Jews in European classical music (composers and performers)

Composers and performers of Jewish origin occupy a considerable place in the History of Western classical music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and baptized in childhood, was one of the great Romantic masters, while the ambivalent figure of musical antisemitism was embodied by Richard Wagner, author of a pamphlet on "Judaism in music." At the turn of the century, Gustav Mahler, who converted in order to accede to the directorship of the Vienna Opera, and Arnold Schoenberg, theorist of twelve-tone composition who returned to Judaism, profoundly transformed musical language. The twentieth century also saw the radiance of great performers such as the violinists Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, and, in the United States, the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. The Jewish presence in this domain, often linked to questions of assimilation, identity, and exile in the face of persecution, remains the subject of rich historiographical debate.

Sources & resources

• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan
• Jewish Virtual Library ↗