CHAN 20243 – HEMSI

Alberto Hemsi: Chamber Works

Biographical background

In March 1492, Queen Isabella I of Castille and her husband, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, issued the Alhambra Decree, expelling all ‘heretics’ – meaning Jews (or Sephardim) – and giving them four months to sell up and leave. Their flight created a diaspora which extended beyond the entire Mediterranean rim, from present day Morocco to Egypt, through the Holy Land, Syria, Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and Italy, to France, the Netherlands, and even as far as Iran and Iraq. The Sephardim brought with them a rich culture and a separate language, Ladino, a Castilian dialect that acquired elements of other languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish, and Greek.

Devotees of Sephardic vocal music may well be familiar with the Coplas Sefardies of Alberto Hemsi, a set of sixty songs collected over many decades, which he self-published in ten fascicles. The songs are realisations rather than transcriptions. Hemsi writes in his introduction:

I did not harmonize these melodies; I simply tried to recreate with them the traditional spirit of the people in the manner I thought was most favourable and appropriate to the song’s mood. [This is] a rescuing work in a triple process: reproduction, reconstruction, and recreation.

The Coplas were originally unaccompanied, but Hemsi believed that they had to be modernised if they were to appeal to twentieth-century audiences, and their virtuosic piano accompaniments are redolent of the great turn-of-the-century composer-pianists – Enrique Granados, Isaac Albéniz, and, in particular, Manuel de Falla and Maurice Ravel. In Hemsi’s renderings, these romances, lullabies, and celebrations – weathered, adjusted, and revised as they were passed down through the generations – were transformed into dramatic and sometimes profound art songs.

While the Coplas Sefardies are regularly performed, and reasonably well represented in the recording catalogue, most of Hemsi’s instrumental music is unknown, even though it shares the same roots. Paradoxically, this, too, is ‘rescuing work’, albeit at a remove from the research and recovery to which Hemsi devoted his life.

For the greater part of his life, Hemsi lived and composed outside the European mainstream, and researchers and musicians were either unaware of his legacy or unable to access it. This changed in 2004, when the composer’s widow, Miryam Capelluto Hemsi, donated Hemsi’s entire archive to the Institut européen des musiques juives (European Institute of Jewish Music), in Paris. The archive contains Hemsi’s published works, the manuscripts of both liturgical and secular compositions, recordings, and photographs, all of which have now been scanned and catalogued.

Alberto Hemsi was born on 27 June 1898 in Turgutlu (also known as Cassaba), in Anatolia (present-day Turkey). The town lies some thirty-five miles east of Izmir which, prior to 1930, was called by its ancient name, Smyrna. Alberto’s parents, Simhá Chicurel and David Coen, had moved to Turgutlu from the Italian port city of Livorno which, following the Alhambra Decree, had hosted a bustling Sephardic community. However, the Jewish presence in Anatolia can be traced back 2000 years before this, the population expanding considerably with the arrival of Sephardim from Spain and Portugal, and dwindling precipitously with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Nazism, the creation of the state of Israel, and the escalation of anti-Semitism in the Arab world.

The local school which Alberto attended was one of a substantial network created by the Alliance israélite universelle, an extraordinary, mid-nineteenth-century initiative dedicated to the rigorous application of the French education system and the strengthening of Jewish identity. The AIU established schools in Cairo, Baghdad, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Beirut, as well as in smaller towns extending from Cassaba to Tétouan, Morocco. In his teens, Alberto was sent to live with an uncle in Smyrna, the better to build on his manifest musical ability. He studied Ottoman music with Shem Tov Åžikyar, cantorial music with the illustrious Isaac ben Solomon Algazi, and he learned to play the flute, cornet, clarinet, trombone, and piano, the instrument to which he was most attracted. Alberto was also a member of a large wind band run by Izmir’s Israelite Music Society, an organisation which covered the fees and travel expenses that allowed him to enrol at Milan’s hallowed Verdi Conservatory.

