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The First Yiddish Opera
by NEIL W. LEVIN
Did you know that worldwide there have been five full-scale YIDDISH OPERAS written since the early 20th century? Not Second Avenue Yiddish musical shows or melodramas, nor Yiddish plays with music, nor operettas, nor Singspiels, but actual bona fide operas completely in Yiddish! And did you know that the very first such Yiddish opera was KING AHAZ (Melekh Akhaz), composed in 1911 by Samuel Alman—now better known in cantorial circles for his sophisticated yet traditional synagogue music—and premiered in London in 1912 to great critical acclaim? If your answer is 'no', you are not alone. For indeed this might be one of both the opera world's and Yiddish culture's best but unintentionally kept secrets.
That first-ever Yiddish opera, for which the composer wrote his own libretto, is centered loosely around the 8th-century BCE biblical Ahaz (II Kings), one of the evil kings of Judea. He is said to have presided over and encouraged if not demanded the reversion to idolatry and pagan cult worship, perhaps even including human sacrifice. But Alman turned for his fictional plot and several of its characters to one of the first Hebrew novels of the Haskala, which is also a work of fiction that creatively incorporates elements of the biblical account, albeit in the context of modern, and to some extent, proto-Zionist sensibilities.
The opera is basically about the ancient Judeans' joyous return to the Torah and Judaic moral values upon the end of King Ahaz's reign, during which they have suffered forced pagan worship and danger of any attempts to avoid conformity. The plot swirls around a wealthy Judean, Uziel, and his beloved wife Miriam, whose child, Elifelet, has been demanded by Ahaz for burnt sacrifice because Yehoshuva—wife of the Viceroy—has denounced Uziel as a traitor to the regime out of jealous rage at his spurning her advances for an adulterous love affair. Uziel, now under a death sentence, too, flees to Lebanon while Miriam's and his longtime loyal Jewish servant, Naftali, successfully devises a scheme to save their baby by substituting, undetected, a look-alike doll for the sacrifice. Only fifteen years later, upon the death of Ahaz and the restoration of Judaism under his successor son, King Hezekiah, is Uziel— unaware that his son is alive—able to return to Jerusalem and to his wife Miriam. The two have remained romantically in love with each other all these years. Under the new regime, Yehoshuva is forgiven, and the Jerusalemites rejoice publicly as the kohanim resume their long-forbidden function and, together with the Levitical choir, pronounce their three-fold priestly blessing from the now Judaically cleansed and restored Temple.
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All this is but a small sample—a firgerikht—of what the YIVO research has yielded thus far for my book in progress on "Jewish opera," of which KING AHAZ is Chapter One of many on a surprising number of such operas.
I would like to share with you an interview with Alex Weiser, our Director of Public Programs, with whom I have been discussing my research and writing as I go along (March 2023):
Neil W. Levin is YIVO’s Anne E. Leibowitz Visiting Professor-in-Residence in Music.