To express their gratitude for being spared from destruction by the Turks in 1683, Prince Paul Esterházy and his son Prince Michael transformed the Oberberg (high hill) on their estate in Eisenstadt into one of the largest Marian sanctuaries in Hungary. They crowned the construction with a church, known as the Bergkirche, on the top of the hill. Many engravings and images exist of the Bergkirche and the town. Yet, as Caryl Clark observes in her book Haydn's Jews: Representation and Reception on the Operatic Stage, all images are ‘angled away from the Unterberg [low hill] and cropped in such a way that the Jewish ghetto’, home of Eistenstadt's Jewish community, ‘is entirely excluded, as if it did not exist’ (60). Clark's book aims to correct this intentional erasure by making the Jews of Haydn's time visible. Clark's study is even more ambitious, promising to dispute Haydn's (and by extension Haydn scholarship's) ‘innocence’ concerning Jewish subjects: ‘Jewish history figures prominently in the life and working environments of Joseph Haydn in Vienna and nearby Eisenstadt in the mid-eighteenth century’, Clark states, ‘yet its very absence from our music history books tells us as much about ourselves as about the myths we continue to perpetuate’ (xiii).

As Clark's title indicates, the central topic of her book is opera, an under-appreciated genre in Haydn scholarship despite the early efforts of Hungarian scholars Dénes Bartha and László Somfai, and later Robbins Landon, to call attention to Haydn's rich operatic oeuvre. Clark may have been inspired to search for a link between Haydn and his Jewish contemporaries by a peculiar pre-World War II German practice, namely the frequent performance of Haydn's little comic opera Der Apotheker (Lo Speziale in its original Italian version) by professional apothecary organisations. As Clark explains, pharmacists were predominantly Jewish in Germany before the Nazis took over (according to Clark, by the 1930s, seventy per cent of all pharmacists in Germany were of Jewish descent). In this context, Haydn's revised opera became a ‘comedic entertainment created about Jews, by Jews, and for the consumption of Jews’ (208). And this is why a photograph of a 1930 Berlin performance of Der Apotheker by the Organisation of German Apothecaries, originally reproduced in the Pharmazeutsiche Zeitung, also appears in a book about the history of Jewish participation in the pharmacist profession.Footnote ¹ Did Jewish pharmacists embrace Haydn's opera only because it featured a pharmacist as its main character, or did this character possess some Jewish features that Jews recognised and with which they identified? Clark's work suggests that Haydn intentionally imbued his pharmacist with a secret Jewish ethnicity, and that consequently Lo speziale is a forerunner of late nineteenth-century musical works, more specifically of Wagner's anti-Semitic representation of Jews. To make this resonance between Haydn and Wagner audible, Clark proposes a ‘difficult imaginative leap’ from Haydn's Sempronio, the main character in Lo speziale, to his ‘descendants in several of Wagner's music dramas’ (212).

The premiere of Haydn's Lo speziale on 28 September 1768 marked the inauguration of the new opera house of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy I, who earned the nickname ‘Magnificent’ after transforming a modest hunting lodge at Süttor into a Hungarian Versailles equipped with an opera house, puppet theatre, and other buildings that made Eszterháza a cultural fairy-land equal to the best in Europe. Lo speziale pleased Nikolaus enough for it to be shown at court and staged at a private residence in Vienna in the 1770s, demonstrating, according to Clark, that the opera was perceived as representative of the comic tastes of the time. Haydn based his work on Carlo Goldoni's libretto about a comical pharmacist who, intending to marry his young ward Grisella, attempts to fend off two suitors, his faux assistant, Mengone, and a local dandy, Vespone. The plot has all the ingredients of an Italian buffa: the confused and grumpy, elderly Sempronio versus the young lovers, now themselves in a love triangle; frequent, comical mis-hearings; a staged fake wedding ceremony (here with two fake notaries); and, to top it all, invading Turks who turn out to be Vespone and his companions in disguise. In keeping with the eighteenth-century tradition of the lieto fine, in the end Sempronio is duped into agreeing to marry off his ward to the deserving Mengone.

