After decades of making Westernness a duty (rather than identity), composers in Israel had lost the capability, and eventually the motivation, to relativise art music in Israel through the epistemic marginality of Jewish diasporism and ethnography. Indeed, it took the arrival of someone like Andre Hajdu to render Eastern European Jewish music ethnic in his 1970 Ludus Paschalis, where Talmudic excerpts and Hebrew psalmody were gradually eclipsed and eventually stained by the singing of Christian children performing a mock Easter play. Ludus Paschalis bluntly disregarded the modernist separation of art from ethnography (as much as it scorned the Zionist vilification of Jewish diasporism) and deemed the ethnicity of the Ashkenazi hegemony in Israel relational to those ethnic groups it placed on lower socio-ethnic rungs (which is also why it caused such a public kerfuffle).Footnote 1 But all this did not mean that composers who reproduced the ideological apparatus of national Hebrew culture went extinct. They were not, and this article studies at least one such painful instance in which the aesthetically violent critique of Arik Shapira (1943-2015) was nonetheless caught in a national(ist) inertia, even though he was keenly aware of the ideological ills and indoctrinations of the Zionist project.
Shapira’s vehement opposition to this ideological apparatus only emphasised its tropes, often through the sheer abundance of blunt inversions. In his 1982/2003 opera Aqedah (Binding), Shapira sought to upend the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) by setting it side by side with the banishment of Ishmael (Genesis 21). In so doing, he highlighted the intricate network of correspondences between these two stories while restoring balance to Jewish victimhood, which more often than not excluded Ishmael in favour of politically actualising the binding, and by metonymy the many Isaacs of the present, as recoded in Hayim Gouri’s 1960 poem ‘Heritage’ (‘Isaac, as the story goes, was not/sacrificed. He lived for many years, saw/what pleasure had to offer, until his eyesight dimmed. // But he bequeathed that hour to his/offspring. They are born with a knife in their hearts’).Footnote 2 Yet to reflect the brutality embedded in these stories (nationally appropriated or not), Shapira disintegrated the text into syllables to which he assigned mostly even durations and inert pitches that resulted in a deliberately unemotional, stringent reportage whose violent conveyance equalled its desemanticisation. Yet despite his best intentions, Shapira was ensnared in a discursive space defined by these national topoi, and so his resistance often amounted to no more than scratching the ideological cage from within. In tandem, what further fuelled his zeal was his resistance to post–Second World War avant-garde, about which he knew only indirectly and partially; and this is exactly why he could essentialise it to mean inherent inhumaneness leading (inevitably) to Nazism.
These were the wounds national Hebrew culture inflected on one individual (Shapira), who was nevertheless audacious enough to point to the possible liberation of music from the nationalisation of religion and from the territorialisation of culture.
Binding Oneself
Born in Kibbutz Afikim in 1943, Shapira began his academic studies as a philosophy major at Tel Aviv University (1962–65), to which he added a composition major a year later, studying with Ödön Pártos (1963–68).Footnote 3 Three years from his graduation, however, Shapira’s 1971 Eight Substitutes for guitar disclosed very few traces of his academic pedigree; his music signalled growing compositional attention to ‘soft contrasts’ (‘artificial light surrounded by sunlight … gleaming white set against somewhat murky white’, in his own words),Footnote 4 while the bigger dramas in Israeli and Jewish histories would constitute his thematics – be they Zionism, the Holocaust, the 1982 Lebanon War or Jewish settlements in the West Bank. As a composition major in the 1960s, Shapira argued, his curriculum lacked a fundamental critical aspect; it was missing the acute disclaimer that compositional approaches from Bach to Ravel were mere techniques ‘representing long gone aesthetics’, and as much as they are vital for craftsmanship, they were ill-suited to the problems posed by contemporary composition. ‘Orchestration is composition’, he asserted, and so any thorough and meticulous study of a given orchestral style would inescapably penetrate one’s artistic predilections and lead one to a stylistic displacement of the self (‘imagine … composers younger than myself who sound like bastards of Debussy and Ravel’, he added).Footnote 5 Shapira’s inevitable conclusion was that academic musical education, then and now, has been ignoring current aesthetic and social problems; this recognition had been consolidating in his work into a high artistic principle already during his undergraduate studies, as had his need to negate his teachers’ compositional approaches.
