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DAVID SCHIFF (b. 1945) is a highly respected and accomplished composer and a distinguished writer on music and culture. Born in New York City, he began composing as a child, but he elected to major in English literature during his undergraduate studies at Columbia College (Columbia University). During the 1960s, Columbia was a major center of new music and exciting new developments, with such important composers on its faculty as Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, pioneers in electronic tape music; Jack Beeson, the celebrated opera composer; and, from the younger generation, Harvey Sollberger and Charles Wuorinen, who jointly directed the groundbreaking Group for Contemporary Music, to which Columbia played host. Schiff could not have resisted that influence, and indeed, after earning a master's degree at Cambridge University in England, he returned to New York to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music, where he worked with John Corigliano (a former student of Luening's at Columbia) and Ursula Mamlok. Following that, he earned his doctorate in composition at The Juilliard School, where his principal mentor was Elliott Carter—widely considered one of the deans of serious American composers. Schiff's association with Carter led to his first major literary endeavor, a book about his teacher's work. Published in 1983, The Music of Elliott Carter was the first book-length study of Carter's challenging music and the various forces behind it, and it brought Carter to the attention of many outside new music circles.

Although he is one of Carter's most prominent and successful students, Schiff's music bears little if any resemblance to his teacher's style and rigorous, intellectual, and nontonal approach. Rather, Schiff has turned, for example, to jazz in a number of pieces, such as Scenes from Adolescence (1987), a chamber work for which Schiff acknowledges a composite debt of influence to Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Sidney Bechet, and especially Charles Mingus; Shtik (1992), for bass trombone and jazz ensemble; Four Sisters (1997), a concerto for violin and orchestra; Low Life, for solo bass trombone and jazz orchestra; and Pepper Pieces, arrangements of songs by Jim Pepper for the jazz violinist Hollis Taylor and string ensemble. Schiff's interest in jazz as a powerful influence to be tapped for concert music extends beyond his own compositions. His second book, published in 1997, is a study of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue: probably the best-known example of a synergy between jazz and blues on the one hand and classical European traditions on the other.

Jazz has hardly been the exclusive influence on Schiff's music, nor the only wellspring from which he has drawn. Major American as well as European modernists have also played a major role in shaping his creativity—especially Stravinsky and Bartók, whose impact is felt in many of his pieces.

Schiff's deep commitment to his Jewish heritage has left its stamp on a number of his works, apart, of course, from the obvious—and still the most famous—example of Gimpel the Fool. One of his most important liturgical works is his Sabbath eve service, Avodat Bet Yisrael (1983), commissioned for the 125th anniversary of Congregation Beth Israel in Schiff's home city since 1980, Portland, Oregon (a congregation that was founded in 1858, the year before Oregon had become a state). This service is believed to be the first full synagogue service written specifically for the special characteristics of a soprano cantorial voice (in this case, Schiff's wife, Judith, an invested cantor in the Reform movement). The other significant liturgical works are Hallel (1988), for cantor, choir, and organ; and a setting of the k'dusha (lit., sanctification) liturgy (1991), under that title. He has also written an operatic-dramatic cantata, or chamber opera, Vashti, or the Whole Megillah (1997)—based on the Book of Esther.

Schiff began work on a second full opera, Dubliners, after James Joyce, but when a Broadway show emerged on the same subject, he abandoned his project, and it remains uncompleted. The work he did on it gave rise to several instrumental pieces bearing the shared title Joycesketch. Other significant compositions include Slow Dance (1989), written on a commission from the Oregon Symphony; Stomp (1990); Solus Rex (1992), for bass trombone and chamber ensemble, commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and premiered by bass trombonist David Taylor; Speaking in Drums (1995), a concerto for timpani and string orchestra commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra; Canti di Davide (2001), a concerto for clarinet and orchestra composed for clarinetist David Shifrin; and New York Nocturnes, a piano trio written for Chamber Music Northwest.

Schiff's music has been performed by many major American orchestras and has been issued on recordings by the Delos, New World, Argo, and Naxos labels. He continues to write, especially about 20th-century music—but often in a wider historical context—and he contributes major articles frequently to The New York Times. He is also a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, where his essays appear regularly.

Schiff has been a professor at Reed College in Portland since 1980, and he has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, ASCAP (the Deems Taylor Award), and League of Composers / ISCM.

Schiff's opera Gimpel the Fool—originally written almost entirely in Yiddish and based faithfully on (or, more aptly, a musical stage setting of) Isaac Bashevis Singer's famous short story of the same title—had a protracted and cumulative gestation. The idea came to the composer in fulfillment of an undergraduate assignment to develop a libretto for a composition class with Nicholas Flagello at the Manhattan School of Music. Schiff, who had read none of Singer's stories either in Yiddish or in translation, was teaching a literature class at the New York branch of Hebrew Union College (along with another in music theory), and he had put some of those stories in their English translation on the reading list for his class—"as an excuse to read them" himself, he later confessed. He was immediately drawn to Gimpel. Like Gimpel in the story, his own grandfather had been a baker, but Schiff also had a growing urge to explore some of his ancestral roots in Poland, and this story served as a conduit. At the same time, he intuited the operatic potential of the story and its characters, especially in terms of "the true believer who appears foolish in the eyes of the world." With Singer's permission, Schiff proceeded to adapt a libretto directly from the author's words, returning to the original Yiddish. Singer of course approved the libretto prior to the premiere, but Schiff has explained that it was not a collaborative process: "I can't say I wrote it [the libretto], because it is Singer's words; I 'arranged his words.' But the structure is mine." By the time Schiff actually began composing the music, in 1974, he was a doctoral student at Juilliard, working with Elliott Carter, and the opera ultimately became his dissertation.

The initial version amounted to a small part of what would eventually become the full opera, and it was first performed, with piano accompaniment, at Schiff's family synagogue, Beth El, in New Rochelle, New York, in 1975. At that point it was, in his words, more like a little cabaret piece. Subsequent performances followed in New York and Boston, each time with additions and refinements to the score and even to the structure and theatrical concept. But it remained unorchestrated until the opportunity came for a full production of the completed work (its "first completed version") in 1979 at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York, more or less inaugurating the imaginative "Jewish Opera at the Y" annual series, which became a formal program the following season and lasted until 1985.

