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The soul breath of Kol Nidre By Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollehiem |
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| When Reb Leizer of Czenstochow walked out of the gates of Buchenwald, he set out to find his youngest son. In the last moments of deportation he had thrust the child into the arms of gentiles - perhaps he was still alive. In his old town, he was told to try the monasteries. Not surprisingly, none of them admitted to sheltering any Jewish children Reb Leizer bought an organ and added one melody to the stock of marketplace ditties: Kol Nidre. He moved about the countryside as an organ grinder, setting up his instrument in each village and watching as children ran to hear his music. Whenever he played Kol Nidre, he would observe their faces for any reaction. Sometimes, he saw signs of recognition, of sadness and longing. He would follow these children, take them aside and tell them: "The war is over. You can go back to your own people." According to the story, Reb Leizer never did find his son, but he helped dozens of Jewish children regain their faith. The melody of Kol Nidre, which opens the evening service on Yom Kippur with an annulment of all vows made before God, is as haunting as the story of Reb Leizer's search for his son. Kol Nidre is like a musical umbilical cord that links Jews to their religion. Even the most secular "Yom Kippur Jews," who enter synagogue only this one night a year, speak of feeling the tug at the sound of the falling and rising and returning-to-its-beginning melody, which, despite its many variations, is recognizable in synagogues the world over. Classical Reform Judaism, after declaring the Kol Nidre prayer "unessential" at the rabbinical conference in Brunswick in 1844 and recommending its abolition, could not bring itself to do away with the melody, singing it instead either to the words of hymns or Psalms, or opening the Yom Kippur service with an instrumental performance of it. No other Jewish piece of music is credited with such emotional powers, and no other has so many stories of conversion attached to it. The German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, for example, after having decided to convert to Christianity, had an epiphany listening to Kol Nidre in 1913, whereafter he reaffirmed his Jewish identity. There are moving stories of the cathartic power of Kol Nidre bringing Jews to tears during the terror-numbing years of the Holocaust. The piece unwittingly "converted" German-Protestant composer Max Bruch to Judaism - if only in the minds of people who assumed that the author of the romantic Kol Nidre Cello Concerto surely had to be Jewish. In Berlin, Bruch had several Jewish acquaintances, among them cantor and musicologist Eduard Birnbaum. To him he wrote in a letter in 1889: "I became acquainted with Kol Nidre and a few other songs in Berlin [...] Even though I am a Protestant, as an artist I deeply felt the outstanding beauty of these melodies and therefore I gladly spread them through my arrangement." There are also echoes of Kol Nidre in the opening bars of Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 131, although musicologists have yet to find evidence that Beethoven consciously borrowed the melody. Arnold Schoenberg, who in the 1930s returned to Judaism after having converted to Christianity, and who found Bruch's concerto insipid, composed his own version of Kol Nidre in his Hollywood exile in order to "obliterate the excessive sentimentality of Bruch's cello." Schoenberg's piece, set for male speaker, mixed chorus and orchestra, has a certain irony to it. Musically, he abandoned his experiments in Serialism and returned to tonality in the hope that it would aid the piece's adoption by congregations across America. But with its odd sprechgesang (a form of declamation somewhere between speaking and singing), its busy orchestration with agitated strings and noisy brass and cymbals, Schoenberg's piece seems to bury not only the original melody, but with it the introspective, soul-searching quality of the prayer. This is perhaps no accident, since Schoenberg's text reveals his discomfort with the Kol Nidre service. Influenced perhaps by centuries of anti-Semitic accusers that saw Kol Nidre as proof of the Jews' duplicity, Schoenberg's text (written, in English, by Los Angeles rabbi Jacob Sonderling, who also commissioned the work) mixes in references to the Kabbala and defines the oaths to be annulled as only those "wherewith we pledged ourselves counter to our inherited faith in God." Clearly, for Schoenberg, as for Rosenzweig, Kol Nidre was above all about dissolving their Christian vows and returning to their faith. Another irony, perhaps, is that as Jewish liturgical music goes, Kol Nidre doesn't sound all that Jewish. The melody was first written down in Berlin in 1765, but probably originated before the 11th century in France or Germany. An article in the Jewish Encyclopedia describes how its opening is what in medieval plainchant is called a pneuma, or soul breath. A passage closely resembling the opening strains of Kol Nidre appears in two medieval antiphonaries where it is given as an example of a pneuma in the first Gregorian mode. Jewish cantors, familiar with developments in church music, began adopting the same technique. "Instead of announcing the opening words in a monotone or in any of the familiar declamatory phrases," writes the author of the Encyclopedia article, "some ancient chazan of South Germany prefixed a long, sighing tone, falling to a lower note and rising again, as if only sighs and sobs could find utterance before the officiant could bring himself to inaugurate the dreaded Day of Atonement." But Kol Nidre's cathartic power is also due to its change of tone in the closing phrases, where it lifts up into a confident and optimistic strain. Musicologists have identified this phrase as that of the Aleinu and suggested that the two texts were deliberately linked by cantors in or soon after the year 1171. That was the year when 51 Jewish men and women were burnt at the stake in Blois. As they died, they chanted the Aleinu, which now continues to echo through synagogues on Yom Kippur.
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