gesualdo, circa 1561-1613, but Gesualdo was a 
prince rich enough to publish his own extremely strange work and who could 
get away with murder: literally ? he killed his wife and her lover.)

For Rossi, a Jew in a Christian country, it was imperative to please. He 
had to keep from being considered disrespectful to Christians and their 
sometimes willful sentiments; he could not chance shocking or offending. 
Ever the Italian, he wrote a huge number of madrigals of love, but always 
with a certain mannered coyness that managed to befit the style of the day 
and also keep him out of trouble. Even so he pushed all the boundaries he 
could. He even collaborated with Monteverdi and others on a theatrical work 
about Mary Magdalen (Rossi's charming contribution, reconstructed by 
Harrán, was gleefully performed as part of the Merkin Hall concert), but 
deliberately avoided setting any Christian subject matter. Not able to take 
big chances, his innovations were of a more practical nature and his 
artistic aim was always to please. But lack of flamboyance should not take 
away from appreciation of the pure, direct beauty of the music.

One can hardly overestimate the sophistication of this composer. Another 
astonishing thing Rossi did was to publish what may be one of the first 
copyrights in the history of music, writing that no one ought to profit 
from the hard labor of others (meaning himself). It should be noted, too, 
that publishing music at that time was no small endeavor. The engraving 
costs for the 13 volumes of Rossi's published works might well have 
exceeded the equivalent of $1 million in today's money. That's a lot of 
patronage. His sister was also a famous singer, called Madama Europa, one 
of the most celebrated and sought-after stars of her time ? but that's 
another story.

What became of Rossi's grand experiment in cross-cultural collaboration? 
Unfortunately, after the Gonzaga family died out, the golden age went up in 
flames. The Austrians invaded and destroyed the Jewish ghetto, murdering 
many of the inhabitants and scattering the rest. We have no information 
about what happened to Rossi. Most of the copies of his music disappeared. 
But for the rare copy in a distant library, these major works of this 
glorious innovative composer would have been lost forever. It was 300 years 
before any other Jewish composer attempted something similar ? it took that 
long for any Jewish musicians to venture out into the larger Christian 
society or to bring new music into Jewish society. Only with the 
liberalizations of the 19th century were Jews to be found once again at the 
center of the music world. But even then, most of those, like Felix 
Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler, etc., found it necessary to convert to 
Christianity before they or their work could be accepted.

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