Apart from Schiff's masterful score, colorful musical depictions, and engaging use of melodic and modal materials, that premiere of Gimpel the Fool as a full-length and fully staged opera resonated with significance in the general music, operatic, and Jewish literary worlds on two planes. Singer, considered for some time one of the great writers of Yiddish fiction in the modern era, and certainly the most famous Yiddish writer to the non-Yiddish-speaking public in America, had just received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1978. Marking the first—and to date the only—instance of that award given to a Yiddish writer, its citation referred to his "impassioned narrative art, which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal conditions to life." Still, although some of his stories had enjoyed stage adaptations as plays, this was the first opera based on any of them. Moreover, Gimpel was probably his most widely known story, having been written originally for publication in the largest circulating Yiddish newspaper, the Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward) and then published in an English translation by Saul Bellow, another Nobel laureate, in the Partisan Review in 1953. Together with the 1950 published translation of Singer's novel The Family Moscat, that translation of Gimpel was largely responsible for introducing him to the American reading public. There was also the considerable intrigue, even in New York, surrounding the very fact of a serious opera by a classically oriented serious composer—not a commercial musical comedy or Second Avenue "operetta" and not a cantata, of which there were many—in Yiddish, and in no less an established venue among New York's concertgoing public than the Kaufman Auditorium of the 92nd Street Y. Gimpel was not the first opera in Yiddish; that honor is usually—in the absence of documentation to the contrary—accorded to Samuel Alman's (1877–1947) Melekh akhaz (King Ahaz; 1912), which he wrote in London, and for which the full score has only recently been found. And there were other sporadic instances prior to Gimpel, but none that achieved either artistic success, permanence in any repertoire, or acceptance by the general music world. In that regard, Gimpel was a watershed event.

Following the 1979 production, Schiff continued to revise and polish the opera, which was produced again at the Y in 1980. Then, anticipating its third production there, in 1985, Schiff realized that despite clever theatrical measures he had taken and devices he had created to mediate the language barrier for an obviously mixed audience, much of the meaning—and especially the humor—was still lost on those who were not fluent in Yiddish. And even those moments that induced howling laughter from the entire audience at the premiere— such as "Jesus" rendered in the diminutive Yiddish equivalent, Yossl—would probably not fly elsewhere in the country and, after another generation or two, perhaps not so easily in New York either. Moreover, Schiff felt that even at the Y in 1979, some of the audience was at a disadvantage—although the reaction was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Given the highly idiomatic nature of the Yiddish language and its suggestive expressions, many veiled connotations, and references to ethnic and religious matters, no amount of listener preparation with a translated libretto could compensate adequately. Supertitles had not yet been implemented in theaters, but even those would probably not provide a satisfactory solution.

In addition, there was the complex problem of diction, pronunciation, and inflection, especially for envisioned tours and productions outside the New York area. Even in New York, those issues had required serious attention, but at least at that time there were still a few classically trained veterans of serious Yiddish theater or art who could—and did—participate in the cast. Even so, Mascha Benya, the foremost authority on learned, artistic Yiddish vocal rendition and diction (as well as pretty much everything Yiddish), was called in to coach the cast intensively during rehearsals—not only for the benefit of those to whom Yiddish was entirely foreign, but also to ensure uniform pronunciation according to accepted standard literary Yiddish. Even for experienced Yiddish-speaking singers (who made up only a part of the cast), that was necessary in view of the many and varied prevailing dialects, which depend on one's family background and European geographic tradition. And there would be no Mascha Benyas in Portland, Omaha, St. Louis, or Houston.

Schiff also knew that as time went on, few singers experienced in or even familiar with Yiddish would remain active. The problems would only become magnified, since some of the particularities of Yiddish—especially with regard to certain specific sounds, vocalizations, and consonant-vowel combinations—are not part of any of the standard languages in which American singers are trained, or to which they might at least be exposed: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and so on. These particularities and relative peculiarities can prove difficult if not impossible to teach or absorb, or even simply to imitate—the more so out of any regular aural context or exposure to the emblematic authentic cadences and nuances. And one could not rely on the rare exceptions of naturally gifted mimics. This has been proved by the embarrassing results of most attempts to pronounce even a few words in Hollywood films, where there are virtually unlimited budgetary resources to provide for adequate coaching. Similarly so for recently released CDs by high-powered labels with superstar pop or classical singers, who we know for a fact received substantial coaching by knowledgeable native speakers and even experts—sadly to little or no effect.

With all that in mind, Schiff decided to do an English version for the third production at the Y in April 1985. This represented his own translation—with some untranslatable Yiddish expressions and terms left intact to preserve the flavor—which was used for the Milken Archive recording of excerpts. Although he now considers this the final and principal version ("I would rather have the opera sung well in English than badly—or not at all—in Yiddish"), he has nonetheless expressed the hope that both versions may be produced "as is most appropriate for the performers and the audience."

For the full-length Yiddish production at the Y, Schiff ingeniously provided organically integrated and connecting narration in, or mostly in, English. This was drawn from Singer's own words but assigned to the stage role of the badkhn, the quintessential wedding jester and bard who typically presided over post-ceremony entertainment in traditional eastern European circles and even early on at immigrant celebrations in America. That role has wisely been retained in the English version, to fill out otherwise unexplained elements of the story and permit the music to focus on dramatic moments.