The Milan Conservatory’s alumni constitute a who’s who of Italian music: Puccini and Mascagni in the late nineteenth century and, more recently, Gian Carlo Menotti, Riccardo Muti, and Claudio Abbado. For the teenage Alberto, his move to Milan, in 1913, was profoundly significant. Regarding this period of her father’s life, Allegra Hemsi-Bennoun mentions that the passport which Alberto carried gave 1895 rather than 1898 as the year of his birth, a falsification almost certainly intended to evade the Conservatory’s age requirement.

Hemsi studied composition with two esteemed pedagogues: the organist Enrico Bossi and Verdi scholar Carlo Perinello. The musicologist Giusto Zampieri guided Hemsi through music history and aesthetics; Guglielmo Andreoli oversaw his piano studies. As an Italian citizen, Hemsi was eligible for military conscription, and in 1917, as World War I was drawing to a close, he was sent to Genoa for training. He joined the infantry, rose to the rank of captain, and earned medals for conspicuous bravery. Although a wound to his right arm from shrapnel destroyed all hope of a career as a professional pianist, he nevertheless returned to Milan to complete his studies.

When Hemsi asked Zampieri about Jewish musical traditions, Zampieri replied that he was unable to play any Jewish melodies because over time they had all been lost. The claim, although made in ignorance, left a considerable impact on Hemsi. As a boy he had certainly heard traditional Sephardic songs and, on returning to Smyrna and Turgutlu, in 1920, he visited local cantors, and set about notating the melodies sung by his maternal grandmother and her contemporaries.

A fascination with national folk music had taken root throughout Europe – Bartók and Kodály in Hungary, DvoÅ™ák and Smetana in Bohemia, and Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst in England being the most familiar examples. Because his research was not defined by political or geographical boundaries, Hemsi was compelled to survey the myriad communities spread throughout the vast Sephardic diaspora, and with the support of the Grand Lodge of the B’nai B’rith in Constantinople, he began to visit many of them. Hemsi was as fascinated by this musical heritage as he was concerned about its survival but, like so many composers, he also understood how traditional melodies, together with the various performance styles and conventions that supported them, could provide inspiration and nourishment for his own music.

His research was interrupted by Turkey’s victory in the Greco-Turkish war (1919 – 22) and the horrific reprisals that followed – the worst of which visited on Greek and Armenian civilians. In September 1922, a massive fire in Smyrna reduced a large part of the city to ashes. Turgutlu suffered similar if less devastating injury. Hemsi and his family, who were among the tens of thousands of refugees who fled Anatolia, moved to the island of Rhodes. Here Hemsi continued his fieldwork, notating and documenting the local songs, in particular those of the cantaderas, who provided the music for weddings and community celebrations, and who were renowned for their vocal brilliance. Hemsi also worked as a translator and teacher, and among his music students were three young women, the daughters of Ruben Capelluto. Hemsi eventually married the youngest, Miryam. Prior to World War II, Jews constituted about a third of the largely Italian population of Rhodes. By the end of the war, almost all of these residents had been rounded up and murdered in Auschwitz. Their number included seventy-six members of the Capelluto family.

In 1928, the Hemsi family settled in Alexandria, where Alberto began a new chapter, as musical director of the Middle East’s largest synagogue, the Eliahou Hanabi Temple. A cultured and cosmopolitan city, Alexandria had a substantial and sophisticated Sephardic population who spoke French, Ladino, and Arabic. In addition to his work at the synagogue, Hemsi taught at Alexandria’s Conservatory, composed and performed, founded and conducted the Alexandria Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as a children’s choir, and established his own publishing concern, Édition orientale de musique (or EOM). In Hemsi’s words, the imprint aimed

[to present] Oriental works by composers familiar with the life, manners, languages, sciences, and arts of the Oriental peoples which bear the stamp of unequalled Orientalism.

