Alberto Hemsi

Alberto Hemsi (born June 27, 1898 in Kasaba , Ottoman Empire , † October 8, 1975 in Aubervilliers near Paris ) was a Jewish - Sephardic composer , ethnomusicologist , chasan and choirmaster.

Life

Alberto Hemsi was born into a Jewish family of Sephardic origin who originally came from Livorno , Italy and therefore had Italian citizenship. He first went to a school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in his hometown before he was sent to his uncle in Smyrna at the age of 10 . At the music school of the Israelite Music Society (Société Musicale Israélite) in Smyrna he learned to play the flute, clarinet and trombone, but he was most interested in piano. In 1913 he received a scholarship from the Société Musicale Israélite to study music abroad and went to Milan. Hemsi studied piano , composition and music theory at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi . His teachers included Marco Enrico Bossi and Carlo Perinello . In 1917, Hemsi was drafted into the army as an Italian citizen and was seriously wounded in the arm in May, making the planned career as a concert pianist impossible. After the war he finished his studies in Milan and returned to Smyrna.

Between 1920 and 1923 Alberto Hemsi taught theory, piano and choral singing in Smyrna. In 1924 he took a job as an interpreter at the Italian consulate on the island of Rhodes . There he also worked as a piano teacher, among other things he taught three daughters of the banker Ruben Capelluto. The youngest of them, Myriam Capelluto, became his wife in 1930 and the couple had three daughters.

In 1928, Hemsi became music director and choirmaster of the largest synagogue in the Middle East - the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria , where he also taught choral conducting and music theory at the Conservatoire de Musique d'Alexandrie. Hemsi played a prominent role in the musical life of Egypt at that time. In 1932 he took part in a conference on Arabic music in Cairo, attended by important composers such as Paul Hindemith , Béla Bartók , Egon Wellesz , Jenö Takacs (who had been professor of piano at the Cairo Conservatory since 1927), Erich von Hornbostel and others. a. were invited. At the end of the 1920s he founded his own music publishing house , Édition orientale de musique , which published works by composers living in Egypt.

When Alexandria was occupied by German troops in 1941, Hemsi and his family fled to Cairo. During this time he developed diabetes . It was not until 1945 that he was able to resume work in Alexandria. After the military coup and Gamal Abdel Nasser's seizure of power in 1954, the political situation in Egypt steadily deteriorated. As a Jew and as an Italian citizen, Hemsi was at double risk. After the Suez Crisis , he finally decided to leave Egypt and went to France in 1957 , where he had to rebuild his existence. Hemsi became the music director of two Sephardic synagogues , Brith Shalom and Don Isaac Abarvanel . At the invitation of Léon Algazi , head of the music department of the Séminaire israélite de France , Hemsi taught Sephardic liturgical music at this rabbi and cantor seminar .

In the last years of his life, Hemsi enjoyed growing recognition from the professional world. In 1973 he was appointed "Académico correspondiente" of the Spanish Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando . For health reasons, he was no longer able to attend the solemn ceremony in Madrid in person. In 1975, Hemsi died of lung cancer .

plant

Alberto Hemsi was the first musician who artistically dealt with the folk music of Sephardic Jews. With his ethnographic activity he also made a significant contribution to the preservation of this centuries-old oral tradition, the existence of which was already threatened with extinction by assimilation and acculturation processes. About the beginning of his interest in traditional Sephardic music, he later recalled:

“When I came back after seven years [from Milan], I went to visit my maternal grandmother and to express her joy at seeing me again she sang me two old romances we had known from home. These two songs moved me and so aroused my curiosity that I wanted to get to know others, even at the cost of becoming a homeless wanderer, so eager was I to explore a world I had barely noticed before I left ... one World, whose history, poetic wealth and variety of melodies make it such an enchanting literary and musical phenomenon. "