Gimpel the Fool is infused with many of Singer's favorite themes, fixations, and enigmas: daily life in the lost world of small-town Jewish life in eastern Europe; sexual repressions and frustrations; spirits, ghosts, and superstitions; mysteries that might at first appear to be perfectly transparent; inner as well as outer demons; willing self-deception; blurred lines between fantasy and reality, between fabrication and truth, and between the imagined and the known; and the desire and need to believe, sometimes contrary to rational thought. The story has been cited by some as a parable of faith—not only in God, but in people and in life—and of common goodness triumphing over deceit. It centers around Gimpel, a baker and the supposed town fool in the fictional village of Frampol, somewhere in Russian Poland in the 19th or very early 20th century. The constant butt of the townspeople's practical jokes and pranks, which often involve concocting impossible stories that he, as a fool, believes—or either pretends or chooses to believe—he is also the willing and long-suffering victim of an unfaithful, shrewish wife who berates him for being such a fool. He is mocked relentlessly by the townsfolk for his gullibility, and they cruelly take delight at his expense. They have told him that the Czar was on his way to visit their village, that the moon fell out of the sky, that the Messiah was on his way to Frampol, and even that his dead parents have risen from their graves and are looking for him. And he always falls for the gag. To the one about his parents, he muses that he knows full well that this is both impossible and untrue, but as he says, "What did I stand to lose by just looking [for them]?" Nonetheless infuriated as well as confused, he consults the town rabbi for advice on how to cope, and the rabbi tells him that the deceiving townsfolk are the fools, not Gimpel, for by their deceit they will forfeit olam haba— eternal life in the "world to come." "It is written," the rabbi reminds Gimpel, "that it is better to be a fool all your days than to be evil for one hour. For he who causes his fellowmen to be shamed loses paradise for himself." Indeed, deliberately shaming, embarrassing, or humiliating someone without cause is considered a major transgression of Jewish law, as illustrated in the legend of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, wherein a rich man's unnecessary public humiliation of his personal enemy is said—not literally or historically of course—to have hastened the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.

Much of this occurs in the first act, during which the townsfolk also organize a match for Gimpel with Elka, the town strumpet, whose out-of-wedlock child she passes off as her brother. He resists, not only for that ruse but for other unpleasant features he finds in her, but the townspeople, knowing full well the truth about Elka, nonetheless threaten—as part of their torment of Gimpel—to bring charges of slander against him that could result in a fine by the rabbinical court. In the end, he not only marries her, he solicits contributions so that she may have a dowry with dignity. But on their wedding night Elka refuses to have sex with him and throws him out of bed and out of the house—on the fabricated pretense that she had not been to the mikve (ritual bath), a monthly prerequisite for sexual relations.

The scenes excerpted for the Milken Archive recording occur in Act II. Only four months after their wedding, Elka gives birth to a boy. Gimpel knows that the child cannot be his, and naturally he feels disgraced and angry. Yet after being placated by the rabbi, who mysteriously compares Elka to the biblical Eve (the connection is never made clear other than that no particular gestation period is given in Genesis), Gimpel not only pays for the brit mila (circumcision) celebration, but he names the boy after his own father as a de facto adoption. In Scene 10, which finds Gimpel singing a lullaby to the baby, Elka insists that he was simply born prematurely, trying to make an even greater fool of him and insulting his intelligence by claiming that the boy was a "Seven-month" birth. Gimpel makes it clear that he knows simple arithmetic: "seventeen weeks is not seven months." Deciding to accept the situation with the ever-so-slight hope that his worst fears might be unfounded, he consoles himself by recalling, "After all, they say that Jesus never had a [human biological] father either."

Scene 11a finds Gimpel actually having come to love Elka despite her incessant mistreatment of him and her lies, and he steals little bits of customers' dough and baked goods for her: a kikhl (a hollow type of cookie), a shtritzl (a little cake), a khale (halla—the special bread for the Sabbath, Festivals, and the High Holy Days), and a bubele a flodn (a little fruit layer cake). Oblivious to Elka's affair with his apprentice (which the audience does not realize at that point), he praises the young lad's good heart and sends him home while he remains working at the bakery.

In Scene 11b, Gimpel returns home to jeers of the townspeople, only to hear two sets of snores coming from his and Elka's bedroom. To buy time for the apprentice to escape unseen, Elka sends Gimpel outside to check on their goat, which she claims has been ill.

The white goat, which Gimpel describes as trading in (selling) the symbolic confection of raisins and almonds, is no mere goat, but a ubiquitous motif in eastern European Yiddish folklore—specifically in lullabies. Usually the goat is found either under or near a baby's cradle (in this case, the fact that the goat is left outside may say something about Elka's priorities; or the scene may represent Gimpel's projection onto it out of his concern for the child's future). The goat image has been perceived either as a companion or as a symbol of protection for the baby. Among various probing constructions, however, the goat has been interpreted as representing the father, who, on a metaphoric plane, seeks to ensure not only a sweet future for his child (the raisins and almonds) but also a better world in the form of national or spiritual redemption, or both—all of which may be symbolized in that interpretation by the acquisition of raisins and almonds. In Yiddish folksong, many variants of the archetypal lullaby containing this goat image as a trader of raisins and almonds also go on to express the prototypical hope that the child grow up to be Judaically learned and religiously observant ("study of Torah is sweeter than honey"). This might also refer to the old custom of having a child lick some honey placed on a page of sacred text in order to create a quasi-Pavlovian association between sweetness and study at the earliest possible age).

This goat image is undoubtedly most widely known now from its expression in the theatrical song Rozhenkes mit mandlen (Raisins and Almonds), which Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908) apparently stitched together from multiple folk tune sources for his famous 1904 operetta Shulamis. One of the principal phrases of that song has an echo in Mahler's sixth symphony.

The goat image itself (apart from the raisins and almonds) may also have been derived from even earlier Judaic sources (predating Jewish folklore), in which the kid symbolizes the Jewish people and its determination for, as well as faith in, redemption and survival—themes that could have resonated on a personal level with Gimpel. Moreover, the goat in the refrain of the popular Aramaic-Hebrew Passover seder song Had gadya (A Single Kid)—although some literary critics insist that the text is simply children's verse based on a popular French ballad—also has been interpreted as a metaphor for God's having taken the people Israel as "His own" through the Decalogue of the Sinaitic covenant. All these things were undoubtedly known to Singer, and it is worth considering that Gimpel has taken Elka's child "as his own."

Gimpel's song to his goat is the only instance in the opera where Schiff used, appropriately for this moment, an actual Yiddish folk tune, Unter soreles vigele (Under Little Sarah's Cradle)—unrelated to and preceding Goldfaden's song—that appears in one of the first collections of Yiddish folksong. It is also known in many text variants as Unter yankeles vigele (Under Little Jacob's Cradle) and Unter dem kinds vigele (Under the Child's Cradle).

