Halévy: La Juive (Vienna State Opera, ORF, Deutsche Grammophon, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday night my husband Charles and I watched the DVD I just got of one of the most remarkable operas ever composed, Jacques Fromental Halévy’s La Juive (“The Jewess”). It’s been a singularly cursed opera, at least during the 20th century: after first performing it in 1895 the Met revived it in 1919 as a vehicle for Enrico Caruso in the star tenor role of the Jewish patriarch Eléazar – only it turned out to be the last role Caruso added to his repertoire and the last he ever performed in December 1920 before he took sick late that year and died eight months later, in August 1921. Then Richard Tucker, star tenor at the Met for a quarter-century, wanted the Met to revive it for him in the early 1970’s. He got as far as two staged performances in New Orleans and a concert version in London, where RCA Victor allowed him to record a single LP of excerpts, before he died. (It was a personal project for Tucker because he was not just Jewish, he was an observant Jew who refused to wear a pendant with a cross around his neck for Verdi’s Don Carlos and refused to work with Herbert von Karajan because Karajan had been a Nazi. Tucker’s only compromise with orthodoxy was he agreed to sing in Met broadcasts, which then were always on Saturday afternoons.) Then Philips announced they would make the first complete recording of La Juive with José Carreras as Eléazar – only Carreras got leukemia and, while he recovered, he left the recording unfinished for a year and a half until he was well enough to return to work, and critics noted how different Carreras’s voice was “before” and “after” his diagnosis and withdrawal.

It’s also an opera I’ve been hunting down for years before finally getting hold of this Deutsche Grammophon DVD from a 2003 performance at the Vienna State Opera, with Neil Shicoff (a tenor I remember seeing in San Francisco in the late 1970’s when he was virtually unknown) as Eléazar. Unlike his most famous contemporary as a Jewish composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer (a German, born Louis-Ferdinand Beer, who first moved to Italy and finally settled in France), the French-born Halévy wasn’t just a composer who happened to be Jewish. As his Wikipedia biography notes, “Halévy was born in Paris, son of the cantor Élie Halfon Halévy, who was the secretary of the Jewish community of Paris and a writer and teacher of Hebrew, and a French Jewish mother. The name Fromental (meaning 'oat grass'), by which he was generally known, reflects his birth on the day dedicated to that plant: 7 Prairial in the French Revolutionary calendar, which was still operative at that time (1799, when Halévy was born – 14 years before both Wagner and Verdi). He entered the Conservatoire de Paris at the age of nine or ten (accounts differ), in 1809, becoming a pupil and later protégé of Cherubini. After two second-place attempts, he won the Prix de Rome in 1819: his cantata subject was Herminie.” (The rules of the Prix de Rome was that there would be a contest for poets, who would write a libretto for a piece for voice and orchestra; and then a contest for composers, who would set the winning poet’s text. Among the people Halévy defeated in the Prix de Rome contest was Hector Berlioz.)

La Juive was premiered in 1835 and was an immediate hit which established its composer’s reputation and stayed in the active repertory of many major opera houses until, like French grand operas in general, it faded from popularity between the two world wars. Set to a text by librettist Eugène Scribe, who also wrote texts for many of Meyerbeer’s opera, La Juive is an open attack on anti-Semitic prejudice. It takes place in the year 1414, just after Emperor Sigismund IV (the singer in this role isn’t identified on the DVD box but he bears a striking, and currently appropriate, resemblance to Joe Biden) has just defeated Jan Hus’s heresy and has declared this Sunday a feast day to celebrate his victory. Only he and the throngs of Christians there for the festival hear a tapping noise from the workshop of Eléazar the jeweler, and they immediately denounce him as an infidel for working on the Sabbath. Eléazar, of course, insists he has a perfect right to work on Sunday because it isn’t his Sabbath. He’s also been raising a daughter named Rachel (Krassimira Stoyanova) as a single father, and she’s grown to womanhood and is having an affair with a man she thinks is a fellow Jew named Samuel (Jianyi Zhang).

Only in act one Samuel declares his intent to carry out some revenge plot against Rachel, and his true motives become clear later on when he reveals that he’s really a Christian and, even worse, he turns out to be Prince Leopold, husband of the Emperor’s daughter Eudoxie (Simina Ivan). The regime bans sex between Christians and Jews and makes it a capital crime for both parties, but as Eléazar suspects Leopold, through his social position, is probably going to be able to weasel out of it while both he and his daughter will be put to death. Eléazar is also greeted by an old friend of his, Cardinal Brogni (Walter Fink, the only singer in this cast besides Shicoff I’d heard of before: he played Edward Teller in John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic and, given what the real-life Teller did in denouncing his former friend and mentor J. Robert Oppenheimer as a traitor for refusing to work on the H-bomb, I thought Fink’s last name was all too appropriate for his role). Brogni and Eléazar were former comrades in Rome in the city’s defense against an invading army from Naples (remember that until the 19th centuries both Italy and Germany were made up of small city-states, and these often went to war against each other). The Neapolitan army killed Brogni’s wife and daughter, and out of his grief he decided to take holy orders and join the Roman Catholic hierarchy, through which he’s risen to become a Cardinal and put in charge of the church’s campaign against the Jews in the opera’s setting, a city ironically named Constance.

