(Author: Cecil Bloom, Vol. 72, No. 3, Chanukah 2017)
It is possible that one of the great operatic masterpieces of the 20th Century would not have been written had its composer obtained the performing rights to a play that he wanted to use as a subject for another opera. This could have been the fate of Porgy and Besshad George Gershwin succeeded in getting the rights to The Dybbuk, the Yiddish play written by Solomon Rappoport (better known as S. Ansky) some years before composing Porgy and Bess. The Dybbuk, also entitled Between Two Worlds, is probably the most famous of all Yiddish plays. It was a great success from its first performance in Warsaw by the Vilna Troupe in 1920, a month after Ansky’s deathand it has since been performed in many other countries, including Germany, England, the US, Ukraine, Sweden, Bulgaria and France. Its New York premiere was in September 1921, a Hebrew version was later provided by Hayim Nahman Bialik and a Yiddish film was produced in 1937. In 1968, a Hebrew version was produced, with a musical score written by one of Israel’s leading composers, Noam Sheriff.
A dybbuk in Jewish folklore is the restless soul of a deceased person that tries to enter a living person’s body. On taking over a person’s body, it talks through his mouth and controls his behaviour. Ansky’s play is about the love of two young people, Chonon, a poor Talmudic student, and Leah, who are betrothed to each other at a young age only for Leah’s father to break the agreement and arrange for her to marry a rich young man instead. Chonon invokes the mystical powers of the kabbalah before he dies and, as Leah is about to be married, his spirit enters her body. Possessed by this dybbuk, she speaks his words in his voice. Chonon cries out that he has come to claim her as his own. Leah’s father asks the rabbi to exorcise this evil spirit, and he succeeds in doing so. However, Chonon has the last word as he takes Leah’s soul from her body to be united with him in death.
In 1926, Gershwyn considered the possibility of writing a full-scale opera after reading Du Bose Heyward’s novel Porgy, which he believed had operatic potential, but did not follow up on this. In December the previous year, he had seen The Dybbuk at a New York theatre, where it was being performed by the famous Habima troupe. It impressed him so much that later, in October 1929, he wrote to a friend saying that he was thinking very much about setting it as an opera. Otto Kahn, a banker who financed musicals, became very keen on his doing this. Two days later, a newspaper headline announced, “Gershwin shelves jazz to do opera”. He sketched out some musical ideas, some of which were believed to have Jewish characteristics. One was a slow, hypnotic rhythm similar to synagogue chants, which is in itself is interesting as Gershwyn does not appear to have gone to a shul service since his boyhood. He showed his friend Isaac Goldberg (who was also his first biographer) some of his dybbuk themes, and Goldberg recognised them as Jewish prayer music and a chassidic dance. He even planned to go to Europe to study Jewish folk and liturgical music. This was followed up by his signing a provisional contract with the Metropolitan Opera Association for an opera to be entitled The Dybbuk, to be performed in April 1931. But the whole project collapsed when Gershwin found he was unable to obtain the performing rights to the play because they had been awarded to an Italian composer from Turin, one Lodovico Rocca. This being the case, Porgy and Bess became the next realistic proposition.
In all, Rocca wrote five operas of which Il Dibuk, his third, is considered to be his finest and which at one time was thought to be a splendid successor to Puccini’s Turandot. Why he chose this Yiddish drama as a subject is unclear. He had apparently seen a performance by the legendary Vilna Troupe, which performed only in Yiddish, when they toured Europe in the early 1920s. It is unlikely that he himself was Jewish. Throughout World War II, he was Director of the Turin Conservatory, not a post for a Jew. He name does appear on a Nazi list of banned composers but it is generally believed that he was banned because of his having composed Il Dibuk, not because he was a Jew. Rocca’s librettist, Renato Simoni was also unlikely to have been Jewish – during the war he was editor of an important Italian newspaper.
Il Dibuk, a three-act opera with a prologue sung in Italian, was first performed in March 1934 at Milan’s La Scala theatre. The Jewish Chronicle (London) reported on its good reception there. It then played in Turin, Rome and Warsaw before moving to the United States, now in English translation. In May 1936, it first appeared in Detroit and then Chicago prior to performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Detroit’s audience lauded the work but the famed critic Olin Downes, in hisNew York Times review, criticised it heavily as a work that abounded in banalities, with Jewish tunes being used in a pseudo-Jewish manner. He was critical of the tenor playing Chonon, whom he wrote “struggled manfully with his role and almost succeeded in out-shouting the musical instruments” (although he acknowledged the performance to have been “earnest and painstaking”). Downes admired Ansky’s play as a wonderful drama but did not believe that Rocca had any feel for a subject that was “clothed in artificiality and pretence”. Gershwin apparently did not attend any performance of the opera – surprisingly, in view of his previous interest in the play.
Ansky’s original play has never lost its popularity and some writers have used its basic plot in their own versions of the drama. Julia Pascal’s 1992 production is part of a Holocaust trilogy. Its central character is a British Jewess who conceives of an Eastern European ghetto where five Jews debate issues of love and death as well as invoking thekabbalah before being sent to Auschwitz. The dybbuk fable is encapsulated within the play. Hanna Krall’s 2003 Warsaw production has a boy as the dybbuk murdered in the Warsaw ghetto but whose father eventually reaches America where another son is born and the dybbuk appears before the boy.
The dybbuk theme has also been used as a subject in music. The most important is that of a ballet choreographed by Jerome Robbins with music by Leonard Bernstein. It premiered in New York in 1974, although Robbins had considered the subject as early as 1948. Robbins and Bernstein did intend it to be ready to commemorate Israel’s 25thYom Ha’atzmaut. Hebrew texts interspersed throughout the ballet are sung by a tenor and baritone. Later, Bernstein arranged two orchestral suites from his music, the first featuring two vocalists and the second only instrumental. Robbins was never satisfied with his ballet and revised it three times, eventually changing its title to Suite of Dances. Other ballets based on the dybbuk story have been choreographed, one using music by Joel Engel that was used in the original performances of the play as well as music composed by Arnold Schoenberg. Engel’s incidental music used many old Jewish melodies and was later entitled Suite of the Dybbuk Legend.
It was some time following his plans for an opera based on Ansky’s play before Gershwin turned to Porgy and Bess. This eventually premiered in New York on 10 October 1935. But would he have turned to Porgy had he won the rights to The Dybbuk and even if he had, would he have been able to finish it before his tragically early death in 1937? It would surely have been a tragedy for opera lovers had Porgy and Bess never seen the light of day, but imagine what might have come instead – a real Jewish opera!
Cecil Bloom, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a former technical director of a multinational pharmaceutical firm in the UK. His essays on Jewish themes relating to music, literature, history and Bible have also appeared in Midstream and Jewish Quarterly.
George Gershwin, 1898-1937