Elka's diversion is not successful, for Gimpel catches a glimpse of his apprentice fleeing. But Elka's "offensive defense" in Scene 11d is to curse and berate Gimpel for even suggesting what he saw, insisting that he had imagined it and she is the victim ("your mind is possessed"). Her abuse is echoed by the townspeople, who always take her side merely to irritate Gimpel for fun. But this time Gimpel has had it. ("even to Gimpel's foolishness there must be a limit").

In Scene 11e, Gimpel is determined to divorce Elka, which means that he must persuade her to agree to accept a get (a bill of divorcement), since under Jewish law both parties must agree to a divorce. Gimpel goes to the rabbi to discuss the matter, and the townspeople once again jeer outside, claiming that Gimpel's charges for the proposed divorce amount to punishable slander. Despite Elka's continued protests that Gimpel has imagined what he saw, the rabbi agrees that he must try to divorce her. The rabbi tells him that if she refuses to appear to accept the get in person, he should "declare" a divorce. By that he means a get zikku'i, whereby the husband prepares a proper legal get and has it delivered to an agent appointed by the court on her behalf, based on the assumption that it would be in her interest to accept it. Since she would otherwise be unable to remarry, and Elka would probably want to find a husband to support her two children. (Gimpel has no financial obligations to them; he has not adopted them legally.) No sooner has the rabbi expressed his view than Gimpel begins to relent—asking if he would still be able to see the children, of whom he has obviously grown fond. The rabbi replies that he must not, that he must remove himself immediately not only from Elka ("that whore") but also from her children. ("Bastards" is actually misused here and in the translation of the story. Under Jewish law, a bastard (mamzer) is the child of a biblically forbidden union, such as a married woman with a man other than her husband; but both Elka's children were obviously conceived before her marriage to Gimpel, and it is presumed in the story that she was unmarried at the time.) Clearly, he also has some second thoughts about never seeing Elka again. He begins to back down at the rabbi's admonition to leave—"Good, Rabbi, I'll consider it"—to the taunts of the townspeople, who seem to know that the whole matter is painful and not so simple for Gimpel.

In his monologue in Scene 11f, Gimpel rebukes himself for his inability to sustain anger. But then he begins to question his own memory—seizing on the skillful acting in Elka's denial—believing what he so desperately wants to be the case, trying to ignore that which he would rather not confront. Here we find Singer in his almost mystical merging of fantasy, imagination, and delusion with reality and truth—a subordination of truth itself to the human quest for belief. For in Singer's mysterious and mystery-filled universe, there can be, as he suggested in a 1963 interview in Commentary, something of truth after all in fantasies and self-deception—some revelation about the depth of the human psyche from which such fantasies emerge. And what this might reveal is the human realization that the search for truth cannot result in its attainment—hence, the need to choose belief, even if that choice may be untenable.

Since Gimpel truly loves Elka's children as his own, his words in the monologue suggest that rather than being the fool he appears to be, perhaps he is possessed of a certain folk wisdom in his retreat to acceptance, his inclination to forgo his dignity for the children's sake, and his search for an excuse to overlook reality. His conflict, and the way he tries to cope with it, also illustrate what Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, in their Treasury of Yiddish Stories, have cited as the thematic "sanctity of the insulted and the injured" in Yiddish literature.

Gimpel concludes by reminding himself (through the nudging of the badkhn in the staging) what the rabbi once told him about the need for faith and trust in marriage: "If today you don't believe your wife, tomorrow you won't believe in God."

In the balance of Act II, Gimpel, missing his family, returns to the rabbi, seeking permission to return to his wife and home. After prolonged deliberation, the rabbi finds some rabbinic authority to allow the reunion with a sexually faithless and therefore forbidden wife, and Gimpel returns. Over the course of the twenty years of marriage, Elka bears six more children, finally succumbing to a fatal illness. On her deathbed (at the beginning of Act I as a prologue), she confesses to Gimpel that none of them are his. In his shock—which one assumes is possible only for a fool, given all that has transpired—Gimpel grapples with his naïveté in having allowed himself to be deceived all that time.

After the funeral, an "evil spirit" appears to Gimpel in a dream and urges him to seek revenge upon the townspeople—who tricked him into the marriage in the first place—by urinating on the dough for the hallot they will be purchasing for the following Sabbath. After he does so, Elka appears to him in another dream and urges him not to go through with his revenge, since she is being punished in the afterlife for all she has done. This is justice enough for Gimpel, who should not allow himself to become an evil deceiver because of her deceit. Why should he, because of her, forfeit the reward of eternal life in olam haba? Why should he succumb to the "evil spirit" after all he has endured? In the end—in Singer's portrayal of her ultimate realization—she had deceived only herself, and on her deathbed she had remarked pathetically that her deception of Gimpel had been the "meaning of her brief life."

Realizing that surrendering to the evil impulse and becoming no better than the townspeople would be a mistake, Gimpel—after awakening from the dream—heeds Elka's advice and discards the contaminated dough. He relinquishes all his belongings, leaves town permanently, and becomes an itinerant raconteur and yarn spinner for children, who eagerly run after him asking him to repeat his fantastic stories. He draws on many of the same stories that had been told to him as lies. Now, however, they are not lies, but entertainment for children. And he is no deceiver, but a performer of worthy deeds in the eyes of Jewish law and tradition, since he brings laughter and joy to the children. He has come to believe that "there really are no lies," for whatever does not actually happen is—or can be—dreamed, even coming to pass sooner or later.

Gimpel's newfound mission seems to echo an apocryphal story, rooted in a talmudic vignette about Elijah, in which a Jew in a busy public square is asked by his friend to predict which of all the other Jews congregated there will be found worthy of eternal life in olam haba—if, for the sake of intellectual exercise, only one could be selected. Looking around, the man notices pious Jews engaged in study and deliberation of Torah and other sacred texts, Jews dispensing charity, Jewish merchants striving to earn a living to support their families, Jews praying the afternoon service, and, finally, a shoeless simpleton street entertainer and clown—to whom he points as his sole predicted candidate. Astounded, his friend asks him why, when there are so many more worthy pious and learned Jews in the square fulfilling so many of God's commandments, he would single out the simple buffoon for God's favor. "Why?" came the answer. "Because he brings laughter to sad people."