Shapira’s zealous belligerence concerned almost everyone: his predecessors in Palestine/Israel, his contemporaries, the post–Second World War European avant-garde, Hebrew nationalism, the Occupied Territories, Jewish settlements, Jewish ethnocracy, tonality, compositional retreats into the ivory tower and mainly Germanness – which he perceived unambiguously and monolithically as a murderous culture whose inevitable outcome was the Jewish Holocaust. This was a tall and over-fatiguing order to live by. It emerged immediately after Shapira’s graduation, when he began questioning his musical patrimonies and subsequent choices, and it was rationalised (in hindsight) when circumstances prevented him from furthering his training at Julliard. With no studies abroad, the avant-garde of the 1950s and’60s, and more accurately what Shapira could have known about it through the few recordings and even fewer scores available, served as his punctum archimedis, even if in the negative sense.Footnote 6
But how can one resist, let alone seek, moral alternatives to something one has never been part of? Nothing in Shapira’s autobiography addresses the alternatives formulated by Henze, Zimmermann, Nono, Lachenmann, Kagel or Berio (to mention but a few); neither their music nor their texts. Instead, Shapira’s ‘moral imperative’ to resist European music in general and the avant-garde in particular had been motivated by obsessively reading modern German history since his teens (books like The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, which appeared in Hebrew in 1954 and 1961, respectively). These histories were to frame his entire biography and oeuvre–from familial stories on friends and family who had perished in the Holocaust, through interaction with survivors in Israel, to that of the 1961 Eichmann trial; and they were academically grounded in 1962 when Shapira entered Tel Aviv University as a philosophy major, seeking to study Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Brentano and others, hoping to decipher the German collective psyche.Footnote 7
To the extent that Shapira’s understanding of the post–Second World War avant-garde relied partly on predispositions rather than the intricate pan-serial compositional aesthetics that wrestled with the immediate past, while the German philosophies he had been studying consolidated into a teleological inevitability leading to inhumanity, his understanding of art music in Israel was no less prejudiced. Emigrant composers who arrived in British Palestine in the 1930s were usually dismissed by him as being dislocated Europeans whose imports denied them of any expression pertinent to the here and now (and here, too, his decisiveness exempted him from discussing particular compositional practices or texts written by his contemporaries and predecessors), even if his socialist upbringing located him as culturally equidistant from both Arab and Jewish musics.Footnote 8 Insulated from cultural ecosystems outside Israel, Shapira opted for an uncompromising, forthright insistence on provincialism that for him meant laconicism, ugliness, stiffness, guttural linguistic dryness and non-euphonous designs whose point of departure was the sound itself.Footnote 9 All this raised the question of whether negation and oppositionality were sufficient to write music, and particularly under such severe constraints of an ensnared self.
Shapira supplied around 70 answers to that question (the number of his opuses), with one of the first being the 1978 Missa Viva for symphonic orchestra and an amplified rock ensemble (consisting of two electric guitars, two bass guitars, percussion and electric piano, in addition to an amplified harpsichord with a volume pedal). These were five minutes of brilliantly intense symphonic music for someone self-besieged by countless eschewals and abstentions. But to understand the assemblage that is Missa Viva, one has to go through its glossary, which lists the ready-mades Shapira had employed in this work; these modules vary in length from one to six measures (depending on the instrumentation), while their ordering remains flexible. As such, they are neither melodies nor harmonic progressions, but sonic schemes or impersonal grooves made of either clusters or melodic and rhythmic fillers destined to be consumed in the sea of other simultaneously playing ready-mades, unless an audibly conspicuous ready-made flickers through this nervous symphonic tumult. Some ready-mades feature accelerations, others use microtones (especially in the strings and brasses, which also consist of repeated forte-piano at each cluster to generate an abrupt and accelerated acoustic decay); several ready-mades seem to be temporally displaced variants of the version preceding them in the glossary, while most are short, indistinctive and demonstrably unexceptional fragments – unless a certain measure is repeated enough times to transition into an ostinato or a module.
These highly strung and laconic ready-mades adjoin into what often sounds like a dry, indeterminate and careless hocketing, while their non-teleological unfolding is interrupted only by what is most likely the single premeditated moment in the work – the entrance of the rhythm section (marked ‘percussion B’ in the score), which signals the climax right at the two-thirds mark (see Example 1). Excluding this atypical build-up, all other parts (including the electric and bass guitars) were drawn on the inventory given in the glossary. The difference was in the actual assemblage of these ready-mades in each and every bar, an assemblage whose unfolding had no syntagmatic aspirations, which is why any resemblance to aleatoric or minimalist strands was at best coincidental.
Example 1: Arik Shapira, Missa Viva (1978) for orchestra and rock group, eighth sheet (Arik Shapira Collection, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem (henceforth, NLI), MUS 307 A66).
Putting together the ready-mades of Missa Viva resulted in a counterpoint in which the more conspicuously audible modules stuck out due to their timbre, dynamic or articulation, while the rest formed the white noise whose softer pulsations cemented the whole setting. And so other than the premediated entrance of the rhythm section in Example 1, the collective, amassed effect of the different segments of Missa Viva appears to be mostly unintended, thereby sabotaging any expectancy of the more audibly noticeable ready-mades whose potential ostinato is also continuously interfered. As such, development of these thematic materials (or ready-mades) was not in the (composer’s) cards, and this alone was an insult to every modernist who valued such quality, composers and concertgoers alike; in lieu of development, Shapira offered the nervousness of objects partly subjected to chance, while fuelling his defiance from the negative attention he calculatingly garnered.
