The première of David Tamkin’s operatic version of The Dybbuk, presented by the New York City Opera Company this past October 4, comes a quarter of a century after the Habimah troupe from Moscow first made its entry into the European theatrical world with its production of the Ansky play. Both the play and the players became famous overnight, and both have continued to hold a special place in the modern drama. Habimah is now the national theater of Israel, and The Dybbuk has become a kind of cultural monument, representing even to many who have never seen it a “classic” of Jewish and world literature.
Even after all these years—and such unhappy years—one can still recall something of the peculiarly electrifying effect of the 1925 production on the cosmopolitan audience of the German capital in those days of cultural ferment. The Berlin critics, always on the alert against any artistic falsity, at once recognized in The Dybbuk a genuinely fresh note. This somber drama of demonic possession was more than folklore, and more than “good theater”; it was a deeply true evocation of a life that, mysteriously, was still going on in the towns and hamlets of Eastern Europe—a life governed by ancient commandments and rites, where the possibilities of good and evil retained an immediate reality which had long been lost in the more enlightened atmosphere of the West; perhaps, among other things, The Dybbuk owed its success in Berlin to a certain uneasy awareness of the limits of enlightenment.
The history of the play contains in miniature some of the intellectual currents that agitated East European Jewry in the early years of this century. Semyon Akimovitch Ansky, whose real name was Solomon Seinwil Rapoport, had alienated himself from his Hasidic background and joined the revolutionary movement; after the revolt of 1905 he returned to the cultural world of the Jews and devoted himself particularly to exploring Jewish folklore. The Dybbuk was written in Russian, and translated by the author into Yiddish to be performed by the Vilner Truppe, and then once more translated into Hebrew—because the Habimah players, founded in 1916, had the temerity to believe that they were going to create the Hebrew theater of the future. The Hebrew translation was the work of the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, leading figure of the Hebrew renaissance. The incidental music was composed by Joel Engel, formerly Yuli Dimitrievitch Engel, music critic of a leading Moscow newspaper—another “alienated” Jew who had returned to the culture of his people and who ended his life in Palestine. Finally, this play that was to become a Hebrew classic was directed by a Russian-Armenian, the great Moscow director Eugene Vachtangov.
The play is not a proper drama in the strict sense, but rather a loosely woven dramatic legend based on Hasidic lore and Jewish folkways. The brilliant young Talmudist and Cabalist Channon, frustrated of his predestined bride Leah, after his death enters into her body as a dybbuk; Channon’s father, himself many years dead, appears to accuse Leah’s father of having betrayed an agreement that their two children were to marry; in a final climactic scene, the dead father’s claim is tried before a court of rabbis, and the dybbuk is exorcised, but the soul of Channon calls to Leah and she follows him to death. A playwright concerned only with dramatic structure might have emphasized this plot for its own sake; Ansky, a man of refined conceptions, used it as a framework for the evocation of the whole strange world of Hasidism, that world which felt itself hovering every day on the brink of a miracle. And Vachtangov, true to Ansky’s conception, with unfailing tact refrained from stressing action as such, but concentrated on the subtle interplay of the incidents surrounding each action—a shifting, poignant pattern of color and feeling. Thus the opening scene with its wellnigh audible silence, intensified by the occasional humming of the Hasidim in their meditations, impresses itself much more deeply upon the spectator than the rather bombastic ceremonial of exorcising the dybbuk in the last act, or the obvious theatrical “effect” of the trial between the dead and the living. Though not a Jew, Vachtangov showed an uncanny intuition for going beyond the mere presentation of “milieu” to grasp that living interplay of the mystical and the everyday which constituted the Hasidic ideal. In effect, Vachtangov created a Dybbuk tradition, and all later productions of the play have rested upon the foundation he established. How great his contribution was may be seen in the fact that the final act of the play, which he did not live to stage, has never achieved the depth of the earlier acts, though the script itself offers many potential highlights.
Of the later productions of The Dybbuk on the international stage none seems to have achieved quite the effect of that first appearance in Berlin, though some were surely not without merit. (I have a close personal recollection of the German production, Der Dämon, staged by Berthold Viertel with Gerda Mueller as Leah; the stage sets were done by Joseph Budko, and the incidental music was composed by a then young and “promising” musician, one Chemjo Vinaver.) But the play lives on, and those interested in serious drama will for many years to come find reason to return to it.
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From the beginning, The Dybbuk had a special appeal in terms of music; Hasidism itself was a religious movement full of melody, and Joel Engel in his incidental music for the original production made full use of the Hasidic musical tradition; his score abounds in folk motifs employed with an unerring instinct for the right tune in the right place. It was natural that musicians should have thought of turning the play into an opera. One such effort was made in the 30’s by the Italian composer Lodovico Rocca. And now, The Dybbuk appears as an American opera.