The 1770s stagings did not mark the end of the opera's fascinating performance history. At the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Hirschfeld, an influential music critic in Vienna, decided to revive the work. Der Apotheker, as it was called in Hirschfeld's German version, premiered at the Dresden Court Opera in 1895 under Ernst Schuch. After performing Hirschfeld's edition in Hamburg in 1895, Gustav Mahler, who became the music director of Vienna's Hofoper in 1897, brought the piece to the capital in 1899. On the 100th anniversary of Haydn's death in 1909, Felix Weingartner, Mahler's successor at the Hofoper, revived Der Apotheker yet again. The little piece remained an audience favourite, especially after Heinrich Müller and Robert Rossmayer turned it into a children's opera for members of the Wiener Sängerknaben, a group that in the 1920s regularly performed this infantilised version. The Mozart Sängerknaben staged and recorded yet another children's version of Der Apotheker in the 1960s. As László Somfai notes, these ‘sugary play-opera productions’ greatly contributed to assumptions about ‘the supposed mediocrity of Haydn's operatic stage works’ (quoted p. 205).

Instead of rejecting Lo speziale as damaged goods (or, as Somfai put it, ‘the black sheep in the renaissance of the Haydn operas’), Clark embarks on a journey to uncover hidden meanings in this apparently innocent little opera. Her journey, as she indicates, is similar to that of the young student Don Cleofas Leandro Perez Zambullo who, in Alain René Le Sage's fantastical novel Le diable doiteux (1707), upon which Haydn's early comic piece Der krumme Teufel (The limping devil) is based, undertakes a sensational journey with the help of the lame demon Asmodeus. ‘During their flight’, Clark reports, ‘the devil lifts up the rooftops of houses, prisons, palaces, and even tombs, in order to reveal parts of Spain, where they continue to experience a series of outrageous and amusing adventures’ (15). The hidden parts of history Clark's study reveals are less amusing than Cleofas's discoveries, yet some might consider them equally outrageous. Like Don Cleofas, Clark also has her escorts: she is guided throughout her journey by the work of Sander Gilman and Marc Weiner, both experts at deciphering anti-Semitic Jewish stereotypes in late nineteenth-century opera.Footnote ²

Clark's research first leads her to the actor Josef Felix von Kurz (1717–84), known by the stage name Bernardon, who commissioned the music from Haydn for Der krumme Teufel (1752/59). The limping devil in this opera is unmistakably a Jewish character whose ethnicity was written on the surface of his body (according to Gilman, the tropes of the limping devil and the limping Jew are interchangeable). Unfortunately, no music survives, so we cannot tell how Haydn contributed to the representation of this stereotype. Yet Haydn's experience with Bernardon's theatre, which still maintained elements of Hanswurstian extemporised comedy that frequently used specifically Jewish characters as comedic foils, indicates that Haydn must have been familiar with the traditions and tropes of Jewish caricature on stage. Along with other stereotypical characters such as the Styrian peasant, bookseller, painter and Cupido, Hanswurstian types also included the Jew. Bernardon, for instance, was praised for being able to employ Jewish speech and ‘Judenmimus’ (Jewish mime) in his adaptation of a play about a Jewish wedding (35). With its traditional Purim plays, Jewish theatre influenced mainstream culture as ethnic Jewish actors, like the original Hanswurst, Joseph Anton Strantzky (1676–1767), shaped theatrical traditions in German-speaking countries.