Soon enough, this defiance would take violent political forms in incidental music for fringe theatres, performance art, installations, electronic music and combinations thereof. One such work was the 1982 opera Aqedah (Binding), commissioned from Shapira and Motti Mizrachi (an avant-garde performance artist with whom Shapira had collaborated on other projects and installations previously) by the Israel Festival and the Jerusalem Theatre. The opera was written, sets and costumed were designed, yet it never made it to the stage. In 1984, Mizrachi presented his installations and sketches for Aqedah at the Sara Levi Gallery in Tel Aviv, showcasing some of the subversiveness the two could have produced together had there been proper funding for their (yet-to-be-performed) opera. Among the items presented were costumes, mise-en-scènes, miniature designs and a sketch for an apocalyptic film (which was never shot) in which Jerusalem is submerged in water.
Shapira and Mizrachi made an explosive power couple, and the unperformed opera supplied the perfect buzz for an artistic elite (in which composers were always a minority) to blame the state for not supporting a work that revisited its very myths. Artist and critic Raffi Lavie lamented that no institution was willing to take a worthwhile risk and fund Shapira and Mizrachi’s audacious opera, ‘even if it turns out to be a fiasco’. Lavie read Mizrachi’s mise-en-scènes as works of art by themselves; he described them as the Bible ‘in Technicolor’, as a Zionist epos in a ‘Yellow Submarine’, as ‘Disneyland Judaism’ and as the ‘Pillar of Fire’ (referring to the 1981 Israel Broadcast Authority’s documentary series on the history of Zionism) but with fireworks. These powerful and often painful sketches, he added, ‘were disguised as lollipops while exploiting showbiz cliches’.Footnote 10
Painter Ilan Nahshon read Mizrachi’s (‘overworn’) imagery as a critique voiced through the artist’s non-Ashkenazi (read: non-privileged) origins (born in south Tel Aviv, in 1946, to a family of Iraqi emigrants, Mizrachi contracted polio during his childhood and remained handicapped for the rest of his life; he was doubly disabled – socially, given his ethnicity, and physically). Mizrachi, Nahshon wrote,
is a cultural eunuch, who, separated from his culture, has turned into a sad clown. He does not bite, but exposes the disability society has inflicted upon him, and sees it as part of the disability society has inflicted upon itself.
In lieu of ‘pastoral landscapes of the Land of Israel or waxing nostalgic on olive trees’, Mizrachi’s exhibition, ‘polished and oversaturated with imagery, is a colorful theatrical story whose theme is stupidity’. It is where one can witness the ‘screwups’ (read: oppressed) of the neighbourhood in south Tel Aviv in which Mizrachi was born, Nahshon concluded, ‘or the very screwups of the Israeli dream. We are all bound.’Footnote 11
Zionist Ready-mades
Still, what was this opera all about? Its first and second movements set two adjacent texts from Genesis: the birth of Isaac followed by the banishment of Ishmael and Hagar (21:1–20), and the binding of Isaac (22:3–19). Parallel configurations and potential actualisations were undoubtedly premeditated; as Robert Alter writes, each of Abraham’s sons is threatened with death in the wilderness, ‘one in the presence of his mother, the other in the presence (and by the hand) of his father. In each case the angel intervenes at the critical moment, referring to the son as na’ar, “lad”. At the centre of the story, Abraham’s hand holds the knife, Hagar is enjoined to “hold her hand” (the literal meaning of the Hebrew) on the lad.’ And each of the sons ‘is promised to become progenitor of a great people’, thereby averting the threat to Abraham’s continuity.Footnote 12 Since the 1940s, the biblical aqedah (binding) has become a focal trope in Zionist thought and Hebrew letters, gaining its prominence, paradoxically, due to its double semantic potential, namely, the genocide of European Jews in the Holocaust and the modern ethos of national sacrifice and martyrdom, including unavoidable juxtapositions thereof or variants that rendered the biblical aqedah the Jewish equivalent of the Crucifixion. Shapira and Mizrachi were therefore joining a long and dense genealogy that challenged Hebrew culture’s ‘own complacent acceptance of one of monotheism’s foundational myths – filial sacrifice’.Footnote 13 In tandem, as Yael Feldman writes, ‘the biblical plight (and flight) of Ishmael and Hagar in Genesis have always exerted a certain moral pressure on Zionist consciousness’, animating the dichotomy of ‘br/other (brother vs. other)’ as Ishmael’s descendants were palpably personified in the real world and around new Isaacs, real and literary.Footnote 14
But then Aqedah (the opera) was never produced, due to fiscal constraints that were inseparable from the growing antagonism Shapira had been garnering through his music and literally through his compositional attitude. By 2003, however, after several production attempts had failed, he resorted to electronically producing the 1982 score (which remains in his handwriting),Footnote 15 recording each vocal part individually while violently flattening the political-theological nuances of these mythically explosive texts. Indeed, notwithstanding his oppositionality or the numerous texts (modern midrashim, in fact) that had been penned by authors and poets in the Jewish community of Palestine and the state of Israel, Shapira opted for the original biblical text (in Hebrew), which he must have seen as advantageous given its impassive economy and subsequent potential for emotional laconicism.
