Passover Psalm is a choral-orchestral work for soprano, mixed chorus (SATB), orchestra and organ by composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. It was composed in 1941 from a commission of Jacob Sonderling, who led the Society for Jewish Culture in Los Angeles. Passover Psalm and Prayer were Korngold's only non-secular compositions.[1]
Sonderling wrote the Haggadah texts that Korngold adapted, intended for Passover.[citation needed]Passover Psalm was one of five pieces commissioned by Sonderling from émigré composers fleeing The Holocaust.[2]
Korngold conducted the first performance of the work on 12 April 1941.[3] In 2003, Swiss conductor Marcello Viotti conducted a live version of this piece with the Munich Radio Orchestra and with soloist voice Emily Magee, that was included successively in some anthology albums, mostly of religious music and Korngold compilations.
The work
The structure and musicality of the work resembles Korngold's previous orchestral works that were in a line between the melancholic, the religious and the cinematic, and that will influence Korngold himself to do more in his successive works, especially the ones based on the soundtracks of the movies he composed. (One notable example is the choral work Tomorrow, that he will compose the year after this composition, and that he will base on his soundtrack for the movie The Constant Nymph.) The composition, solemn and with clear influence from Mahler, Brahms and Bruckner, calls also for a piano and an organ during the gargantuan finale minutes, that close the whole in a bang, with the hope of peace, love and harmony, especially in a period full of desperation, hope and confusion associated with World War II.
Lyrics
The work's lyrics were arranged by Jacob Sonderling. The piece begins:
Let us praise, let us honour, Let us sing praise to him, to him, who did wonders for our fathers and us, their children.
References
↑ Carroll, Brendan G. (1997). The last prodigy: a biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Internet Archive. Portland, Or.: Amadeus Press. ISBN978-1-57467-029-5. Around this time, he was asked by the chief rabbi in Los Angeles, Dr. Jacob Sonderling, to compose music for liturgical use. Although Korngold was not a practicing Jew, he agreed to consider some Hebrew texts. The result was A Passover Psalm and Prayer, accorded Opus 30 and 32 respectively. A Passover Psalm was later dedicated "To the Society of the Friends of Music, Vienna" for a concert in 1951. These two works are the only nonsecular compositions written by Korngold, who did not profess any strong religious beliefs. He placed both works together with his Shakespearean Lieder in a box marked "My last four—or more optimistically—my latest four works. For my dear parents on their Golden Wedding Anniversary, Hollywood, 27 September 1941."
↑ Friedmann, Jonathan L. (2016). "Was Max Steiner a Jew?". Journal of Film Music. 9 (1–2): 94–106. doi:10.1558/jfm.20942. ISSN1758-860X. Jacob Sonderling, a progressive and artistic-minded German-born rabbi with Hollywood connections, commissioned five such pieces for his Society for Jewish Culture–Fairfax Temple: Arnold Schoenberg's setting of Kol Nidrei (1938), a testament to the composer's embrace of a political, though not religious, Jewish identity; Ernst Toch's Cantata of the Bitter Herbs (1938), a tribute to his mother who had passed away in Vienna; Erich Korngold's Passover Psalm (1941) and Prayer (1941), responses to the increasingly desperate situation of European Jewry; and Eric Zeisl's Requiem Ebraico (1945), considered the first serious musical response to the Holocaust.
↑ Haas, M. (2023). Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler. Yale University Press. p.299. ISBN9780300266504.
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