ROSSI and P0ULENC

By Judith Eckelmeyer

(GRACE WOODS MUSIC SESSION APRIL 7, 2025)

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Salamone Rossi

Salamone Rossi (1575-1630) was a life-long resident of Mantua, a highly talented and respected violinist and composer, and a Jew living in a ghetto in a Christian city. His career was therefore extraordinary by any measure. The powers in Mantua were the Gonzaga family; their Dukes were collectors of art and artists of all media, and their court was a center of sophistication and splendor.

Ducal palace, Mantua.

None other than Claudio Monteverdi began his career there, notably composing his opera Orfeo ed EuridIce there in 1607 before moving to Venice; Salamone Rossi conducted the performance.

Claudio Monteverdi - L`Orfeo

In a web article “From Ghetto to Palazzo: How a Jewish Composer in Renaissance Italy Harmonized Two Worlds” September 19, 1017), Candice Agree explains:
 
Salamone Rossi's skill as a violinist and composer was highly valued at Vincenzo's Catholic court, and he was officially exempted from wearing the yellow badge required of the Mantuan Jewish community. But as a Jew, he still was seen as an interloper. It was solely due to the patronage of the Duke that Rossi achieved the status that he did, precarious as it was. As Don Harrán, Artur Rubinstein Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, points out, "As a Jewish musician working for the Mantuan court, and competing for the favors that its Christian musicians and composers hoped to gain, it was only inevitable for Rossi to have been considered an intruder. His talents as composer and violinist must have been so remarkable that Vincenzo and his successors decided to keep Rossi in their service over the course of almost forty years, from 1589 to 1628."

Vincenzo I Gonzaga in ducal armor (Frans Pourbus the Younger, 1588)

As early as 1476, Hebrew works had been printed in Mantua. But it wasn't until 1623 that Salamone Rossi's thirty-three Songs of Solomon (Ha-shirim asher li-Shelomoh) became the first composed "songs" to be published in Hebrew. Sebastian Gluck, pipe organ builder and considered the authority on the synagogue organ in America, points out that Rossi "…was the first to write Jewish liturgical music in the prevailing style of the time, without melodic or harmonic influence from Hebraic chant."

Title page of the first edition of Hashirim asher leSholomo (Venice: Pietro e Lorenzo Bragadino, 1623)

Although Rossi composed a great deal of secular music, both instrumental and vocal in the current Italian style, he also wrote for his Jewish community. 
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His “Songs of Solomon” is a collection of 33 settings of sacred texts taken from Hebrew psalms, hymns and synagogue songs in the conservative style of the late Renaissance. (They do not refer back to King Solomon, as one might surmise, but rather to himself!) Yet Rossi was caught in a cultural crossfire. As a Jew employed in a Catholic court he was considered an outsider, and as a Jew composing secular music and music cultivated in the Christian community he was criticized by his own community. There can be no question, however, of the beauty of music, whether sacred or secular.

The selections by Rossi for this session are both instrumental (secular) and vocal (sacred), giving examples of his contribution to the court and Jewish community of Mantua. 
 
1.   Sinfonia grave, an instrumental ensemble work.
2.   Barechu et Adonai ham’vorach; sung in Hebrew:
             Praise be to the Lord, forever and ever.
3.   Sonate a 6, an instrumental work.
4.   Eftach na sefatai:

Let me open my lips and give utterance to song; Yea, I will sing to the living god for His Ark stands ever before us. When God grants us His salvation, then I will declare His praises; When the redeemer comes to Zion, my throat shall call out in joy; Yea, I will sing to the living God. Hearken to the prayer of the oppressed, let deliverance spring from the earth. Then shall Israel be saved and the muted tongue shall find song. Yea, I will sing to the living God. Return our captivity, O Living Redeemer.

Then through the offerings we vow shall Aaron the priest work atonement for us. Yea, I will sing to the living God. Scattered, God, be Thine enemies, joyous be those who long for Thee when Thy cause is victorious and they return to the holy stronghold. Yea, I will sing to the living God. The redeemed shall march on, for the God their Fortress shall conquer, shall prevail. Yea, I will sing to the living God. Be Thou our strength, banish sorrow and lamentation; Then will we sing as once we did when His Ark moved on before us.
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5.   Sonata in dialogo.
 