It must be reported, regretfully, that Mr. Tamkin, for all the enthusiasm that greeted his work, has not succeeded in writing “the” opera of The Dybbuk. He proves himself a skillful musician, adept at instrumentation, and he deserves praise for a generally judicious treatment of the singing voice. But he lacks any deeper knowledge of Hasidic life, and seems insufficiently conversant with the traditional Hasidic musical idiom. There is little justification for turning a good play into an opera unless the operatic form deepens the impact and meaning of the drama, and this Mr. Tamkin’s treatment does not achieve.
Paradoxically, the difficulty for the composer lies in those very virtues of immediacy and emotional power that make the play seem so “natural” a choice for opera. Pervaded as it is with the dense atmosphere of Hasidism, The Dylbuk projects a mood of such intensity that only music of extraordinary power could carry it any further, and anything less than that tends to diminish the original impact. For The Dybbuk is already, in a manner of speaking, an opera without music. Quite independently of any musical score, the characters of the play fill the stage with the distinctive melos of Jewish folk life; the very inflections of language, the rhythmic swaying of bodies, the ritual sing-song of the House of Study pervading even the most everyday speech (for to the Hasid there was no “everyday”)—all this is already in a quite literal sense a form of music. And only by working from within, from the Hasidic tradition itself, might the composer hope to bring to The Dybbuk a note of higher intensity. To do this he would have to be a musician of genius, an artist perhaps of the type and stature of a Gustav Mahler, with Mahler’s intuitive power and love of the mystical, though without Mahler’s unfortunate alienation from Jewishness. Such a composer might succeed in transcending the play’s obvious and “natural” operatic elements, the merely crude and spectacular manifestations of magic and honor, to seek out and intensify those subtler “things between heaven and earth” which constitute its real riches: the unearthly devotion and fervor, the spiritual aura surrounding the simple Jews transformed by mystical faith.
One seeks in vain any such higher achievement in Tamkin’s music. And even in the quieter passages—for example, the folk humor of the scene between the frightened bridegroom and his melamed trying to encourage him—Tamkin fails to live up to his opportunities. Now and then, when the composer does succeed in striking the right note, he invariably fails to sustain it—as in the dance which follows Sender’s announcement of his daughter’s betrothal, or in the fine short theme introducing the last act, which raises expectations and then vanishes: why so short of breath? Surely it is not the libretto that is at fault; on the whole the scenes lend themselves well to a sustained development leading up to an ecstatic climax—so characteristic of Hasidic emotional intensity. The Beggars’ Dance in the second act is perhaps a bit more sustained musically, but the scene in expectation of the Rabbi, a potential highlight of the third act, blows over unnoticed: how moving this scene might have been made simply by having the Hasidim as they wait chant an authentic nigun, even if it was the one used by Habimah. One of the lesser sins against style should also be mentioned: the all too neat, almost synagogal “Amen” of the minyan at the close of the trial; absurdly reminiscent of a modern well-rehearsed choir, it is fatal to the mood of a mystical rite among Hasidim.
The presentation was excellent, greatly helped by Irving Pichel’s direction, by the dances (choreography: Sophie Maslow), and by the imaginative though somewhat “Russified” stage settings (Mstislav Doboujinski). Alexander Tamkin, the composer’s brother, responsible for the libretto, had the good sense and good taste to stick closely to the original script. The singers all did well; Robert Rounseville stood out particularly as Channon and Mack Harrell as Rabbi Azrael; Patricia Neway, who sang the part of Leah, no doubt has more to offer than the part permitted her. And there can be nothing but praise for the conductor, Joseph Rosenstock, who brought the entire cast to a polish and roundedness altogether unusual in a first performance.
Despite all the opera’s shortcomings, a sufficient taste of the spirit inherent in The Dybbuk did communicate itself that evening at the City Center, and the reaction of the audience was gratifying indeed. It is consoling to think that there are still people capable of being carried away by the image of so irrational and mysterious a world as that of this play, and one wonders whether after all there may not be the possibility in this country of a Jewish culture above the borscht-and-bagels level that some of our entrepreneurs of culture seem to have decided is all we can take. If even the fragmentary remains of our Hasidic heritage—a world at once exotic and esoteric to this generation so far removed from it in time, in space, and in spirit—can still arouse and inspire an audience in New York City, surely there must still exist somewhere in our Jewish life on these shores a spark of that fire which once was lit by those who had faith, a fire whose mere reflection is enough for warmth and illumination.
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Of that fire the Hasidim tell a story which has been beautifully retold by the Hebrew novelist S. J. Agnon, and for which thanks are also due to Gershom Scholem, the distinguished scholar of Jewish mysticism.
“When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire, and meditate in prayer—and what he had set out to perform was done.
“When a generation later the Maggid of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers—and what he wanted done became reality.
“Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs—and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was.
“But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And the story which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.”
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