About the Bloch Sacred Service

Though Ernest Bloch was raised in a Jewish household, as a child he was much more interested in music than religion. It was only during the aftermath of the notorious anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair, while he was living in Paris, that he began to think of himself as a Jew. Not long after, he had the first germ of the idea for Avodath Hakodesh, the Sacred Service. He wrote to his friend Edmond Fleg in 1911, “I think that I shall write one day songs to be sung at the synagogue in part by the minister, in part by the faithful. It is really strange . . . this impulse that has chosen me, who all my life have been a stranger to all that is Jewish.” In one of his composition notebooks of the period, he wrote down a six-note motif—G-A-C-B-A-G—which would ultimately become the opening phrase of the Sacred Service and permeate the entire piece, noting that it was for “a possible Jewish service.” It was not until 1929, however, while living in San Francisco, that he was finally able to write this service, when his friend Reuben Rinder, the cantor of Temple Emanu-El commissioned him to set the Union Prayer Book version of the Saturday morning Sabbath liturgy. A generous monetary grant enabled him to spend the next four years in the Swiss Alps, writing, and the work premiered in 1934.

Behind the mundane details of the genesis of the piece, however, lies an intense psychic drama. As Bloch began to reclaim his Jewish heritage, he wrote to Fleg, “an immense sense of pride surged in me. My entire being vibrated; it is a revelation.” His description of an overwhelming moment when the limited human spirit is suddenly lifted into the realm of the infinite has many Biblical parallels—think of Moses on Mount Sinai, or Elijah encountering the “still, small, voice.” It is a moment of spiritual revelation that informs and animates the entire Sacred Service. Again and again, when talking about the piece, Bloch returns to the idea. The lovely passage Associate Conductor Timothy Mount read to us at rehearsal is one example. In it, Bloch describes the way he immersed himself in the Hebrew text for the Sabbath service (remember, he had to learn Hebrew in order to write the piece): “I have absorbed it to the point that it has become mine and as if it were the very expression of my soul. . . . It has become a cosmic poem, a glorification of the laws of the Universe … a dream of stars, of forces … the Primordial Element … before the worlds existed. … It has become a 'private affair' between God and me.”

Perhaps the fullest explanation Bloch gives of this experience of transcendence that he was trying to capture comes in his description of writing the “seu sheorim” (lift up your heads) section in the third movement. This section introduces the highly charged moment when the Torah is taken from its ark to be displayed to the congregation, and the chorus sings “Torah tzivoh,” (the Torah, which God gave through Moses, is the Law of the House of Jacob.) This part of the service is the physical embodiment of Bloch’s spiritual drama—the moment when ordinary people are brought face-to-face with the divine. As such, it was a crucial section for Bloch, and he struggled to get it right. “When I read ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates and be ye lifted up ye everlasting doors and the King of Glory shall come in,’” he wrote, “I could not understand what this was about. It mystified, puzzled and worried me. I was in the Swiss mountains at the time; the day was foggy, the fir trees drooped, the landscape was covered with sadness, I could not see the light. Suddenly a wind came up, the clouds in the sky parted and the sun was over everything. I understood. I felt God was within me at that time in lifting up the clouds.”

While the drama depicted in the Sacred Service is highly spiritual, it is not essentially Jewish, or indeed connected to any specific religion. Time magazine (which back then was actually interested in classical music premieres) pointed this out in a review of the first New York performance: “in spirit his Service was universal, as much for Gentiles as for Jews.” And Bloch himself believed that the work was “more cosmic and universal than Jewish.” He made this explicit in his commentary on the end of the work. He claimed that the final twenty-five measures took him two years to write—and no wonder, considering what he was trying to accomplish: “The last part,” he wrote, “is like an epilogue. Here is the whole realization of humanity, the love of God, when all men will recognize that they are brothers, a fellowship in spirit and united, and on that day the world shall be one.”

So the Sacred Service dramatizes a spiritual journey taken by all people. But for Bloch to express it to his satisfaction, he had to draw deeply from his own Jewish background and heritage. As he put it, “A tree must have its roots deep down in its soil. A composer who says something is not only himself. He is his forefathers! He is his people!”

The Collegiate Chorale will be embarking on this spiritual journey at the historic Central Synagogue, a beautiful Moorish revival building. Their cantor, Angela Warnick Buchdahl, will join us to discuss the background of the piece, and the ways Bloch changed and adapted the traditional Sabbath service for his purposes. Like Bloch, she has the unusually rich perspective on Judaism that comes from starting with a different point of view. Born in Korea to an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Korean Buddhist mother, she is the first Asian-American cantor in North America. She knows first-hand how flexible and accomodating Jewish traditions can be--one year for the bitter herb called for in the Passover seder, her mother used kimchee.
(For a full, and quite moving, account of the writing of the Sacred Service, visit http://www.zamir.org/Notes/NFZ-Spring05.shtml. A fascinating piece by Angela Buchdahl on her background can be found at http://www.shma.com/june03/Angela.htm.)

-- Janet Pascal, Singing Member and Chorale Music Librarian