But in his inversion of bibliocentrism (the selective appropriation of biblical texts that re-enacted Hebrew sovereignty through the Hebrew language, the single surviving linguistic component of ancient Jewish independence), Shapira remained close to the Hebrewist discourse that gave it life, and he got closer than he might have wanted to, including to what is most likely an inadvertent reproduction of male aggression, beginning with his own. As ‘a child of Zionism’,Footnote 16 as he once put it, he had indeed been directly propelled by the most immediate Zionist symbols, particularly Songs of the Land of Israel (Shirei Eretz Yisrael) and national texts of various genres (from political speeches to legal transcriptions) that were often employed in his music as found musical objects. As ready-mades.
From a handwritten synopsis of the opera we learn how costly its production would have been: in addition to the soloists, choir and orchestra, it featured live electronics, statists, dancers (some of them on roller skates), 25 children improvising on recorders in the orchestra pit, different curtains at the centre of the stage on which various imagery were to be projected, a six-metre-in-diameter well-like structure that rises to the ceiling, a moving altar, movable pyramid-shaped props, and a ram-shaped sculpture, in addition to set designs and costumes by Mizrachi.Footnote 17 But the 2003 electronic production of Aqedah, put together using a relatively low-tech multi-track, preserved the opera’s musical qualities,Footnote 18 particularly in the first two movements, in which the singers do not act. Shapira encoded their immobility and depersonalisation in the music itself, as shown in Example 2, the setting of Genesis 21:10 (‘And she [Sara] said to Abraham, “Drive out this slavegirl and her son, for the slavegirl’s son shall not inherit with my son, with Isaac”’). Example 2 also displays the harmonic precis of the entire movement – a nine-note aggregate consisting of three 016 cells: C-F♯-B and F-B♭-E in the altos and tenors’ parts, respectively, in addition to another, less stationary 016 cell in the brass. The aridness, stiffness and emotional flatness of this setting, complemented by a deliberately unstylish (pesky, even) rhythmic homogeneity, was staggering. Not only did it come at the expense of textual intelligibility, but it was further pushed to the extremes of impersonality by the choice to record the vocal parts separately,Footnote 19 thereby rendering the choral singing an artificial joining – and to filter the entire ensemble (choir and brass) through a vocoder.
Example 2: Arik Shapira, Aqedah (1982), I, bars 120–135 (Arik Shapira Collection, NLI, MUS 307 A11) (text: ‘And she [Sara] said to Abraham, “Drive out this slavegirl and her son, for the slavegirl’s son shall not inherit with my son, with Isaac”’; Genesis 21:10).
Only in the last five verses of this movement (Genesis 21:16–20), while the stasis of the preceding verses is kept unchanged (notwithstanding slight variants), does Shapira set fragments from the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) and graft them onto the concluding verses of Genesis 21, thereby defying the linearity of the biblical story and converting the dichotomy of br/other into an overlapping, continuous present. Example 3 shows one instance of this simultaneity in the first movement, wherein the choral part (‘And God opened her [Hagar’s] eyes and she saw a well of water’; Genesis 21:19) is juxtaposed with three soloists performing part of Genesis 22:2 (‘your only one, whom you love, Isaac’). While the texture here grows thicker, its sonic schemes are unchanged compared with the opening; and yet the grafted fragment from Genesis 22:2 introduces unmistakably dissimilar vocal delivery, namely, forthright operatic singing with expressive dynamic markings that stand in stark contrast to the choir and accompanying ensemble. Combined, the machine-like, dispassionate reportage of the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael and the operatic delivery of excerpts from the binding of Isaac mutually highlight their differences. Notwithstanding their shared intervallic content, both layers are exposed as ready-mades whose recontextualisation stages both children of Abraham as bound. Was it a coincidence that the title of this opera (Aqedah) was left without an object? And in other words, whose aqedah was it?
Example 3: Arik Shapira, Aqedah, I, bars 274–280 (Arik Shapira Collection, NLI, MUS 307 A11) (texts: [soloists] ‘your only one, whom you love, Isaac’; Genesis 22:2; [choir] ‘And God opened her [Hagar’s] eyes and she saw a well of water’; Genesis 21:19).
