Music Treasures of the American Yiddish Theater: Interview with Matt Temkin

On Sunday, December 15, 2013 at 3:00 pm, YIVO will celebrate the work of the most popular composers from the golden age of Yiddish American theater, otherwise known as the “big four of Second Avenue”: Abraham Ellstein, Alexander Olshanetsky, Sholom Secunda, and Joseph Rumshinsky. This concert features the composers’ hits for the Yiddish stage, as well as their classical, cantorial, and American musical compositions, works which are almost never performed, and in some cases, entirely forgotten.

The performers for this concert (part of YIVO's Sidney Krum Young Artists Concert Series) include students and graduates of Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, Mannes, and Queens College, as well as young New York cantors.

Program consultant Matt Temkin was interviewed by Yedies Editor Roberta Newman on November 26.

RN: What will we be listening to at the concert on December 15th?

MT: We're going to be listening to a compilation of classics by Yiddish theater composers, and then some of their concert music, which is very rarely heard.  In certain cases we're also going to hear orchestrations of this music that have not been heard since they were played on WEVD radio since the 1960s at the latest, and more likely the 1940s and 1950s.

Of the four great Yiddish theater composers, both Sholom Secunda and Abraham Ellstein grew up in the United States. Ellstein was actually born in America. As a matter of fact, this year is the fiftieth anniversary of Ellstein’s death, his fiftieth yahrzeit (yortsayt). And both Secunda and Ellstein went to the school that is currently known as Juilliard. Secunda went when it was still the Institute for American Arts and Ellstein went when it was already known as Juilliard. So both of these men were highly trained composers, who were interested in writing art music. And they were always wondering, "Why can't we become Gershwin? Or Irving Berlin? What keeps us locked in as Jewish composers?"

One of the pieces we're going to hear is Secunda's biggest hit, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen," which did actually become a big crossover hit. But it only worked because he wrote it as a Jewish piece. When he tried to write an American piece, he never had as great a success. We're also going to be hearing two of the movements of Secunda "String Quartet in C Minor," which was recorded by the Milken Archive. But I don't think it's ever been performed live. It was originally written for the radio. And it was actually performed on American radio but it was never published. To get the music for this, I had to go to NYU to his archive and get the music and actually create the scores for it because there wasn't an existing score. So we created new parts for it.

From the Abraham Ellstein collection at YIVO, we're going to be playing his piano concerto, the "Negev Concerto." It was written toward the end of his life in the late 1950s, early 1960s. It's a serious concert work for piano and really gives us a different perspective on a composer we think of as having written only light Yiddish theater pieces.

So we're really looking at expanding on what we think about Yiddish theater composers.

RN: Will there be vocalists?

MT: Yes, there will be two singers: Jay O'Brien, a cantorial student at Hebrew Union College, and Maria Dubinsky, who is a cantor here in the city. Jay is going to sing two pieces for us. Abe Ellstein was the musical director for Jan Peerce for many years and so there are a number of published pieces he wrote for Jan Peerce such as "Shema Yisroel." It's really cool to hear a piece that I would say is very rarely performed. It's definitely a concert piece. It's not something you would normally hear in a synagogue service.

Jay is also going to be singing the rarest of the pieces that we're going to be doing-- the only piece not by Secunda or Ellstein--and that's the entr'acte and march to "Shabetai Tsevi" by Alexander Olshanetzky. It can be found in YIVO's WEVD collection. We're going to hear a cut-down orchestration that I've done, using only existing parts. The story of Shabetai Tsevi is the story of a false messiah living in Turkey in the Ottoman Empire. Olshanetzky really plays on themes we think of as oriental music. It's not the sort of stuff we're used to thinking of in connection with him. Though the march did get published as sheet music. But it never really caught on.

RN: Do you have any theories about why this music didn't catch on or why it faded away? Why couldn't these musicians cross over into the mainstream?

MT: I think the best example of why they didn't break into the mainstream is when we hear Secunda's "String Quartet in C Minor." It is nothing but Jewish music. As hard as he is trying to write mint, twentieth-century string quartet music, he keeps getting pulled back into Jewish themes, and while yes, American Broadway music is sort of Jewish in style, this is a little too Jewish and it's not something that we normally expect to hear. I really think that the reason this music was lost is that Jewish communities, synagogues, and federations cut back on the concerts they were giving. This music was usually performed at fundraising concerts, but they cut back on them or they would bring in Israeli musicians. We'd have Perlman, we'd have Pinchas Zukerman playing, but the repertoire they'd be choosing to perform would be different.

I think that live, immigrant radio (where people were trying to hear the music from their homeland) and radio stations that had live orchestras really kept this alive for a while. And the same musicians who worked on live radio would then go and play hotels. Looking at pictures of Ellstein conducting orchestras at hotels, you can't tell what music is on his stand but there is a good chance that this sort of music wouldn't be the majority of what would get played. But at some point in the concert there would be a few pieces of this.

RN: Did you do all the orchestrations for the concert?

MT: Except for a few places where I had to cover for the missing instruments and rewrite a few things, the orchestrations are all original. These are all things that have been found in the YIVO Archives. Or,in the case of the "String Quartet," at NYU. But from the YIVO Archive, we're going to do "Shabetai Tsevi" with strings and piano. It's not its full orchestration but it's much more substantial than just having a piano accompaniment behind the singer.

We have this wonderful piece that we're going to close the concert with, "Mayn shtetele Belz." It's the other Olshanetzky piece and it's from the radio. It's an orchestration. We don't have the woodwind parts but we're using all the existing string parts. The only part that I created was the piano part. The piano part I created is extremely minimalist. It has the original bass line and I took a couple of cues and fills that are in the flute and carved out the part that we don't have and put it in the piano. Everything else is what existed when it was put on radio and it's an amazing duet version of the piece that I think will bring something out that we're not used to hearing.

RN: What drew you to this repertoire?

MT: I played drums for a number of years for Yiddish Folksbiene productions, and I was always wondering, "What are the original orchestrations like?"  And so I went on a search to find out what the original orchestrations looked like. There are a couple of relevant collections at YIVO. I started with the WEVD collection. I went through all 18 boxes and looked at the music. Note that 18 boxes is a small fraction of what the original music library was, but that's what YIVO ended up with. And it was a search for: "What were these musicians looking at? What did these orchestrations look like?"

This music is totally stuff that can still be played. It's just that nobody is out there championing it. I'm just trying to expose people to it so that there can be musicians who can say, "Oh, I want to do something different, something that other people aren't doing. Let me search this out."