Clark claims that Haydn's knowledge of Jewish types was not limited to the theatre. Through his early occasional employment at the church of the Barmherzige Brüder, whose establishment was located in Leopoldstadt, site of Vienna's Jewish ghetto, Haydn could have easily come into contact with Jews. The founder of the Barmherzige Brüder was St John of God, a converso during the Spanish Inquisition – his origin is acknowledged on the Order's crest by a six-pointed yellow star. Clark proposes that some peculiar features of Haydn's Missa brevis Sancti Joannis de Deo, which he composed for the Brothers, ‘capture the essence of the Order’ that presumably engaged in converting Jews from the nearby ghetto. The end of the Credo indicates that Haydn had included catechumens (converted members of the congregation who were not yet completely initiated into the Christian rites) in his imagined audience: ‘If any catechumens were to leave the Mass at this point, they would have done so at a musically coherent moment, one in which closure had been satisfactorily invoked’ (71). In the Gloria, Haydn distributes different lines in the four vocal parts, creating an ‘aural muddle’ that, Clark claims, resembled the ‘noise’ or Mauscheln Christians associated with Jewish speech or prayer. It is confusing that Clark interprets this polytextuality both as a site of potential ‘aural familiarity’ to newly converted Jews, and also as the aural equivalent of the Christian perception of ‘garbled Jewish speech’ (12). Is Haydn's treatment of text, if indeed it is related to Jewish prayer, a mocking or a welcoming gesture? But we might not even need to go that far in interpreting Haydn's polytextual practice. According to Bruce C. MacIntyre, telescoping or polytextuality in the Gloria and Credo were endemic in missae breves, serving to dispose of lengthy texts in a short time. MacIntyre compares Haydn's Gloria in his Missa Brevis in F not to ‘garbled Jewish speech’, but to the Babel of ‘a medieval polytextual motet’.Footnote ³

Clark believes that Haydn's omission of lines referencing the belief in Jesus as Son of God from the Credo is also a sympathetic nod towards the Jewish converts in the church (‘By omitting the line about believing in Jesus Christ as the only Son of God, Haydn offered an olive branch, as it were, to those not yet fully indoctrinated into the faith, demonstrating a willingness to include non-believers and transitioning believers into the fold of worshippers’ [78]). This is an interesting hypothesis, although Clark cannot find any historical evidence that there was any such practice at the time (Fabiano Foghi's translation of the Credo into Hebrew, which she cites, makes the doctrine of Christianity more and not less specific for Jewish converts [78]). Clark's hypothesis about Haydn's Mass being an enlightened, inclusive service becomes still less convincing when she tries to interpret the same omission in the Credo in three other Masses by Haydn, one early missa brevis and two late Masses (Nelsonmesse and Theresienmesse). Clark claims that Haydn wrote the two late Masses with a ‘conversion story in mind, and possibly a nod towards non-believers’ (81). The Nelsonmesse ‘may have as its honorary dedicatee St Martin of Tours, a fourth-century convert who was born in Pannonia’ (82), whereas the Theresienmesse invites ‘the worshipper to personalise the conversionary experiences of St Teresa of Avila by finding a way to make the invisible Christ – whose very absence was marked by the missing words in the Credo – become present again in one's own life’ (85). Both, Clark proclaims, ‘may have played a role in converting new members to the Catholic fold’ (86). Interesting as this hypothesis is, it is hard to believe that Haydn indeed played such an active role in Catholic missionary work. Even if we accept that his music was part of the Church's propaganda, it is problematic to conclude, as Clark does, that in their selective textual settings these Haydn Masses ‘appear to signal an accommodation of religious difference’ (12).

