The Training of Hazzanim in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Nineteenth-century Germany witnessed a fundamental change in the process by which a hazzan learned his art. The increasing phenomenon since the later eighteenth century of individual German cantors, here and there, notating their own compositions had little effect on the basic oral nature of the tradition and the learning process. This oral transmission, from one generation to the next, from a hazzan skilled in the musical tradition to a young novice eager to learn, still flourished in Germany in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. German Jewry thus remained linked to that common phenomenon shared by all branches of Jewry, Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and the 'adot hamizrah, namely the oral transmission of synagogue chant. However, starting in the 1830s and 1840s, there occurred in Germany a serious weakening of the oral means of transmission. This occurred at the same time as the introduction of an entirely different system of cantorial training that only further attenuated the integrity of the oral tradition.