Special Symposium
Ernst Bloch: The Jew as European and American Composer On the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of his Death
Bloch: Known and Unknown
Chair: Clara MóriczMalcolm Miller, The Open University, London
Bloch Reception and Wagner: Refutation or Vindication?
Klara Moritz has shown how Bloch’s pursuit of the universal through the ‘racially particular’ was an outcome of a complex response to Wagnerian racial-musical theory via the intermediary of Houston Stuart Chamberlain and his French translator Godet. Yet there is a paradoxical contradiction in Bloch’s relationship to Wagner, in that his expression of the ‘Jewish soul’ and use of Jewish traditional elements, both refutes Wagner’s denial of Jewish creativity, while at same time vindicating Wagner’s idea that true creativity relies on the immersion in the folk sources of one’s tradition. If this paradox was crucial to Bloch’s ‘modernity’, was he aware of it and was it shared by critics and interpreters in Bloch’s lifetime and subsequently? To what extent did they consider his works – especially in the context of the Holocaust and the creation of Israel - as responses to Wagnerian racial idea? In this paper I discuss this dilemma of Bloch reception and interpretation in the Modernist and Post-Modern eras with particular reference to his Jewish works. I also consider how far Bloch’s musical dialectic of Jewish particularism and universality, symbolises a wider phenomenon of negotiation of identities and cultures.
Dalia Atlas, Technion, Haifa, Head of The Ernest Bloch Society in Israel and Honorary Vice President of the International Bloch Society.
The Unknown Music of Ernest Bloch
Ernest Bloch was one of the most interesting, inventive and successful composers, recognized and appreciated during his lifetime as a successor to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. While these three giants developed and established their own definite style within their own respective historical period, Bloch was unique. He was a wanderer and explorer, caring nothing for the fashions of the time. He possessed the supreme qualities of a great creator in each of the varied styles in which he wrote throughout his whole life. Music was Bloch's most authentic language for the expression of his individuality, ideas, philosophy, profound intellect, truthfulness and ethnicity, all perfectly balanced. At the same time he carried within himself and passed on his feelings of Weltschmertz, love and hope. For several years during World War II he wrote nothing, but found his salvation in J.S. Bach. In his later compositions he returned to modality and polyphony, whether modern or conventional. After his death, Bloch became internationally famous, but known to the new generation only for several compositions in his Jewish style. It is baffling, almost fifty years after his death, that most of his works should have remained hidden from the present-day generation. The challenge now for performers and listeners is to understand Bloch's multiple styles, and the secret of its correct interpretation.
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