Halévy and Scribe carefully parallel the Christian services in act one and a Jewish Passover seder in act two, led by Eléazar and featuring some vocal writing intended to evoke the spirit of cantorial music (remember that Halévy’s father was a cantor), to show that though the Christians want to persecute the Jews and ultimately kill them all (the Nazi Holocaust was just the latest, and because it was carried out by a modern technological state the most effective, of all too many attempts by European governments and church establishments to rid Europe of its Jews), the two groups are really the same at heart, both worshiping the same God and revering at least part of the same Bible. Eudoxie shows up at Eléazar’s Passover seder to order a valuable piece of jewelry from him, and after she leaves Leopold tries to get Rachel to run away with him but Rachel sensibly points out that there really is no place they can run to get away from the prejudices that threaten to undo their love. Rachel follows Leopold to the palace and essentially gives herself up, announcing to the court that she and Leopold had had sex and therefore all three of them – Rachel, Leopold and Eléazar – should be put to death. Eudoxie persuades Rachel to withdraw her allegations, but Brogni insists that she can only be spared execution if she and Eléazar renounce their faith and become Christians.

Then Eléazar tells Brogni that Rachel isn’t his daughter at all, nor is she a Jew – at least not by birth; she’s a Christian girl whom Eléazar rescued from a Neapolitan massacre and raised as his own. Brogni demands to know who Rachel’s real father was, and Eléazar won’t tell him – of course, by now we have figured out that Rachel is Brogni’s own daughter, who wasn’t killed when her mother was but was taken in by Eléazar. In a chilling ending, effectively staged in this production by Günter Krämer, Eléazar finally tells Brogni that Rachel is his daughter – just as a squad of executioners in red Ku Klux Klan-style outfits burst onto the stage and take Rachel away to kill her. It’s not clear whether Eléazar intended to tell Brogni only once it would be too late to stop Rachel’s execution or he wanted to save her life but simply didn’t deliver the revelation in time – but the opera ends with Rachel on her way to execution, Eléazar likely to follow, Leopold spared and Brogni left bereft because the daughter he searched for in vain all those years was finally killed on his order.

La Juive was premiered in 1835 but it seems like an opera from at least 20 years later: the story is tightly-knit and, within the limits of operatic form, it makes sense. The plot is driven mostly by duets, ensemble scenes and choruses, with only two big arias: Rachel’s “Il va venir” in act two and Eléazar’s “Rachel, quand du Seigneur” in act four, in which he admits to her that she is not his biological daughter. The conductor is one of those people with an indigestible Slavic name, Vjekoslav Sutej (some of those consonants should have haceks on them), but he paces the score effectively and keeps the drama moving. Günter Krämer decided to move the opera’s setting to the 19th century – as Charles joked, Emperor Sigismund is dressed like he could have fought against Napoleon but not against Jan Hus! – and clad Stoyanova as Rachel in a singularly unattractive black dress. The singers generally delivered Halévy’s music effectively even though Shicoff, who otherwise sang well (despite a nondescript costume that made him look like a Jewish accountant – think Ben Kingsley in Schindler’s List – instead of the imposing, robed and bearded patriarch Caruso dressed like in the role), never quite made Eléazar’s bitterness believable.

La Juive attracted quite a few followers in its time, among them Richard Wagner, who responded to the work and hailed it as a masterpiece despite his own anti-Semitic prejudices. He carefully left Halévy out of his denunciations of Jewish composers (the ones he picked on specifically were Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer), just as he left Bellini, whom he admired, out of his denunciations of Italian composers. One wonders how someone as ordinarily perceptive as Wagner could embrace La Juive as a masterpiece and totally miss its point, continuing to believe in all the anti-Jewish prejudice and garbage he expressed in bizarre essays like “Judaism in Music” (1850), but however Wagner resolved the cognitive dissonance between admiring La Juive and clinging to the anti-Semitic prejudices the opera was intended to denounce, he was certainly right about its artistic merits: La Juive is a powerful, gripping opera that deserves to be better known. It also piques my curiosity about Halévy’s other operas, including La Reine de Chypre (“The Queen of Cyprus”), which Wagner wrote a rave review of when it premiered in Paris, and Noë (“Noah,” based on the Biblical story of Noah, the ark and the flood), left unfinished at Halévy’s death and completed by his son-in-law, Carmen composer Georges Bizet.