Gimpel finds comfort not only in his entertainments for children and the respectful treatment he is given everywhere he goes, but also in his communication with Elka through dreams and, in view of her rehabilitation, his hopes to be reunited with her in the end. In that perfect "world to come," there will of course be no such thing as deceit, and even Gimpel will not—cannot—be fooled.

* * *

In composing the opera, Schiff sought consciously to evoke through its music some of the vanished world of Singer's story. In part, he relied on traditional cantorial inflections and Ashkenazi synagogue modalities and idioms, but he also wanted to reflect some of the typical sounds, wails, and spirit of traditional 19th-century eastern European Jewish wedding bands—now erroneously often called "klezmer" music. But, as Schiff has pointed out, the so-called "klezmer revival" movement had not quite yet gotten off the ground.

Klezmer simply means an instrumental musician, with the connotation of a band player for Jewish celebrations, rather than a classical orchestral musician. Even by the 19th and early 20th centuries, such bands of klezmorim played many different styles of music, emanating from various sources and outside traditions: Romanian, Ukrainian, Gypsy, and other musics. "Klezmer" cannot possibly signify a style or genre. Moreover, klezmorim have reflected the musical fashions of their time and surroundings since the Middle Ages in western Europe. Klezmorim in the Baroque era, for example, played music imitative of Western minuets, gavottes, sarabands, and other Baroque dance forms—and with Western modalities and melodic content.

That "revival" is also misnamed, since the 19th-century phase (viz., the tunes and flavors typical of 19th-century klezmorim) never really died but remained current throughout the 20th century at American Jewish weddings within orthodox—and certainly Hassidic—circles. The continuum stretches back to immigrant bandmasters from eastern Europe who transplanted their craft to American soil beginning late in the 19th century. Only the introduction of such music as exotica to the ethnic "outsiders"—non-Jews as well as younger generations of Jews or Jews from nontraditional backgrounds—awaited the "movement" in the 1970s and thereafter. But, as ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin suggested to Henry Sapoznik, the Jewish band historian, popular music authority, and accomplished klezmer, as quoted in Sapoznik's book Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World, "[the word] 'revival' only makes sense in the case of Lazarus, or in giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitations. Short of that, terms like 'reevaluation,' 'remembrance,' or 'reenergizing'—as in lost battery power—are far more appropriate." Sapoznik agreed in part: "Affixing it [revival] to the active across-the-board performance of klezmer music denigrates the subtle and irrevocable process of continuity that is key to widespread renewal of the music." Nonetheless, like the confusing, constricting, and even belittling term klezmer itself misused as a style or genre, or like many misnomers born of philological or historical naïveté, we may be irrevocably stuck with its popular usage.

Although Schiff had heard music played by such traditional Jewish wedding bands in his youth, it was dormant in his mind and ear by the time he began working on Gimpel. He would have had to make a project out of frequenting the then more closed world of orthodox weddings or Hassidic celebrations for other occasions, or else to engage in ethnomusicological research involving thousands of old 78-rpm records in private hands or still uncatalogued archives—to which access was far more difficult then than now. And the plethora of archival re-pressings onto contemporary formats had barely begun. In addition, he felt that the sounds of the current "revivalist" klezmer groups that he heard in the mid-1970s, some of which used such historically incongruous substitute instruments as electric piano, were "too American." What he wanted for this opera was "something more European." So he turned instead, especially for his instrumentation and orchestration, to the perceived sounds of klezmorim as reflected in classical works by such composers as Mahler, Weill, and Stravinsky. The particular ensemble of fourteen musicians on which he eventually decided was influenced by his restudy of certain works by those composers. Schiff also feels that, although the music itself in Gimpel was not suggested by those pieces, the opera does exhibit their influence in terms of orchestra and instrumental idiom and style.

Schiff has credited his teacher at Juilliard, Elliott Carter, with good suggestions about the orchestral ensemble. "Start with an unusual ensemble," he recalls Carter advising, to avoid artificial efforts to produce unusual sounds. "You wouldn't think Carter [not only a non-Jew, but an avatar of rigorous nontonal music] would be of much help with this kind of music," Schiff said in a 1999 interview, "but he was!" He also worked on the orchestration with composer Trude Rittman, who introduced him to some Broadway techniques; and he found some helpful hints in Benjamin Britten's use of a similar ensemble for his opera The Turn of the Screw. In 1982 Schiff fashioned an instrumental suite from Gimpel in the form of a divertimento, which is scored for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.

* * *

Over the years since its publication, Singer's story has been subjected to voluminous literary criticism, analysis, interpretation, deconstruction, and decoding—and even so-called study guides—on numerous levels and from various perspectives and disciplines. Whether because of his faith and capacity for love, his own form of pacifism, his natural urge to believe in goodness, his turning a blind eye rather than taking revenge, his looking the other way, his optimism, his embodiment of potential goodness in the common man (the yetzer ha'tov, the inclination toward good, which Jewish teaching holds that God has placed in each person along with the yetzer ha'ra, the inclination toward evil, that man may choose or be educated to choose between the two), most critics have tended toward the assessment that Gimpel was not, in fact, a fool, and that the inclination toward delusion is natural. One critic, Thomas Hennings, posited the notion that the story was based closely on the biblical Book of Hosea. Others, such as Edward Alexander, have raised the issue of a possible parallel to the inability or refusal of many Jews to face reality and confront the truth during and prior to the Holocaust—a failing that jeopardized the survival of many victims out of an ultimate belief in mankind. If so, Gimpel's naïveté, real or feigned, might not be so benign as a symbol, and perhaps then he indeed represents a fool.

Whatever the critical approach or method, the issues always seem to frame the same essential question: Was Gimpel a fool? At the very beginning of the story he tells us that he is "Gimpel the fool," but he follows with a rebuttal. He doesn't think himself a fool—to the contrary, in fact. Had Singer revealed the answer, he would not have been Singer. But the more probing question might be: Did Singer know?

—Neil W. Levin

 

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American-born composer ELIE SIEGMEISTER (1909–1991) is best remembered for his lifelong mission to forge a distinctive American compositional idiom consistent with his unwavering political and social commitment—an embracive and pliant idiom that was heavily reliant on American folk music and Americana, but which could be expressed, especially in his mature period, within the framework of conventional concert and theatrical forms. Perhaps even more so than some of his circle—who during the 1930s gravitated with nearly blind faith to varying degrees of the far left in America, but later distanced themselves as "establishment" composers—Siegmeister remained throughout his life an emblem of artistic social consciousness and an advocate of art and serious concert music for the common folk.

