The
voice of Jehovah, has it spoken to those who throughout the ages have
called for it much differently than it speaks at the close of Bloch's
22nd Psalm?
And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks in the desolation
of the third of the "Poemes juives." Once again, the Ecclesiast utters
his disillusion, his cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanity
of existence in the soliloquy of the 'cello in the rhapsody "Schelomo."
Once again, the tent of the tabernacle that Jehovah ordered Moses to
erect in the wilderness, and hang with curtains and with veils, lifts
itself in the introduction to the symphony "Israel." The great kingly
limbs and beard and bosom of Abraham are, once again, in the first
movement of the work; the dark, grave, soft-eyed women of the Old
Testament, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth, re-appear in the second, with its
flowing voices.
Racial traits abound in this body of work. These ponderous forms, these
sudden movements, these imperious, barbaric, ritual trumpet blasts,
bring to mind all one knows of Semitic art, recall the crowned winged
bulls of the Assyrians as well as Flaubert's Carthage, with its
pyramided temples and cisterns and neighing horses in the acropolis.
Bloch's themes oftentimes have the subtle, far-flung, monotonous line
of the synagogic chants.
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