In addition to Hemsi’s own music and two academic books, La Musique de la Torah: la première expression musicale d’IsraeÌˆl (1929) and La Musique orientale en Égypte: études et polémiques (1930), EOM published works by, among others, JenÅ‘ Takács (briefly a professor of composition at the Cairo Conservatory), the Belgian critic, musicologist, and composer Gaston Knosp, and the Egyptian Coptic composer Yusef Greiss. There are regular references to Hemsi in the local Jewish press, and it is clear that he had become a central figure in Alexandria’s cultural community within a year or two of his arrival. He also established links with significant musical figures in mandated Palestine, notably the composer Paul Ben-Haim (né Frankenburger), who had fled to Tel Aviv from Munich, and the legendary Yemeni singer Bracha Zefira, who performed Hemsi’s songs in Alexandria, and later in Paris.

During the Second World War, Alexandria was Britain’s key Mediterranean port, and from 1941 the city was subjected to indiscriminate bombing raids by the Luftwaffe. As an Italian male of working age, Hemsi risked internment, and as El Alamein, the scene of two huge North African battles, was only seventy miles away, he was well advised to move the family to Cairo. Hemsi’s father died on the journey, and shortly after their arrival, Alberto was diagnosed with diabetes.

The Hemsis returned to Alexandria after the war, but a little more than ten years later the family was obliged to move once again. In July 1956, Egypt’s President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalised the Suez Canal, which had been under the shared authority of Britain and France. Following Israel’s invasion of Sinai, British and French forces mounted a co-ordinated (and widely condemned) response, sending paratroopers to reclaim control of the Canal. With the humiliation of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War a recent memory, Israel’s action put Egyptian Jews in an increasingly perilous position, and in 1957, the Hemsi family was among the 25,000 Jews who fled the country. Many had lived in Egypt for generations; all were obliged to surrender their possessions to the Egyptian government before they were granted exit visas. The majority left for Israel, others moved to the Americas or Europe.

French was widely spoken in Alexandria; it was the language of Alberto’s early education, and Alberto’s son-in-law had family in Paris. That city was a logical refuge. However, the move was chaotic and Hemsi left his entire manuscript collection with the Spanish diplomat Francisco Utray Sardá, who later forwarded it to Paris. Estimates vary but perhaps around a dozen Jews remain in Egypt today.

Hemsi appears to have been one of those rare individuals who thrive wherever they are planted. Virtually penniless when he left Egypt, he quickly rebuilt his career. The family lived in Aubervilliers, in the north of Paris, and during the last two decades of his life, Hemsi oversaw the music of two synagogues: Berith Chalom, which was run by Algerian Jews and the Association culturelle séfarade, and the Isaac Abravanel Synagogue, whose congregation was largely comprised of Egyptian Jews. He also taught cantorial singing and musical liturgy at the Séminaire israélite de France, and raised awareness of Judeo-Spanish folklore in a series of Spanish-language programmes for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF). From 1961 to 1965, now in his sixties, Hemsi studied at the Sorbonne with the doyenne of French ethnomusicology, Claudie Marcel-Dubois. His contribution to the field of Sephardic music was recognised by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid, which elected him a correspondent. Hemsi died of lung cancer in Paris on 7 October 1975.

Both the chronology of his life and the challenges which Hemsi encountered differ from the familiar narrative of the composers who fled Europe during the 1930s, those who found refuge, and then gradually settled (or not) into their adoptive country. Hemsi was fortunate to have left both Anatolia and Rhodes before the start of World War II, and although he survived the conflict as an Italian Jew in Egypt, it was, ironically, the birth of the state of Israel that led to his final move to Paris. These are the more recent chapters of the Sephardic exile and they are reason enough to include Alberto Hemsi in the present Music in Exile series. The near-annihilation of European Jewry, together with many of its traditions and cultural institutions, has given Hemsi’s research and the preservation of a hugely significant cultural legacy a sense of providential timing.

Méditation, Op. 16

The Méditation (dans le style arménien), Op. 16 for cello and piano, the earliest work on this recording, was published by Hemsi’s company, Édition orientale de musique, in 1931, and dedicated to the Italian cellist Edgardo Maria Brunetti, who performed and broadcast it in Egypt during the 1920s and ’30s. The piano writing, which responds to the cello’s plangent appeals with quick repeated notes, decorative trills, ornaments, and arpeggiated flourishes, evokes the Greek santouri, a hammered dulcimer similar to the cimbalom. The instrument was popular until the 1920s, particularly amongst the Greek population of Smyrna, and there were probably players of the instrument among the klezmorim (klezmer musicians) who had fled Russian pogroms.