- Alberto Hemsi

His life's work is the Coplas sefardies (1932–1973) collection of 10 booklets with a total of 60 pieces for voice and piano based on Sephardic songs that Hemsi made on his ethnographic expeditions in Turkey (in Anatolia , Smyrna and Istanbul ) on the island Rhodes and Salonika . In this collection he processed the traditional material in a highly original way. The particular charm of these compositions is a peculiar connection between the improvisational, originally oral folk song models and the strict European forms - a special compositional task about which Hemsi wrote:

“Poetry and music, united in the freedom of form and movement, do not follow the rule of numbers. Just as poetry tells its story in innumerable verses, music sings its story in sounds without bar lines. ... That is why this singing is characterized by improvisation and constantly changing variation. Originally from the east, he returns there after passing through Sepharad. Never written down or notated, it is a natural chant, made up of sounds, not notes. In my opinion, this is the fundamental, yes main difference between natural and learned music, between popular music and art music, between oral and written music, between Eastern and Western music. "

- Alberto Hemsi

He did not harmonize most of these monodic and modal songs - in keeping with their musical content. In addition, Hemsi left behind many vocal and chamber music compositions (partly as instrumental versions of some coplas sefardies ), as well as numerous works in the field of synagogue music (arrangements and own works).

Discography

Of all of Hemsi's compositions, only a few songs from the Coplas sefardies cycle have been recorded on phonograms . The Beit Hatefutsot Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv published a CD with Mira Zakai and Menachem Wiesenberg in 1990. The Institut Européen des Musiques Juives (IEMJ), where Hemsi's estate is kept, brought out a further selection of Coplas sefardies in 2005 , this interpretation emphasizing the folk character of the chants.

In 2018, the first two parts of a triple CD recording of Alberto Hemsi's entire songs were released. The first CD includes Hemsi's Coplas Sefardies No. 1–4, the second CD includes the Coplas Sefardies No. 5–7, as well as Alberto Hemsi's Kal Nidrey Op. 12, Arbaa Chirim (Four Songs) Op. 42, and Visions Bibliques Op. 48.1-3. The CDs were recorded by the Israeli cantor Assaf Levitin , accompanied by Naaman Wagner on the piano. The production takes place in cooperation with the Saarländischer Rundfunk and appears on the label Rondeau Production .

The first part of a complete recording with the Israeli singer Tehila Nini Goldstein and the pianist Jascha Nemtsov was released almost at the same time ; the recording is produced in cooperation with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg , the label hänssler Classic and the ACHAVA Festival Thuringia.

Fonts

• Alberto Hemsi: Cancionero Sefardí (= Yuval Music Series 4), ed. by Edwin Seroussi , Jerusalem 1995

literature

• Jonas Kremer: Alberto Hemsi and Sephardic Folklore, in: Antonina Klokova and Jascha Nemtsov (eds.), One-way street or “the holy bridge”? Jewish music and European music culture. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2016, pp. 187–212. ISBN 978-3-447-10633-7 .
• Jessica Roda: Alberto Hemsi et les Coplas Sefardies. Analysis musicologique d'une oeuvre inspirée de la musique judéo-espagnole , Master's thesis at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007 (unpublished).
• Assaf Levitin: Alberto Hemsi's Liturgical Music. Analysis of a musical documentation of Sephardi Nussach , master's thesis at the University of Potsdam, 2016 (unpublished).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alberto Hemsi (1898-1975) - European Institute Musiques Juives. Retrieved September 30, 2017 (French). 
2. ↑ Quoted from: Jonas Kremer: Alberto Hemsi and the Sephardic Folklore, in: Antonina Klokova and Jascha Nemtsov (eds.), One-way street or “the holy bridge”? Jewish music and European music culture. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2016, p. 199.
3. ↑ Ibid., P. 201.
4. ↑ Esther Fintz Menasce: A lberto Hemsi and his Coplas Sefardies ; in Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review , Vol. 15/2, 1993, pp. 62 to 65
5. ↑ Alberto Hemsi Mention of the CD on www.rondeau.de