Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: the Politics of La Juive.(Book Review)(Brief Article)

by Diana R. Hallman Cambridge University Press, 408 pp. $70

Fromental Halevy would surely be disappointed to learn that, two centuries after his birth (1799), he still is known primarily as a Jewish composer. This scholarly study of his work's socio-political context, by a professor of musicology, certainly reinforces the labeling trend. Halevy wrote more operas (and operettas) on non-Jewish subjects, but it is for La Juive that he is known today. Even this author's minute analysis of the score (including all the variants and cuts) leads her to the large social themes summarized in her subtitle.

If anti-Semitism helped drive the opera from the stage in the 1930s, as Hallman contends, then its comeback in recent years seems to be haunted by the Holocaust, in a trend more social than artistic. One sure sign is that most revivals--such as the one currently at the Met--update the action from the 1400s (the Council of Constance) to our own time, trumpeting its continuing relevance.

Halevy's Jewish origins could not be clearer. Born in the first decade of Emancipation, when citizenship for Jews finally became possible in France, he was the son of a Hebrew scholar and grandson of a rabbi. Yet by his twenties, during a tourist visit to the Rome Ghetto he professed total ignorance of the Passover seder rite. Though he did not go so fat" as his brother by converting to Catholicism, Halevy's career and his whole life reflect ambivalence about Judaism. The composer even had two separate families: a Jewish marriage and an extended liaison with a Christian chorus member. Both unions produced offsring.

How much did Halevy suffer as a Jew? Hallman comes up with no clear-cut answer to this ...