The assemblage of the first movement discloses the qualities of the second as far as its ready-mades, the soloists’ periodic signals and the intervallic properties governing the entire movement are concerned. But despite having rendered equivalent the two aqedahs, the setting of Isaac’s binding is distinctly thornier and perturbed given the continuous interruptions embedded in it, interruptions that among other things feature precursory references to the third movement, which suggests yet another binding. The inertia of the last five verses of the first movement becomes evident in the second, with the difference that the previous vocal grafting of textual fragments now highlights selected words from the same verses performed by the choir. The words Shapira chose to underscore were ‘Abraham’, ‘Isaac’, or dramatic signifiers like ‘makom’ (place) and ‘olah’ (offering), yet the interchangeability of words and periodic signals rendered the different melodic formulae more dominant, thereby converting them into ready-mades. Shapira designed these found musical objects as coordinates in a textual topography reflective of the way he read (and heard) the binding of Isaac.
Distinct from the staggeringly uniform reportage that characterised most of the first movement, the topography of the second not only featured interjections by three operatic soloists (see Example 4), but also tilted the beginnings of several verses with violent attaccas that were auditorily and technically familiar from the layout of some ready-mades in Missa Viva (Example 4, bars 353–354).Footnote 20 As Example 4 shows, the opening of Genesis 22:6 is inundated with several of these ready-mades in the ensemble in addition to periodic signals that are performed by the three soloists on words like ‘Abraham’ (bars 354–355) or ‘Isaac’ (bar 363). These signals recur throughout the movement, but not always while setting the same words: a close variant of ‘Abraham’ (bars 354–355) is used later to set the word ‘God’ (mm. 405–406), and elsewhere the periodic signal of ‘Isaac’ is extended melodically to set the word ‘Abraham’ (bars 342–343). The topography of Shapira’s setting, to put it another way, lacks congruence between the melodic motif and the word it sets, thus keeping periodic signals and their signifieds nervously unpredictable.
Example 4: Arik Shapira, Aqedah, II, bars 353–364 (Arik Shapira Collection, National Library of Israel, MUS 307 A11, act II, manuscript) (text: ‘And Abraham took the wood for the offering and put it on Isaac his son’; Genesis 22:6).
Then, after most of the drama has unfolded, Shapira tries to flagrantly flatten God’s commending and rewarding of Abraham for having been willing to carry the sacrifice through. The setting of Genesis 22:15–16 (‘And the LORD’s messenger called out to Abraham once again from the heavens; and He said, “By My own Self I swear, declares the LORD, that because you have done this thing and have not held back your son, your only one”’) at once fades out while thinning out the orchestral and vocal texture. But unlike the dozens of pauses concluding every verse up to this point (including in the first movement), Shapira writes two open bars (each with a fermata) in which ‘random notes are played, as if instruments are tuned before a concert’.Footnote 21 With this he manages to ignore the second angelic address (which had been the source of numerous commentaries, some of which suggest that Abraham had already killed Isaac),Footnote 22 as well as God’s first promise of a future of military triumph (‘and your seed shall take hold of its enemies’ gate’, Genesis 22:17) and other blessings that pick up the language of several earlier addresses (Genesis 12:3; 13:16; 15:5) but are now reinterpreted as a consequence of the aqedah.Footnote 23 Shapira inserts four more indeterminate interjections of this kind with which he splices God’s promises of fertility and military victory (Genesis 22:16–18), interpolating operatic ready-mades that garble the syntagmatic sequence while indifferently sidelining God’s blessings. By the last verse, which says nothing about Isaac’s whereabouts (‘And Abraham returned to his lads, and they rose and went together to Beersheba, and Abraham dwelled in Beersheba’; Genesis 22:19), Shapira extends his anticlimax and reverts to the reportage of the first movement, reminding us (again) that there are two aqedahs.
But there was a third.Footnote 24 Its precursors were implanted as ready-mades in Example 4 (see the flute, oboe, viola and synthesiser parts), yet rather than stylistic markers, these ready-mades were citations in the form of contrapuntal interruptions, originating in Shapira’s 1977 Gideon Kleins Marterstraße (see Example 5). These included the theme of Beethoven’s ‘Arietta’ (from op. 111; see the piano part in Example 5) and ‘O große Lieb’ from Bach’s St. John Passion (Example 5, rehearsal mark A). The third movement of Aqedah quotes Shapira’s Gideon Kleins Marterstraße in its entirety, save slight touch-ups and the reorchestrating of the soloists’ parts in the 1977 version for a choir. Still, the quotation from Bach set a new text; instead of ‘O große Lieb, o Lieb ohn alle Maße/die dich gebracht auf diese Marterstraße!’ (‘O greater love, O love beyond all measure/that brought you to this road of torture!’), Shapira wrote:’Gideon Klein spiel zech off ein Piano/far Gideon Klein diese Marterstrasse’ (‘Gideon Klein plays on the piano/for Gideon Klein on the street of martyrs’).
Example 5: Arik Shapira, Gideon Kleins Marterstraße (1977) for violin, bass clarinet, piano and voice, opening (Arik Shapira Collection, NLI, MUS 307 A9, manuscript).