Clark admits that we know nothing about the extent of Haydn's knowledge of ‘Jewish religion, customs, manners and speech’, but she nevertheless insists that ‘as a self-motivated, curious, and musically astute young man with a keen eye and ear for detail, the chances are that he saw, heard, and absorbed much’ (48). This knowledge, Clark believes, served Haydn both in making tolerant gestures towards the Jews, and in creating mocking stereotypes of them for gentile audiences. According to Clark, Haydn relied on a combination of his theatrical and everyday experience when he furnished the main character in Lo speziale with a secret Jewish character. Goldoni conceived Sempronio, the comic male in the opera, as a baritone. By casting Sempronio as a tenor, Clark argues, Haydn emasculates his voice and thus marks his ethnic difference (high voice, she claims, can signal loss of sexual potency, and in the representation of Jewish characters it can refer to circumcision). In the aria ‘Questa è un’altra novità', in which Sempronio, a compulsive reader of newspapers, recounts a competition between the wide arena of Verona and the long tower of Cremona, he illustrates the differences in width and length by long sustained notes and a succession of extreme leaps. Clark argues that the wild gesticulation that accompanies his singing is another sign of the character's Jewish identity. ‘The aberrant, feminized tenor voice’, Clark writes, ‘displayed through the use of extreme high register, falsetto, howling, and screaming, all point to the fantasizing, hyper-sexualized Jew’ (118). Along with voice and gestures, Clark also detects clues for Sempronio's hidden Jewish identity in his desire to marry his young ward (which signals his perverted sexuality); his smelly profession (which Clark reads as a reference to the foetor judäicus, the odious smell associated with Jews); his presumably limping gait (indicated by the ‘alla zoppa’ rhythm in his aria ‘Ragazzaccie, che sena cervello’); his greed (he is willing to give up his ward for a prosperous job in Constantinople); his preoccupation with reading newspapers and spreading lies (a common accusation against Jews); and even his name, Sempronio, in which Clark hears a reference to the ‘ewige Jude’ (or wandering Jew).

Clark's evocation of the German term ‘ewige Jude’ is telling here, for it signals that her main points of reference come from German sources. The Italian term for the eternal Jew is ‘ebreo errante’ – the Italian Sempronio, constructed from ‘sempre’ (always), can be associated with the eternal Jew only if we hear in it the bigoted English expression ‘once a Jew always a Jew’, unlikely to have been on Goldoni's mind as he shaped his comic character. Similarly, the stench of the apothecary shop need not be a reference to the foetor judäicus; the Italian name for pharmacy, speziale, derives from spèzie or spice, the definition of which includes the substance's penetrating smell. The profession of journalism did indeed become linked to Jews in the nineteenth century, but newspapers in the eighteenth century might not have been associated with Jews (or if they were, we would need Clark to provide eighteenth-century historical data about it). Clark's claim that ‘by embedding Sempronio's discourse within that of the press, Goldoni makes explicit the long-established tradition of linking the medium of the newspaper to the Jews and their language’ sounds anachronistic (Gilman, from whom Clark takes her data, writes about Wagner and his disdain towards Heine, the Jewish journalist).Footnote ⁴

Trying to forge a link between Haydn's and Wagner's representations of Jews on the operatic stage (‘like Wagner, Haydn's theatrical-musical rhetoric frequently alludes to stigmas and stereotypes associated with Jews, and is perhaps even expressive of an anti-Semitic bias’ [12]), Clark is on a mission to rescue Haydn from his degraded nineteenth-century image of ‘a pious, conservative, humble, good-humoured “Papa”’ (5). Like many Haydn scholars today, she is following James Garrett's command to ‘provide a detailed exploration of Haydn's reception in performance and criticism, tracing the fortunes of individual works and genres’ (209). Even at the risk of presenting Haydn as a pre-Wagnerian anti-Semite, Clark believes that her study helps create a new Haydn image: ‘The master no longer wears the innocent and unprepossessing smile of a pleasure-loving Papa, but instead takes from his cultural environment shades of greater depth and complexity’ (211). Recently many Haydn scholars have offered a corrective to this tame image of Haydn. But, as W. Dean Sutcliffe has pointed out, we still lack the biographical data that would enable scholars to develop the kind of psycho-critical approach devoted to Mozart and Beethoven.Footnote ⁵ Clark probably goes the furthest to provide us with a Haydn who not only reacts to but is also an active participant in shaping his cultural environment. Her task is difficult, however, since there is very little biographical data that can support her hypothesis about Haydn's relation to Jews. In her well-documented and ingeniously researched study, Haydn himself remains silent – his agency is present only in Clark's assumptions about what he must have heard, absorbed and intended. None of Haydn's contributions to Der krumme Teufel survive – one can only imagine that in this particular piece, the fascinating background to which Clark presents in her first chapter, it would be easier to detect Jewish stereotypes than in Lo speziale.