Siegmeister was born in New York City, where he spent his youth in Brooklyn, commenced piano studies at the age of eight, and studied music at Columbia College (Columbia University) from 1924 to 1927. Originally intending to focus on philosophy as his primary academic pursuit, he began composing while at Columbia, and he studied composition there with Seth Bingham and counterpoint privately with Wallingford Riegger during the summer of 1926. After graduation he joined the procession of many aspiring composers of that time that led to Paris for study with the legendary mistress of composition and counterpoint studies, Mme. Nadia Boulanger—although he later said that his original intention had been to study with Arnold Schoenberg. He remained in Paris for more than four years, but unlike many others in Mme. Boulanger's class, such as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Walter Piston, he grew disenchanted with her pedagogic approach, methods, and predilections, and he resisted what he later described as her attempt to "force the neoclassical style" on students. He even attributed to her influence a temporary loss of self-confidence as a composer. Moreover, his already leftward perambulating political views, which reflected some of his father's early anarchist orientation, did not endear him to her. Those views were certainly shared by some of her other students, but it seems that Siegmeister was less discreet than they were, at least in her presence.

He returned to New York to find the United States in the throes of the Great Depression—a setting that provided potent fertilizer for what quickly became his obsession with the Marxist rhetoric of so-called class consciousness, not only in purely political terms, but vis-à-vis music. In 1933 he published two articles in the sharply left-leaning journal Modern Monthly—"Social Influences in Modern Music" and "The Class Spirit in Modern Music"—in which he considered the engagement of contemporary composers in political and social issues and followed the typical Soviet attitude of the day toward art by defining new music as either "bourgeois" or proletarian (viz., purposeful and thus worthy). That same year, he wrote his proletarian-infused song about social struggle The Strange Funeral in Braddock, for baritone and piano, which followed earlier works of his related to social issues and music of "the people" (jazz, for example) and attracted far greater public attention than anything he had yet written. It is based on a text by Michael Gold, a visible personality in the American Communist Party and a columnist for its propaganda organ, The Daily Worker, and it concerns "management's" indifference to fatal working conditions in a factory. The song reflects in its musical stridency the mood at typical mass meetings and rallies. It received many performances in New York during the 1930s, beginning with its 1934 premiere in connection with International Music Week Against Fascism and War.

In that same time frame Siegmeister became associated with the Young Composers Group, an organization loosely shepherded by Copland, whose members included such significant or eventually significant composers as Vivian Fine, Henry Brant, Arthur Berger, Bernard Hermann, and Lehman Engel. The organization was short-lived, but it provided a communal forum for young composers, and four works by Siegmeister were premiered at its sole public concert in 1933. The Young Composers Group became known for its rebuff of French influence (including, specifically, Mme. Boulanger's) on American music—a rebuff that of course resonated well with Siegmeister—and for its "discovery" and championing of the music and modus operandi of Charles Ives (1874–1954). Ives's rejection of slavish dependence on European traditions, his revolutionary harmonic and textural treatments, his incorporation of fundamentally American populist (albeit largely New England–centered) rituals and themes, and his interest in American folksong—though hardly the proletarian social-political brand (Ives entered the insurance business and retired a wealthy man)—all offered a composite model for composers such as Siegmeister who were seeking to build upon indigenous American melos and, in the future spirit of 1960s–1970s jargon, to address "relevant" subject matter.

Also important to any consideration of Siegmeister's artistic life is his membership in the Composers Collective, which was connected to the Workers Music League—an outright affiliate of the American Communist Party. Among the Collective's founders were Jacob Schaefer—who had organized the first left-wing workers' Yiddish chorus in Chicago and then later directed the communist-oriented Freiheits Gezang Verein (Jewish People's Philharmonic Chorus) in New York—and Henry Cowell. Housed at the Pierre Degeyter Club—so named after the French worker and wood-carver who, in 1888, composed the tune (to Ezhen Pot'ye's [Eugène Pottier's] words) for "The Internationale," the hymn of revolutionary and communist movements for more than six decades, the theme song of the Bolsheviks, and the state anthem for the Soviet Union from the October Revolution until 1944—the Composers Collective sought to identify as well as create music that would advance the economic and social struggle of working classes in America. For its members, that quest represented a social and political artistic responsibility, in the context of the times, as opposed to the pursuit of music for the sake of abstract art, which some of them viewed as inherently bourgeois and even self-indulgent. At the same time, the Collective's Performing Unit offered eminently affordable concerts and postconcert discussions of its composers' works for "the masses"—taking music out of the supposedly elite venue of the concert hall and bringing it directly to workers' organizations.

In 1934 Siegmeister collaborated with other Collective members in publishing Workers Song Book 1, introduced as the first collection exclusively devoted to "original revolutionary mass, choral, and solo songs with English texts to be made in America." His music appeared in that book under a pseudonym, L. E. Swift, as did the work of the trailblazing folksong collector Charles Seeger [Carl Sands]. Schaefer, who was better known in Yiddishist circles as a composer of proletarian and social protest choral cantatas, contributed songs as well, along with others. A second (1935) volume had an expanded roster of composers, including Copland, Riegger (under the pseudonym J. C. Richards), Stefan Wolpe, and—probably the most ideologically committed and, later, the most openly unrepentant communist sympathizer of the group—the Viennese Jewish refugee Hanns Eisler, who went to live in communist East Germany after the war.

During those years, Siegmeister also conducted the Daily Worker and Manhattan choruses, and he was one of the editors of Unison, the newsletter of the American Music League—the renamed Workers Music League of the Communist Party.

In view of his visibility in the Collective, as well as his outspokenness, the political agenda of his choruses, and some of the company he kept, it is not difficult to see how Siegmeister—along with other prominent American composers of similar leanings—landed himself in trouble by the early 1950s in the wake of congressional committees and investigations.