Written in a Yiddishised German (which is italicised above), this syntactically interrupted text does more than just send us to ‘diese Marterstraße’, which in the St. John Passion refers to both ‘the actual Via Dolorosa through Jerusalem, and the metaphorical pathway or Straße through the Passion narrative’.Footnote 25 In Shapira’s rendition, the nominalised adjective ‘Klein’ has ‘Gideon Klein’ resonate as an antonym to ‘O große Lieb’. Under the operatic purview of Aqedah, ‘Gideon Klein’ becomes not only the metonymic bound but also the allegorically crucified, an allusion already found in the biblical binding of Isaac in Genesis 22:6 (‘And Abraham took the wood for the offering and put it on Isaac’), which the Midrash relates to a Roman method of execution that was sometimes used on Jewish martyrs (‘It is like a person who carries his cross on his own shoulder’; Bereshit Raba 56:3).Footnote 26
Example 6: Arik Shapira, Aqedah, III, bars 724–730 (Arik Shapira Collection, NLI, MUS 307 A11) (text: ‘To the land! And if necessary – even in their death’).
Shapira’s Yiddishised German is also emblematic of other disruptions, since the very same ready-mades cited in the second movement of Aqedah (Example 4) – the ones that sent us to the 1977 Gideon Kleins Marterstraße – are the contrapuntal interruptions that originally discolour Beethoven’s ‘Arietta’. Through these found objects – Bach, Beethoven, Gideon Klein, Theresienstadt and, eventually, Auschwitz and Fürstengrube (where Klein was shot dead on a forced march in 1945) – Shapira stages his manifestly dogmatic understanding of Germanness. What began with the discovery of German books in his father’s attic and the piecing together of Holocaust microhistories of survivors and victims from family photos, what made him a compulsive reader of German history during his teenage years and in turn kindled his interest in German philosophy, resulted in a brutal historical reduction. The Nazis were mere ruthless gangsters, he maintained, who dared to express what had been embedded in German culture and history, which Shapira saw as inherently murderous. Works addressing the Holocaust, according to (t)his logic, could not contain any original music but must use found objects like the language of the oppressors (German) and that of their victims (Yiddish), as well as ‘chorales by Bach, accompaniment formulae by Schubert, excerpts from Beethoven, leitmotifs from Wagner’s monstrous operas, etc. The material must come from there, from the culture of the hangmen.’ Shapira could only comment on these ready-mades through distortion, degrading and abuse.Footnote 27
Still, the third movement has not finished. Its second part bursts with non-syntactic sequences of nationalist buzzwords. More ready-mades. Repurposed, calculatingly decontextualised and poorly stitched (the manifestations of a true collage), all nouns are rendered functionless (‘Vision. Redemption. Kibbutz. Instrument. Ethos. Humanity. Prophets. Immigrants. Partnership. Diasporas. Ktuvim. Messiah. Land of Purgatory…’).Footnote 28 Shapira claimed to have culled this part of the libretto part from Ben-Gurion’s speeches, but given his trademark laconicism such concatenations could have been excerpted from hundreds of Zionist texts, and not necessarily by Ben-Gurion. Except for one phrase. And it through this partly cited sentence that we can trace his source: ‘Artsa! Ve’eem na’hoots gam bemotam’ (‘To the land! And if necessary – even in their death’; see Example 6).
While the imperative ‘artsa!’ literally means ‘to the land’, Zionist grammar swathed this conjugation with the unavoidability of the national call to immigrate – to make aliyah, to ascend. Decontextualised, this excerpt reads as if prospective immigrants should settle in the national soil even at the price of their death; but put back in its original setting, this snippet would allow us to hear what Shapira had no patience elaborating (and which cost him in intelligibility, especially among outsiders): ‘With his immigration to the land of Israel, taking root in the land, and working the soil of the homeland, the New Jew saw his physical and spiritual rebirth’, Ben-Gurion wrote:
here, the pioneering hammer found its historic workshop, and a new era has begun in the history of the land and the people; an era in which Jews shape their own destiny and the destiny of their nation, employing all their strength, their physical and spiritual toil, in the very substance of life, and if necessary – even in their death.Footnote 29
Taken from the introduction to the first volume of G’vilei Esh (Parchments of Fire) – a state-funded anthology of letters, diaries, poems, stories, travelogues, theoretical and scientific texts, paintings, sculptures and musical works by fallen soldiers of the 1948 War – G’vilei Esh was ‘rooted in Ben-Gurion’s view that the community of the dead, as a symbolic entity, was of unique educational worth for inculcations of the values’ supporting the national building enterprise, as Udi Lebel notes. For Ben-Gurion, he writes, ‘the War’s dead were members of a spiritual elite who, by their deaths, had joined a select group, the carriers of ideologically edifying qualities of the first order’.Footnote 30
These were the same dead Shapira sought to render bound, and hence instrumental, using a non-syntactic and purposely unpolished stitching in addition to incessant notated acoustic splicing. But laconicism was not just the lot of this textual mélange; each sequence of nouns launched ready-mades in the operatic ensemble, including written and unwritten riffs on the distorted electric guitar, bass guitar and synthesiser that stylistically at least complement the male rock singer whose very vocal delivery defamiliarises the text (Example 6). Still, this would-be (but-too-impatient-to-be) rock ballad manages to make some of its irregular and occasionally stammering phrases less bumpy, while its longer unisonal riffs for voice and distorted electric guitar eventually cement some of Shapira’s non-syntactic sequences. But what punctuates this section’s form is its syntactically garbled periodic signal (a refrain would be too assuming a term here): ‘Artsa! ve’eem na’hoots gam bemotam’ (Example 6). Shapira must have hoped that, if this were ever performed live, insiders would cringe with each such repetition.
