The Music of Avrom Goldfaden’s 'Shulamis'—The Quintessential Yiddish Operetta

“One can say that I more compiled than composed. But I think that compiling can also be practiced as an art.” So wrote Yiddish theater founder Avrom Goldfaden in a self-appraisal that cannily threaded the needle between romantic artist and colorful impresario. The music he created for a series of operettas—above all, for Shulamis (1880)—provided a template for the astonishing growth of Yiddish popular culture that blossomed within the span of a single generation. Goldfaden drew upon the music of French, Italian, and German opera; upon cantorial, Hasidic, and secular Yiddish folk song; and even upon Torah cantillation, all of which he mixed and matched in a distinctive musical alchemy. But he also composed original melodies, as, for example, that of the most famous song in Shulamis, “Rozhinkes mit mandlen” (Raisins and Almonds).

This seminar will offer a short overview of Goldfaden’s career and the significance of the music and story of Shulamis, and then take a deep dive with close readings of “Rozhinkes” and some of the other musical numbers. We will read their texts, listen to how the music is structured, and see why all that matters to how music and text worked together to achieve the composer’s dramatic aims. We will, of course, identify sources that Goldfaden borrowed and stole. But beyond that, we will demonstrate exactly what he did with those sources, how he adapted them and how his modifications, large and small, yielded the distinctive voice of, yes, a composer of note.

Ronald Robboy is a musician and independent scholar of Yiddish theater music. He was for many years a cellist in the opera and symphony orchestras of San Diego. His own music has been heard at such venues as The Kitchen in New York City, and in 1995 the San Diego Jewish Film Festival commissioned his score to Molly Picon’s silent East and West. Active in the earliest years of the West Coast klezmer revival, Robboy’s work with poet Jerome Rothenberg led to the creation of his experimental Big Jewish Band. As Senior Researcher for the Thomashefsky Project, and working closely with Chana Mlotek z'l at the YIVO Archives, he developed the reconstructions of Yiddish theater scores that conductor Michael Tilson Thomas took to Carnegie Hall. Robboy has written for Encyclopaedia Judaica and Perspectives of New Music, and with YIVO scholar Alyssa Quint is co-editing a critical edition of Goldfaden’s Shulamis for Dusseldorf University Press (forthcoming). His study “Abraham Ellstein’s Film Scores” is appearing in the Polin yearbook scheduled for January 2020.

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