Ladislav Mose Blum an audio document of chant in a Prague synagogue.(document)

Jewish culture found itself in a strange position in post-war Czechoslovakia. While in the 1950s the communist authorities made it very clear that they were scarcely less antisemitic than the Nazis, in subsequent decades they did not express this attitude so unambiguously. Not that their basic attitude had changed much. The Jewish community was allowed to function, but it was always under the vigilant surveillance of the state and the party. Yet even under these unfavourable circumstances the members of the community continued to maintain their traditions, among which liturgical music played an important role. This remarkable document published by the Jewish Museum in Prague gives us an idea of the musical side of Jewish religious life at the turn of the 1970s/1980s through a portrait of one important figure.

In this double CD and attached Czech-English booklet, the editor--the musicologist Veronika Seidlova--, presents the cantor Ladislav Blum (1911-1994) as a figure who linked the post-war period with the traditions of synagogal chant of the first half of the 20th century. He was born in Eastern Slovakia into a family in which the art and repertoire of the chazonus, i.e. liturgical chant, had been handed down from generation to generation, and his teacher was his uncle Adolf Rothstein. This family tradition clashed with the temptations of modernity, of course, and at secondary school Blum became enchanted with jazz, playing it himself on the piano. Later, when he was studying law in Prague, he was attracted mainly to opera. He then studied classical singing in Budapest and it is precisely the combination of classical technique with a knowledge of the cantor tradition that was the foundation of his exceptional qualities as a singer. It was an irony of fate that he obtained his first role in an opera in 1945 in Terezin, where he had been sent after internment in a labour camp in Seredi in Slovakia. After the war he and his wife settled in Bohemia and he sang for a series of opera companies, the Vit Nejedly Army Arts Choir, and the State Song and Dance Ensemble before becoming a member of the Prague Symphony Orchestra Male Choir towards the end of his career. In 1963 Ladislav Blum became second cantor at the synagogue in Jeruzalemska Street in Prague, and four years later succeeded Alexandr Singer in the post of senior cantor, which he held until the end of his life. For social and historical reasons the distinction between orthodox and liberal Jews, each with their own synagogue, had lapsed in Prague and the groups had combined. The synagogue where Blum worked was equipped with organ to accompany the services, which was the typical mark of reformed, more liberal congregations in contrast to the orthodox tradition that allowed only a male choir apart from the soloists. This organ, played by Josef Ksica, accompanies Ladislav Blum on this newly published ...