The same devices that animate the third movement govern the peroration of Aqedah in an episode whose metonymic bound now featured the living, including the composer himself – an excess of snippets of Zionist folk songs or various musics turned into Zionist ‘folk songs’ by dint of contrafacta. Both unfold simultaneously. But the vocal interjections are particularly unsettling; they span two bars at each appearance and consist of a (non-notated) 12-part singing of 12 different songs, all going at once. Much in the way of the other instrumental fragments that pulsate through the ensemble, some are more sonically conspicuous than others, while most are drowned in a sea of calculated splices meant to function as repositories of waste. Zionist waste. It would therefore defeat the purpose to identify these songs here, as these everyday objects of the ideological apparatus were not intended to function individually. At best they could flicker fleetingly. If at all.
As soon as identifiable quotations from Bach and Beethoven are replaced with garbled fragments from Ben-Gurion’s texts, in the middle of the third movement, and followed by the accumulated waste of Zionist objects of indoctrination, in the conclusion, Aqedah moves to mark the unmediated present and its metonymic bound. This is also the moment it turns inwards, and peripheral, addressing insiders (and only insiders) who could untangle at least some of these laconicisms turned into insults. But there was something else to this transition, something that visibly marked Shapira’s oppositional confines. Aqedah’s trajectory began with two biblical scenes of near-infanticide that were set in a linguistic register colonised by the state; it then moved to Theresienstadt – a Zionist counter-metaphor to sovereignty and territorialism – and concluded with redemptive tropes enacted through grotesque cluttering of texts and musics reproducing the ideological apparatus, however inverted or perverted Shapira’s formulations intended them to be.
Ilan Nahshon, who concluded his review of Mizrachi’s installations and sketches for Aqedah by saying ‘we are all bound’,Footnote 31 was nearer the mark than he could possibly have imagined, given that he was probably unfamiliar with the operatic score. While Nahshon situated Mizrachi’s non-European ethnicity as a disability in relation to the Zionist socio-ethnic hierarchy, little did he know that his observation would concern Shapira’s music as well, and even less so that it would refer to the composer himself. Because as unforgiving as Shapira’s inversions were, as direct, impatient and strategically unsubtle as they rang alongside intentional, albeit characteristic, sloppiness, Shapira nevertheless clung to bibliocentrism in the first two movements of the opera – even if he triangulated the traditional dyadic structure of the sacrificial paradigm with Isaac’s sibling, Ishmael. The Holocaust (third movement), too, affirmed territorial nationalism, even if Shapira had at the same time implied that this very imperative entailed the use of violence, seizure of territory and expulsion – and even though he would vehemently protest this tragic inversion throughout his entire oeuvre. But come the non-syntactic verbal collage and the following cluttering of Zionist songs amassed as waste, and Shapira’s all too symmetrical inversions would inadvertently complement a classic Zionist trajectory, unfolding linearly from biblical sovereignty through the historic perils of Jewish diasporism (appropriately reduced to match the manner by which Zionist historiography rendered 18 centuries of exile a nocturnal episode), to redemptive tropes spoken and sung in Hebrew.
And yes, Shapira had most certainly steered all this to mean otherwise, since he, like Amos Oz, treated words like ‘hand grenades’;Footnote 32 but was this just the photographic negative of Zionism? While the 1982 Lebanon War may seem like a good ‘contextual’ explanation, it would be doubly misleading: any centring of this regional round of violence would revert to punctuating cultural history by dint of wars and elections while sidelining the dialectics, imports and compositional aesthetics consolidating in Shapira’s works since the 1970s. Furthermore, the complete and final manuscript deposited at the Israel Music Institute is dated 11 September 1982, and it is unlikely that Shapira, usually a slow writer, had finished this opera three months after the outbreak of that war, nor does it make sense with the press coverage during Mizrahi’s exhibition, which mentions Shapira’s opera as early as April. And so to situate the confines of Shapira’s resistance, two works from 1985 – a cantata and a poem – are in order. None are his.