Knowing what we now know about the Soviet Union's role in support of the American Communist Party, about its brutality vis-à-vis the very proletariat it supposedly championed, about its murderous campaigns against minority groups and entire populations, and about its treatment of composers and writers who flinched at confining their art to the service of changeable Party doctrine, post–Soviet era and post–Cold War judgments about such American artists can flow easily. It is admittedly simple in retrospect to condemn their naïveté in allowing themselves to be seduced by overt as well as subliminal communist propaganda. The hardships and suffering of the Great Depression, which the Communist Party line identified as emblematic of the inherent and inevitable failure of the capitalist system, are frequently cited as the magnet that enticed sensitive and socially conscious artists.

Not all such American artists under communism's sway suffered equally even during the Great Depression, and some had known the benefits of middle-class and professional families with expectations of yet further rewards of free enterprise for the succeeding generation, even in the arts. (Beneficiaries of American society who flirted with communist rhetoric but declined to put their lives or means on the line could be dismissed as "parlor" or "armchair communists" by their acquaintances.) Also, injustices, inequities, and racial bigotry within American society—in the North as well as in the South—were not new to Depression-era America. Those circumstances had attracted some American artists and intellectuals both to internationalist or pan-national fantasies and to the misperceived model of the young Soviet Union before 1929. So one must look beyond the Depression to understand the communist beguilement.

Moreover, there were politically formal, patriotic, and less radical (including specified anti-Soviet) Socialist and related spin-off or third-party alternatives for addressing societal injustice and heightened Depression-related ills—fully within the framework of the Constitution and, one might argue, in a patently American tradition of progressive reform efforts. Noncommunist socialist-oriented groups spawned choruses too, but their anthem remained "The Star Spangled Banner"—sometimes paired with Irving Berlin's "God Bless America"—not "The Internationale." In the American Jewish context, the nonreligious fraternal organization known as the Arbeter Ring (Workmen's Circle) provides an instructive illustration. Much of its agenda, as well as that of responsible socialists in general, wound up in New Deal legislation, and in the succeeding string of labor, welfare, and civil rights laws of subsequent decades.

Most voters responded to the dire condition of the nation by resting their hopes on the Roosevelt administration, whose social and economic programs were designed not to dismantle, but to revive and save the capitalist structure, in part by providing relief for the masses. Others voted for Socialist candidates. But some could resist neither the communist lure of utopian pan-national equality and brotherhood, nor the propaganda organs, which often presented the Soviet Union as a the bulwark against Fascism and the instrument of pacifism. It is understandable that especially those creative artists who equated populism with democratic social ideals, and who wanted to emancipate art from privilege, could be drawn in. The enchanting message cannot be discounted altogether, the more so since in most cases the artists' innate humanity, compassion, and sensitivity to injustice was not necessarily matched by academically rigorous studies of political science, government, economics, or history. Still, there were many such artists who, after revelations began to emerge, genuinely disavowed earlier communist sympathies. There were also those who did not. Any post-1980s judgments must take that factor into account.

After the mid-1930s, as members of the Composers Collective began to refocus their energies from the composition of rallying chants to actual American folksong as a logical and appropriately resonant basis for a new national "music of and for the people," Siegmeister took his cue and began collecting, transcribing, notating, and arranging folksongs from a variety of sources. Apart from notated documents, most of his work with informants was accomplished in the New York urban environment—not, as in the case of other collectors, through cross-country travels to various communities. He did, however, make a few such trips, most notably one to Alabama, where he notated songs as sung by workers on a track gang. He published a series of American song anthologies—some devoted exclusively to anonymous folksongs and others that incorporated songs of a folk nature by identified composers going as far back as the Colonial period. The first of these was his Negro Songs of Protest (1935), but his most voluminous contribution to the field was his 1940 A Treasury of American Song, on which he collaborated with Olin Downes for the text. Unlike both scholarly compilations by ethnologists and more narrowly functional propaganda tools, that volume was intended as a source of viable, organic song repertoires for contemporary singing by the general public. His American Holiday (1933) was one of the first compositions to treat and integrate American working songs and common street tunes within an orchestral guise.

In 1939 he was the founder of an ensemble known as the American Ballad Singers, which toured the country with programs of American music—mostly folk or folk-type vocal music, but sometimes early instrumental pieces as well. Meanwhile, his concern for "the people" also manifested itself in his 1943 Music Lovers Handbook, which not only addressed American music but also tried to acquaint the average layman with the classical canon in terms he would understand.

Yet despite all his work outside the conventional so-called classical or concert music arena, Siegmeister did not abandon or neglect his aspirations as a serious concert composer. To the contrary, he experimented successfully in synthesizing his sociopolitical leaning with concert music, injecting it with American folk themes, and then developing those themes with the arsenal of devices available to the experienced composer. The way had been pointed by Ives and Thomson, and was followed not only by Siegmeister but by composers such as Copland and Roy Harris. Ozark Set (1943) was the first of Siegmeister's successful orchestral pieces based on American folk sources, and it marked a new phase in his acceptance by the mainstream music world when it was performed in 1944 by the Minneapolis Symphony conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. Among his other folk-based works from the same period are Prairie Legend (1944); Western Suite (1945), which received its premiere under Arturo Toscanini's baton with his NBC Symphony on a radio broadcast; Lonesome Hollow and Sunday in Brooklyn (1946); and his first symphony, completed in 1947 on a commission from Leopold Stokowski. In a 1944 statement in a program booklet, he articulated his conviction that "there is no fundamental difference between folk and classical music."

Eventually Siegmeister stretched his canvas beyond the confines of overt folk tune expression, but much of his later music still reflected his populist predilection in its exposition of memorable melodies and programmatic parameters. His orchestral textures and colors, too, tended to bow to the melody. And as he embraced more traditional forms in the postwar period, he further developed and refined his American idiom into what critics have called a "heightened Americanism." Whatever genre or form he addressed, he retained his fundamental concern for direct communication with the audience and for the music to speak to them on its own merits—without necessary recourse to theoretical justification. Nonetheless, by the 1960s some of his music was betraying a noticeably greater sophistication than his earlier, more transparent folk reflections. A 1984 retrospective concert that presented his works from the 1960s and 1970s evoked from critic Edward Rothstein the observation that although some of those pieces exhibited "elements of jazz and folk rhythms and recall the cinematic urban sounds of 1930s composition," Siegmeister had by the 1960s "sublimated Americana into the substance of his work, with a language that is generally tonal and provocative." What Rothstein heard that night was a composer "at ease with his craft and his past—and sounding distinctly American." Not all composers achieve their missions so fully.

