Samuel Cohen (composer)

Samuel Cohen ( Hebrew שמואל כהן, Russian Шмуэл Коэн or Самуил Коган ; * 1870 in Ungheni ; † 1940 in Rishon LeZion ) was a Romanian-Israeli composer who wrote the music for the Israeli national anthem HaTikwa .

Life

Cohen was born on the Romanian border near Iași . In 1878 he emigrated to Palestine with his parents . From 1886 he lived in Rishon LeZion, where he studied viticulture.

He played the violin. In 1888 he composed the main stanzas of the poem Tikwatenu ( Hebrew תיקותנו"Our Hope") by Naphtali Herz Imber in music, which the latter had written in Iași in 1877. The ten-verse text of this poem was published in Imber's announcement of the dawn in Jerusalem in 1886 . The music for "Hatikwa" was published with text by C. G. Röder in Leipzig in 1895 under the title Four Songs as an arrangement by S. T. Friedland as "Sehnsucht".

Cohen was probably inspired for his melody by the Moldovan folk song Carul cu boi (ox cart), known in Romania as “Cantec de mai” (Mailied) or “Cucuruz cu frunza-n sus” (high-leaf corn). After the German musicologist Peter Immanuel Gradenwitz (1910-2001), Cohen used a motif from the liturgical chants of the cantor Nissan Belzer Spivak (1824-1906) from Chișinău .

literature

• Hatikvah (National anthem of Israel). In: Gems of the universe: a treasury of world-famous songs, including outstanding popular standard copyrights, suitable for every occasion. The arrangements may be sung with piano accompaniment, with adaptations for twenty instruments (= Music for everyone. No. 7) Remick Music Corp., New York 1955, p. 173 OCLC 20071590 (score).
• Peter Gradenwitz: The Music of Israel: from the biblical era to modern times. 2nd Edition. Amadeus Press, Portland OR 1996, ISBN 1-57467-012-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Cohen, Samuel . In: Catalog of Copyright Entries: Third series . 1956, p. 557 ( books.google.de ).