6.   Baruch haba b’shem Adonai:
Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord; We bless you out of the house of the Lord. The Lord is God, ad hath given us light; Order the festival procession with boughs, even unto the horns of the altar. Thou art my God, and I will give thanks unto Thee; Thou art my God, I will exalt Thee. O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good. For His mercy endureth forever. 
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The Songs of Solomon. Cycle of 33 spiritual songs (Hashirim asher li ´shlomo) - Mizmor l´´david, havu ladonai b´´nei elim (Ps. 29) · Salomone Rossi · Kühnovi komorní sólisté Rossi: The Songs of Solomon

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Poulenc in the early 1920s

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) was born and raised in Paris. He learned piano as a child from his mother and was introduced through her and her brother into a highly secular world of contemporary French literature and music. Poulenc’s father, whom he described as a “deeply religious but liberal” Catholic from the south of France, died in 1917, after which Francis moved in the spheres of his mother’s secular, cosmopolitan world.

Georges Auric

Arthur Honegger in 1928

Darius Milhaud (1923)

As a teen, he studied the piano music of Debussy and Ravel, then met Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud—three of Les Six—and Eric Satie, their older friend and guide to the avant-garde. At the age of 18 he dedicated his first published work to Satie and became associated with the iconoclastic Six. Poulenc acquired the diversity of resources that would characterize his music: sensitivity to harmonic and tonal color, melodic freedom, and the “language” of popular music current in Parisian cafes and theaters

Pierre-Octave Ferroud

Poulenc’s world changed in 1936 when his friend, composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, was killed in a car accident. In the wake of this tragedy Poulenc retired to Rocamadour, a pilgrimage town in the southern region from which his father had come. There, Poulenc returned to religious faith. His very first sacred choral piece, “Litanies to the Black Virgin” of 1936, is a setting for women’s and children’s voices of recitations honoring the Virgin who is represented by a blackened wood statue in the church of Notre Dame in Rocamadour. ​

Other sacred choral works followed soon after and appeared throughout the rest of his life. Among these are Four Motets for a Time of Penitence, composed in 1938-39. Reflecting not only the Lenten season but also the continuing grief of his own loss, Poulenc took seriously the contents of each of the four Holy Week texts which he chose to set to music. They vary in style considerably, encompassing darkness and deep fear with a prayer for God’s help; a love song to a vineyard, chosen, planted and nourished, but which betrays the owner with bitterness; the great darkness surrounding the time of Jesus’s death; and the “sorrow unto death” of Jesus in Gethsemane, predicting his capture and abandonment by his disciples, and his impending sacrifice. Needless to say, Poulenc employed dissonances of great harshness and the lush harmonies associated with many of his secular works to bring the meaning of the texts to the fore.
 
The English texts follow:

I. Fear and trembling have come over me and darkness has seized my soul. Pity me, O Lord, for in you have I placed my trust Hear my prayer, O my God, for you are my refuge, you, O Lord, are my strength. I have called upon your name; do not desert me.  

II. You are my chosen vine and by my hand you were planted. How then have you become bitter? You have crucified me and set Barabbas free. I guarded you with a hedge, I removed the stones from around you. I built a tower to watch over you.  

III. The day grew dark as the Jews [Biblically the Romans] nailed Jesus to the cross and bout the ninth hour with a great voice Jesus cried out: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? With bowed head he delivered up his spirit, saying: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.  

​IV. My spirit is sorrowful as to death; remain here a while and keep watch with me; soon you will see a great crowd com to surround me. You will flee, and I shall be sacrificed for you, Lo the time is near when the Son of Man shall be given over into the hands of sinners.

Francis Poulenc’s “Quatre motets pour un temps de penitence” performed the WDR Rundfunkchoir under conduction of Peter Dijkstra as part of the concert “Kunst der Motette” on the 5th of april 2019 at the Trinity church in cologne.

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Judith Eckelmeyer ©2025