It is ironic that Clark's bold attempt to rid Haydn of his innocent nineteenth-century image leads her to search for precisely those anti-Semitic tropes in Haydn's operas that were prevalent in the nineteenth century. Her cues for identifying Sempronio as a Jew are all suggested by Marc Weiner's Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1995), in which Weiner devotes entire chapters to high voice, smells, feet and degeneration. Ultimately one sees Clark's Haydn not as a predecessor of Wagner, but as an eighteenth-century composer whose work Clark reads from a nineteenth-century Wagnerian perspective. This does not mean, of course, that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anti-Jewish stereotypes did not overlap, in other words that the anti-Semitic tropes in Wagner's operas did not have their roots in the representation of Jews in eighteenth-century theatrical repertory. But whereas in Wagner's work these features signalled a gradually more threatening anti-Semitic bias, in Haydn's time the Jew on stage seems to have been just one more stock comic figure next to Turks and quack doctors. Clark is right to point to the difference between comic Turks, threatening once but living in comfortable distance from the Habsburg Empire of Haydn's time, and Jews who lived in close proximity and whose mere existence depended on their Gentile neighbours' good will. But this distinction does not explain the difference between the blatantly marked representation of the Turks and the supposedly hidden identity of the Jews in Haydn's Lo speziale. As Clark's other examples of Jewish representation on the eighteenth-century stage demonstrate, subtlety and secret coding were not typical of low comedy.

One also wonders why nobody – not even the Nazis who developed an entire apparatus for spotting Jews in literature and music, or the Jews who embraced Haydn's Lo speziale – seems to have recognised Sempronio's Jewish features. Neither Hirschfeld's nor Mahler's statements suggest that they saw Sempronio as a Jewish caricature. Reading a reference to Jews into Mahler's sycophantic comments about Hirschfeld's revision of Lo speziale, in which Mahler congratulates the critic for adding ‘to the still shining crown of Haydn's genius a precious stone which lay hidden in dust’, is possible only if one assumes that Hirschfeld and Mahler, like Clark, identified the Jewish stereotypes in Haydn's opera. Clark detects the reference in Mahler's use of the word ‘Edelstein’ (precious stone); the word, she argues, ‘might reasonably be read as referring to one of the three main professions traditionally held by Jews, that is, moneylending, pawnbroking, and dealing in precious stones’ (175). It would, indeed, be fascinating to understand why Hirschfeld and Mahler, both converted Jews living in the anti-Semitic climate of turn-of-the-century Vienna, initiated the revival of Haydn's opera if they read the work as Clark does. Unfortunately Clark does not provide any real evidence that they had any ‘intuitive sense about the apothecary's hidden identity’ (175). Even more intriguing would be to study why Jews kept performing the piece if it was indeed encoded with anti-Semitic tropes. Jewish self-hatred cannot explain all.

Clark's study accomplishes most of what she set out to do: she presents a richly documented picture of Jews living in the Habsburg Empire during Haydn's time and provides fascinating details about their presence in theatre and music. By the end of her book, the Unterberg of Haydn's Eisenstadt comes into sharp focus. Yet because of the lack of more documentary evidence, and probably even more crucially, because of the heavy emphasis on interpretative studies primarily addressing nineteenth-century anti-Semitic tropes, Haydn remains an elusive participant in this cultural interchange between Jews and Gentiles. Clark's study is a bold first step to shedding light on this obscure area of Haydn's life and work.