Lest his passion for musical Americana and his quest for a specifically American idiom be seen as an expression of the very nationalism upon which the universalists of his political bent were expected to frown, he once explained his distinction between cultural and political nationalism—between "nationalism as a political movement and nationalism as the root of art in each particular people." For him, the greatest art came from an artist who "responds to his own environment, people and tradition." Certain that this stance would not preclude universality in an artist, he nonetheless thought that a writer, painter, poet, or composer must be "rooted to a time and place."

Siegmeister's large catalogue of works includes a clarinet concerto (1956), which mirrors blues elements; a double concerto for violin and piano (1976), which, like the last movement of his 1965 sextet and many other pieces throughout his creative life, leans audibly on jazz features; eight operas; Shadows and Light (1975), a five-movement orchestral suite programmatically expressing his reactions to paintings by Degas, van Gogh, Klee, and others; Fantasies in Line and Color (1981), similarly inspired by five American paintings; Five Fantasies of the Theater (1967), in which each movement portrays the style of a particular playwright; musical theater and stage works such as Doodle Dandy of the U.S.A. (1942) and Sing Out, Sweet Land (1944); numerous songs and song cycles, of which at least fifty are settings of poetry by Langston Hughes, famous for his capture of many aspects of American black experience (the two commenced a Broadway show together in 1952, but later abandoned it); many choral settings; seven additional symphonies and many other orchestral works; numerous solo and chamber pieces for various combinations—among them a string quartet (no. 3) on Hebrew themes; and a Hollywood film score, They Came to Cordura (1959).

In 1949 Siegmeister began his long tenure on the faculty of Hofstra University as a professor and composer-in-residence, where he remained until his retirement in 1976. At the start, this position might have been chiefly a practical necessity, but in a 1980 interview he explained that while one must make a living somehow, "teaching was more than that to me. It helped me clear my mind, articulate and define my art." After his retirement from Hofstra, he became the first composer-in-residence at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina.

Siegmeister was fond of pondering the abstract nature of music in terms of relating to an audience. "For some reason, the creation of music seems more mysterious than writing or painting, which offer people recognizable objects," he said in 1980. "But the musical idea seems effervescent and mysterious. Laymen … think music is a translation of a literal or verbal scene: a representation of something. They're always asking me, 'What does this sonata mean?' or 'What did you want to say?' And I tell them that if I could put it into words, I wouldn't put it into music."

In the midst of his postwar partial focus on traditional concert forms and more independent, self-contained artistic expressions, his humanistic political concerns continued to surface. Two works that illustrate that undiminished sense of the artist's obligation to society are I Had a Dream (1967), a setting of the most famous speech by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, delivered at one of America's ultimately proudest and noblest moments in its history, the 1963 civil rights march on Washington; and Faces of War (1968), a protest against America's continued military campaign in Vietnam.

In addition to his folksong anthologies and writings on music for the layman, Siegmeister published two important pedagogic volumes, Invitation to Music (1961) and Harmony and Melody, two volumes (1965–66). He served on the board of directors of ASCAP and received awards and commissions from the Library of Congress and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (of which he became a Fellow in 1989), as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In a 1988 retrospective examination of the socially and politically conscious underpinnings of Siegmeister's American idiom, Carol J. Oja observed that, whereas the so-called new Romanticism had become a recent fashion, Siegmeister had been "Romantic" all along, letting electronics, dodecaphony, and chance [aleatoric music] go their way." Indeed, in an earlier esssy of his own, he rejoiced that he had lived to see the day when what he called the "orthodoxy of the avantgarde" had capitulated to the neo-Romanticism of the new generation of composers.

In the 1980s Siegmeister turned to his there

Disc 1

Gimpel the Fool, Op. 1 (more info)
Performed by: Michigan University Opera Orchestra
Composed by: David Schiff
Conducted by: Kenneth Kiesler
Nicholas Phan, tenor
Theodore Bikel, actor
Michael Gallant, tenor
Alissa Mercurio, soprano
Gary Moss, baritone
Megan Besley, soprano


1.   Act II Scene 10: Lullaby (Badkhn, Gimpel, Elka, Rabbi) - 3:59
2.   Act II Scene 11: Pantomime (Badkhn, Gimpel) - 1:39
3.   Act II Scene 11a: Bread Song (Gimpel, Apprentice) - 3:24
4.   Act II Scene 11b: Night Music (Gimpel, Townspeople, Elka) - 2:41
5.   Act II Scene 11c: Gimpel and the Goat (Gimpel, Goat, Elka) - 2:17
6.   Act II Scene 11d: Elka's "Gvald" (Elka, Townspeople, Gimpel) - 1:32
7.   Act II Scene 11e: The Divorce (Badkhn, Gimpel, Rabbi, Townspeople, Elka) - 3:09
8.   Act II Scene 11f: Gimpel's Monologue (Gimpel, Badkhn) - 1:24


Lady of the Lake (excerpts) (more info)
Performed by: Seattle Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: Elie Siegmeister
Conducted by: Gerard Schwarz
Carol Meyer, soprano
Marcus DeLoach, baritone
Robert McPherson, tenor
Recording date: May 2000
Produced by: Stern, Adam


9.   Scene 5: Welcome, Mr. Freeman (Isabella, Blumberg) - 9:15
10.   Interlude - 1:25
11.   Scene 6: She lied to me (Blumberg) - 2:18
12.   Scene 7: So you come here again (Ernesto, Blumberg, Isabella) - 4:38


Esther (excerpts) (more info)
Performed by: Seattle Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: Hugo Weisgall
Conducted by: Gerard Schwarz
Juliana Gondek, soprano
Ted Christopher, baritone
Recording date: May 1999
Produced by: Stern, Adam


13.   Act I Scene 8 (excerpt): Did any queen have more? (Esther) - 3:45
14.   Act III Scene 2: Wild Dance - 3:54
15.   Act III Scene 10: Susa sleeps a sleep (Esther, Xerxes) - 7:28

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