Pilpúl Sonata, Op. 27

Most of Hemsi’s compositions are infused with Sephardic-inflected melodies and gestures, which are supported by sophisticated counterpoint and a rich harmonic palette. The combination produced works of striking originality and the Pilpúl Sonata, Op. 27 is an excellent example, having a particularly arresting history. ‘Pilpúl’, derived from the Hebrew word for pepper, is now applied to the analytical arguments used to interpret Talmudic rules, and to the finicky, even casuistic claims and distinctions employed to defend them. These arguments are demonstrations of intellectual bravura, rather than anything substantive, or with application to the real world. In the score’s short preface, Hemsi tells us that the Sonata is based on three such ‘arguments’, which were heard on separate evenings in Cairo. Composed in 1942, and premièred in a broadcast on Jerusalem radio the following year, the work is an absorbing mix of musical ingredients and influences, including touches of jazz and impressionism, and a wonderfully wry sense of humour. But, like most of the works on this recording, its origins lie in the rich brew of Sephardic musical traditions.

Viola Quintet, Op. 28

Hemsi wrote to Ricordi in February 1952 to ask whether the Milanese publisher might be interested in issuing an Italian version of his Sephardic songs. In introducing himself and describing his connection to Milan, he mentions that Universal Edition, Vienna, was about to issue his String Quintet. In fact, it was only published in 1963, more than ten years later, with the opus number 28, suggesting that it probably dates from the early 1940s.

The dedicatee of this four-movement Quintet is the Hungarian-born composer Ödön Pártos, a virtuoso violinist and violist, and a major figure in Israel’s musical history. The first movement is titled ‘Concertino’ and the entire work is certainly closer to a concerto than a traditional two-viola string quintet. Its thematic material veers away from Hemsi’s usual Sephardic sources. The energy of the Allegretto con brio is reminiscent of that of a stamping dance, while the second movement, ‘Burlesca’, is something close to a parody of a bucolic English jig. The ‘Berceuse’, an introspective lullaby, is followed by a ‘Rondò’ finale in 7 / 8, which almost certainly has its origins in Greek dance.

Tre arie antiche, Op. 30

The Tre arie antiche is drawn from Hemsi’s vocal collection Coplas Sefardies. The first movement, ‘Ballata’, is No. 8 in the series, ‘El rey por muncha madruga’ (The king, rising early in the morning), also known as ‘Landarico’, and a song widely known to Sephardic communities throughout Europe and the Middle East. The ‘Canzone’, No. 27 of the Coplas, draws its material from ‘¿De qué llóras, blanca niña?’ (Why do you cry, my fair girl?). The ‘Rondò’ is an arrangement of No. 12, ‘Estávase la mora en su bel estar’ (There was the Moorish girl in her happy state), the lyrics of which are the same as a text that accompanies a children’s game. The Tre arie antiche is dedicated to the well-known American Zionists and philanthropists Ethel and Frank Cohen.

Danze nuziali greche, Op. 37 bis

The three Danze nuziali greche (Greek Nuptial Dances) for cello and piano are reworkings of a set for solo piano composed circa 1953, with the title Trois Danses grecques. This piano version is dedicated to the young Greek-Jewish pianist Gina Bachauer, who was stranded in Egypt for the duration of WW II. Cairo provided Bachauer with a base for around 630 concerts which she gave to allied troops, and it was here that she would almost certainly have met Alberto Hemsi.

His attraction to the cello is evidenced in the arrangements which Hemsi made of the three Greek Dances as well as in his four Sephardic suites – the first of which is dedicated to Pablo Casals, and the third to the distinguished Italian virtuoso Giuseppe Selmi. The manuscript of the Greek nuptial dances is dated October, 1956, and was probably the last work that Hemsi completed before leaving for Paris. Each of the three dances honours a different wedding attendee, in order: the mother-in-law, the bride, and the godfather.