‘This Idiot, Isaac’
The first, Noam Sheriff’s 1985 The Revival of the Dead (Mechaye Hametim) for orchestra, choir and soloists, is a work Shapira must have despised. The title, drawn from the second blessing of the Amida prayer (‘He who revives the dead’), moves teleologically and unembarrassedly from ‘Jewish Life in the Diaspora’ (first movement) through ‘The Holocaust’ and ‘Yizkor and Kaddish’ (second and third movements) to ‘Revival and Renaissance’ (concluding movement), erecting a redemptive trajectory buttressed by a hodgepodge of citations and recitations that uncritically duplicate the Zionist management of Jewish history. The Revival of the Dead employed Hebrew and Yiddish texts paired with liturgical and folkish musical incipits that Sheriff employed as static Jewish objects. An ill-sutured museological display of Eastern European sonic objects and recitations of Kaddish and Yizkor (third movement), the cantata nationalised indeterminate death as heroic death in the struggle for Jewish sovereignty, and concluded with biblical texts (Isaiah 40:1–2, Zechariah 2:14, Exodus 15) and exoticisms of various kinds, including the Bedouin-made-Hebrew folk song ‘Moladeti’ (‘My Homeland’), whose Hebrewist lyrics affirm territorial expansionism.Footnote 33
Piecing together ‘Moladeti’ with rhythmic allusions to the rural folk dance Dabkeh,Footnote 34 alongside setting of the opening verses of the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1–2) and cantorial interjections that climax with a choral Hallelujah, saw a freeze-framed (Latour’s term)Footnote 35 setting devoid of any movement (or any commentary on behalf of the composer) – just like the many imports that informed the preceding movements. The Revival of the Dead not only subordinated the memories of Holocaust victims to the logos of territorialism while assigning it this constituent function in the nation’s annals, it also situated the cantata in a primitive postmodern scene where, according to Bourrriaud, ‘what was once the modern event is to be liquidated – dissected and pulverized in an identitarian multiculturalism’. Sheriff confined The Revival of the Dead to the ‘symbolic house arrest’ (Bourriaud again) of one’s culture, ethnicity and geographic roots,Footnote 36 entrapping the cantata in an impasse of its own making, namely, showcasing musical and liturgical imports as monolithic stereotypes whose simulated triumphalism transfigures the collective body of Jewish Holocaust victims into the founding of the State of Israel.
Shapira had no interest in ‘representing’ the many ready-mades in his opera, and certainly not for the purpose of duplicating the national allegory; nor was he reverent or respectful towards his imports (arguably nostalgic, but never reverent). No found musical object in Aqedah is highlighted for its own musical and cultural qualities, not even the biblical texts in the first two movements, which Shapira subjugates to phrasings that tear up syntax and undo semantics. Yet both Sheriff and Shapira have produced the exact same redemptive account. Shapira could heap scorn on the objects he employed by unsubtly decontextualising or amassing them as unrecyclable, discarded atrophies. But omit the reverence from The Revival of the Dead or the squarely inverted ready-mades in Aqedah, and both fill the same national historiographical contour. The validity such immediate symbolism had in the 1950s and even the 1960s lost its communal ends by and since the 1970s, leaving behind composers who were painfully unable to take part in this contemporary discourse. Shapira had unquestionably hit a nerve, yet he did so only from the prison of his own indoctrination.
Which is why our second example marks the Midrashic threshold Shapira had approached but could never cross. A poem by Yizhak Laor, ‘This Idiot, Isaac’ (from Laor’s 1985 book Only the Body Remembers) breaches the traditional dyadic structure of the sacrificial trope and triangulates the biblical male duo with Isaac’s scriptural sibling, Ishmael, whose expulsion has usually been the unspeakable and repressed object of much of the aqedah anguish, as Feldman argues.Footnote 37 While Shapira rehearsed bibliocentrism (in spite of himself) in the first two movements of Aqedah, he managed to sequence and equalise both bindings, and that alone was a political rarity among local composers; and yet his almost compulsive work with found objects, textual and musical, seemed to have stopped there. Ishmael and Isaac remained mute and lacked any agency beyond that in the scriptural text, whose literalism had partially indoctrinated Shapira himself. So he too was bound; inexorably bound to invert national symbolism into daggers. Or Waste. But never beyond that. Never considering taking up the knife (formerly a poetic metaphor for Jewish history) against his father(s);Footnote 38 never emerging into a political Midrash that breaks from the ideological apparatus of Hebrew culture, as Laor began:
To pity the burnt offering? To follow commandments? On a donkey?
In such obedience? From the Negev to Mount Moriah to be offered?
To trust such a father? Better act first and kill him. Better lock him up, his father, his only father Abraham, in prison, in an asylum, in the house cellar, so long as he is not slaughtered. Isaac, Isaac, remember what your father did to Ishmael your brother.Footnote 39
Open access
