Local News
April 25, 2008
Anti-Semitic Concert Notes Upsets Viewers
The recent performance of a medieval, anti-Jewish song upsets local concertgoers.
Barbara Pash
Associate Editor
Dr. Roger Marcus could hardly believe his eyes. There he was at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, enjoying a concert sponsored by the Shriver Hall Concert Series, when he read the translated text of the song being sung in Latin.
The text accused Jews of crucifying Christ.
“That was the first time I’d heard anything like that,” said Dr. Marcus, a longtime series subscriber. The Choir of King’s College in Cambridge, England, performed the April 13 concert to a sold-out audience of 1,600.
Written by French composer Francis Poulenc, “Quatre Motets pour un Temps de Penitence” consists of four meditations on the Passion of Christ. Mr. Poulenc set to music a medieval Latin text.
The text was incorporated into the Catholic Church’s Good Friday service until Pope John XXIII renounced it and had the text removed from the liturgy. Translated into English, the text states, “There was darkness all over the earth when the Jews crucified Jesus ... ”
The translation for this and other pieces performed at the concert were inserted in the concert program. “All of a sudden, it popped out at me,” said Dr. Marcus, a Chevrei Tzedek congregant. “I had trouble sitting through the rest of the concert.”
Dr. Marcus was not the only disturbed concertgoer. The Monday following the concert, David J. Baldwin, director of the series, a private non-profit organization dedicated to bringing classical music here, said he received several phone and e-mail complaints.
“We were not aware of the [wording] until the concert itself. We were every bit as appalled as everyone else,” said Mr. Baldwin.
Baltimore was the last stop on the choir’s tour, following New York, Chicago, Dallas, Ann Arbor and St. Louis. The choir was responsible for providing the text and translations for the Shriver Hall program. Mr. Baldwin said he had no indication from the previous tour stops there was problematic wording.
The text and translation arrived in Baltimore later than expected. It had to be sent out to a printer immediately to be reproduced in time for the concert. Then, it sat in boxes at the concert site until being inserted into the programs shortly before the concert.
Mr. Baldwin said he contacted the choir’s management company to warn them for future tours. But he said he does not intend to repeat the experience. In the future, he said he will make sure there is time to review texts and translations, and if a potential problem is spotted, the series’ program annotator will write a special program note.
The Shriver Hall concert situation is not unusual, according to Tom Hall, music director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society. He said liturgical texts set to music, particularly the “Passion narratives” of Easter, reflect the anti-Judaism of their times.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking about this,” said Mr. Hall, who has dealt with this kind of situation in the past. Before a performance of Bach’s St. John’s and St. Matthew’s Passions, for example, he said he arranged a panel discussion.
But there is no single or standard way to handle these situations, Mr. Hall said. Some people advocate deleting the offending passage if possible, he said. Others perform it without an explanatory note, which is the more common approach. Still others insert a note and even make a brief announcement from the stage before the performance.
“A note about it [in the program] would have gone a long way to mitigating the hurtful nature of the text,” said Mr. Hall.
The Shriver Hall concert incident did not go unnoticed in the local music scene. Mr. Hall, who serves as culture editor for WYPR Radio’s “Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast,” discussed the matter on the air April 18 with Rabbi Mark G. Loeb of Beth El Congregation and Dr. Christopher M. Leighton, executive director of the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies.
Said Dr. Leighton: “Some people say, ‘Why can’t you just appreciate the music? Most of it is in Latin, and you are overreacting to a problem that you wouldn’t even be aware of if it hadn’t been translated into English, if people weren’t yammering about it.’”
Neither he or Rabbi Loeb agreed with that sentiment. “Ignorance is no excuse,” Dr. Leighton said. “This is a long-standing problem. You can’t separate the words from the music.”
There is an “obligation to expose” the language often embedded in music with a Lenten motif, he said. “It’s important to realize that this tradition was used to justify patterns of anti-Semitism,” said Dr. Leighton.
Artists presenting these works need to determine if they are appropriate, said Rabbi Loeb. If the decision is to perform the pieces, the least requirement is an explanation on why the language is problematic.
“Over the centuries, whenever these pieces were used, they had the potential to cause trouble for the Jews,” said Rabbi Loeb. “We owe it to each other to be sensitive and not stoke hatred.”
The April 18 segment on WYPR featuring Rabbi Loeb and Dr. Leighton can be heard on the Web site, http://www.wypr.org . Click onto “Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast.” The 11-minute discussion will remain on the Web site until May 18. em>