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Paul Ben-Haim (Paul Frankenberger), Joram, Munich, 8 November 2008
reviewed by Malcolm Miller
Posted 8 April 2009

The long-waited world premiere, in Munich on 8 November 2008, of the Oratorio Joram, by Paul Ben-Haim (1897–1984), some 75 years after its composition, was a historic musical occasion as well as a poignant event to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The splendid performance was warmly received by a large audience at the prestigious Philharmonie Hall, with an excellent cast supported by the Munich Motteten Choir and Munich Symphony Orchestra under the dynamic baton of Hayko Siemens. Happily, the performance, broadcast on German radio, is soon to be released on CD.

The composer considered it his magnum opus and, on the strength of this premiere, it came across as a masterpiece of its time, foreshadowing future developments. The sheer power and quality of the music was all the more poignant for its premonition of the exile, displacement and reintegration which was to face the composer shortly after its composition. Joram was one of the last works composed by Paul Ben-Haim, then Paul Frankenburger, in his native city Munich. He wrote it between 1931 and 1933, after being dismissed as director of Augsburg Opera and completed it weeks before Hitler’s accession to power and his emigration to Palestine, where he became one of Israel’s leading composers. The musical language displays influences of German late Romanticism and Expressionism, of Strauss, Mahler, Orff, and Schoenberg. Yet the admixture is entirely individual and already anticipates, in its softer modal harmony, use of unusual doublings and above all the rhythmic fluidity and translucent textures, some aspects of the distinctive ‘Eastern Mediterranean’ style of Ben-Haim’s later years, particularly of his choral and orchestral works. Its turbulent yet ultimately optimistic libretto is taken from Rudolf Borchardt’s poetic work Das Buch Joram (1907) which, with slight alterations, describes in biblical imagery a suffering Job-like character. The work was performed in part in 1979 in Tel-Aviv, in Hebrew translation. The Munich version, instigated by the Ben-Haim scholar Jehoash Hirshberg, Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University, was the first performance in its entirety, and with the original German text.

At one level the oratorio is Frankenburger’s homage to Bach, notably the Passions, each of the three parts concluding with a large-scale chorus, and the tenor narrator’s recitatives, sung beautifully by Carsten Süss, and main arias interspersed with powerful choral commentaries. Part I comprises eleven movements, the first an arresting orchestral Vorspiel developing a main motif based on a modal Psalm chant, which is further extended in the first chorus. The first aria introduces Joram (‘son of Pinchas of the tribe of Gad’), sung by the baritone Bernd Valentin, in a piquant neo-Baroque style with trumpet obligato redolent of Stravinsky and Copland. Pinchas, his father, was portrayed by the bass Miklós Sebestyén, in a vivid, violent dream-like aria with chorus. The orchestration is vivid with grotesque contrabassoon and plenty of brass textures infused with sinewy chromaticism. The narrative depicts how Joram is married against his father Pinchas’ will to the childless Jezebel, sung resiliently by Carolina Ullrich, their relationship depicted in a duet and chorus, of Weill-like directness and vivid orchestral drama, full of ostinatos for basses, low brass and side drum. Joram takes a trip away from home, and makes Jezebel promise to be faithful. On his trip he is taken captive and sold into slavery in Chaldea. He establishes a warm rapport with his Chaldean master, evoked in the lyrical Arioso and duet enhanced by harp accompaniment. The descriptions of his homeland, related by the tenor and by Joram, and the final chorus (‘Schlusschor’) contains some of the most ravishing music of the oratorio, colourfully scored with soloistic horns, muted brass, melismatic ornamentation in the strings and sustained high string pedal points, bright flutes, all of a richness redolent of Schreker or Berg, yet also foreshadowing the luminescence of Frankenburger’s later Israeli style.

Part II relates how Joram, returning after five years to his home, is lured to his own house by a seductress, who turns out to be Jezebel. Her descent into promiscuity is depicted in the exotic Vorspiel with its Salome-like melodic orientalisms. The tenor's narration and the dialogues between Joram and the mysterious seductress are set in a luscious lyrical style and sensuous orchestral garb redolent of Strauss and Ravel, until Joram’s realisation that his wife is the seductress elicits a shocking orchestral outburst. There ensues a wild orchestral eruption (Zwischenspiel) in the idiom of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which further transforms the oriental theme. It leads to the climax of the oratorio, a potent choral comment on the action in the form of Borchardt’s poem ‘Einem Jungeren in der Joram’ (from his Jugendgedichte, 1912), set to a strident chorale accompanied by cataclysmic orchestral textures, alternating with more solemn organ. There follows a lyrical operatic dialogue, Wagnerian in richness, between Jezebel and Joram, interspersed with neo-Bachian running basses for the narrator. Finally the concluding chorus (Schlusschor des II. Teils) brings the neo-Bachian element to a zenith with brilliant contrapuntal fugues, alternating with lyrical, richly harmonised, modal-chromatic settings, its grandeur located somewhere between Elgar, Strauss and Schoenberg. The performance constituted the world premiere of this chorus, since it was omitted at the 1979 version performed in Tel-Aviv.

The large-scale design and pacing of Joram is symphonic in its sweep and impetus, sustaining tension through the philosophic dénouement of Part III. Here the musical style is the strongest foreshadowing of the balance of impressionism and neo-classicism of Ben-Haim’s later Mediterranean style, evident in its quartal harmonies, and bright and silvery transluscent textures of the angelic responses to Joram’s three Anklänge, arias in which he protests to God. Two are answered by angels, in turn gentle and angry, the first angel’s response featuring an enthralling contrapuntal passage for flute and trumpet. In the third, a choral movement, the angel is transformed into Jezebel, whom Joram then forgives. The work ends in tranquillity, and resolved tension: the final scene depicts, in an intensely stirring, visionary tableau for the two soloists, choir and orchestra, the couple leaving home for Chaldea, with Jezebel expecting their son. The narrative constitutes one of the major changes to the Christian symbolism of Borchardt’s text, where the couple are consumed by fire, their son surviving as a symbol of the Messiah. Frankenburger eschews such as a transfiguration, yet his music here develops a new ethereal and lyrical soundworld, with much solistic writing in the woodwinds, underpinned by atmospheric drone basses. It encourages one to speculate that, even if, in different historical circumstances, Frankenburger had stayed in Germany, he would have developed his idiom and enriched the musical world in radical ways.

As an instance of suppressed music by émigré composers, the premiere of Joram is clearly of historic import; the dramatic and progressive quality of the music adds to its intrinsic significance. It both whets one’s appetite for a UK premiere, and for the appearance of the CD, which promises to add a rich piece to the still incomplete jigsaw of twentieth and 21st-century music.

Malcolm Miller © 2009

A full review appears in Tempo (CUP) – July 2009 issue.

Updated April 8, 2009

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