DARIUS MILHAUD SERVICE SACRÉ Sabbath Morning Service with additional prayers for Friday evening Darius Milhaud's Service Sacr e is considered one of only...
DARIUS
MILHAUD SERVICE SACRÉ
Sabbath Morning Service
with additional prayers for Friday evening
Darius
Milhaud's Service Sacre is considered one of only two compositions in which the
Hebrew liturgy of an entire prayer service forms the basis of a large scale
work of universal spiritual experience by an internationally renowned classical
composer. (The other is Ernest Bloch's earlier Avodath Hakodesh.) As
Milken Archive Artistic Director Neil Levin points out, the Service SacrJ is a work intended for use in Jewish worship that can
also speak on a spiritual and artistic level to people of all faiths, just as
the masterful musical settings of the Roman Catholic Mass can be meaningful
to non-Christians.
Commissioned in 1947 by
one of America's foremost Reform congregations, Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, Milhaud's Service Sacre was originally
conceived as setting of the Sabbath morning service, using the text and format
of the American Reform Movement's Union Prayer Book. To broaden the
work's potential usage in worship services, the composer later added
settings of five portions of the Sabbath eve (Friday evening) liturgy
(1947-50). The score calls for full chorus and orchestra, a baritone soloist
in the cantor's role, singing in Hebrew, and a recitant, or dramatic speaker for the English
readings and spoken prayers, which are rendered against atmospheric orchestral
interludes. The chorus plays a central role, independently and as an equal
partner in responsorial passages with the cantor. Consistent with French
style, the instrumental textures are transparent, dominated by winds and brass.
What makes the Service
Sacre particularly distinctive and
personal is that in formulating its musical language, Milhaud turned to the
French-Jewish heritage of his ancestors - the Provençal rite, known as the minhag
Carpentras, -- the unique liturgical tradition of the Jews of the Comtat
Venaissin region that was nearly extinct in practice and little known
elsewhere. Born in Marseilles and raised in Aix-en-Provence, Milhaud was
descended from a long-established Jewish family of this secluded area of Provence, with roots traceable at least to the 15th century. Throughout the Service
Sacre, elements of the Provençal rite
serve as a unifying aesthetic force, not only structurally in the form of
thematic leitmotifs, but emotionally as well. The solo cantorial lines are
alternately declamatory or quite melismatic and chromatic, but they are much
less florid than the more familiar, virtuoso cantorial idioms of the Ashkenazi tradition.
In all, there is a pervasive sonic aura about the work that suggests an old
underlying tradition, developed with 20th-century techniques and refracted
through polytonal and polyrhythmic prisms. On this recording, Gerard Schwarz
conducts the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and the Prague Philharmonic Choir,
with baritone Yaron Windmueller and Rabbi Rodney Mariner.
As a member of the
loosely associated group of French musical thinkers and composers known as Les
Six, Milhaud embraced the ideals of Jean Cocteau and Eric Satie,
which translated musically into a penchant for clarity, simplicity and
directness as well as for sounds related to nature and daily life, with a
concomitant aversion to romantic excess and sentimentality. Rejecting musical
impressionism, he was subsequently drawn to "ethnic"-- i.e. non-Western, or
non-classically oriented music. As his musical style matured, he incorporated
a variety of popular materials into his musical vocabulary, including French
folksong, Latin American dance rhythms, Jewish secular and sacred melodies, and
jazz, which he encountered in London and in New York's Harlem.
Milhaud also belonged to
a second group of musicians: those European-Jewish emigre composers during the
1930s and '40s who took refuge in the United States from Fascist persecution
and the resulting Holocaust. He left German-occupied Paris in 1940 and took up
a teaching position at Mills College in California arranged by his friend,
conductor Pierre Monteux. While continuing to create at an undiminished pace -
he is one of the 20th century's most prolific composers -- Milhaud
became a devoted teacher, and influenced several American composers including
Dave Brubeck and William Bolcom. For twenty years, beginning in 1951, he
taught every summer at the Aspen Festival.
While Milhaud produced Jewish-inspired compositions prior to his
immigration to the United States, his religious and especially his ProvenHal-Jewish cultural roots
became a more potent and frequent source of artistic inspiration after he
arrived in this country. Perhaps his narrow escape from Europe with his family
and the subsequent murder of more than twenty relatives at the hands of the
Germans played a role in this development. In addition to the Service SacrJ, Milhaud's other large-scale
Jewish related works include cantatas based on the Book of Job and on the
Psalms, the opera David, and various orchestral and choral works.