Jerome. Isaac Mendoza will be here presently, and tomorrow you shall marry him.
Louisa. Never while I have life.
Ferdinand. Indeed, sir, I wonder how you can think of such a man for a son-in-law.
Jerome. Sir, you are very kind to favour me with your sentiments. And pray, what is your objection to him?
Ferdinand. He is a Portuguese in the first place.
Jerome. No such thing, boy: he has forsworn his country.
Louisa. He is a Jew.
Jerome. Another mistake: he has been a Christian these six weeks.
Ferdinand. Ay, he left his old religion for an estate, and has not had time to get a new one.
Louisa. But stands like a dead wall between church and synagogue, or like the blank leaves between the Old and New Testament.Footnote 1
The above dialogue between an unfeeling father and his two children sets the stage for the ensuing drama of The Duenna, Richard Brinsley Sheridan's enormously successful comic opera of 1775. The Spanish plot of the opera is a thinly veiled commentary on contemporary English society. It presents Isaac Mendoza's attempts to marry an innocent Christian girl while the disruptive powers of commercial society—mimicry, greed, and social climbing—loosen communal bonds and put fathers and children at odds. The character of Isaac, a rich “former” Jew, was an elaboration on a relatively new type of theatrical figure—the “Beau Jew” or “Beau Mordecai,” a deceitful interloper marked by incessant attempts to become an insider in polite society through strategic marriage.Footnote 2 A self-proclaimed “cunning rogue” and “Machiavel,” Isaac eventually turns out to be “the dupe of his own art” when he is tricked into marrying the eponymous Duenna, a penniless old maid.Footnote 3 The unparalleled success of the opera, with an initial run of seventy-five performances and a prominent place in theater repertoire well into the nineteenth century, testifies to the continuing appeal of these issues to contemporary audiences.Footnote 4
Where do these Beau Jews originate? The intended bride, Louisa, points to the obvious answer: Isaac emerges from the synagogue by attempting to traverse the immutable walls that separated the two communities. A place of projected fears and suspicions for centuries, the synagogue nonetheless served to contain the Jews within its communal walls, which were an emblem of the Jews' marginalized existence within European society. By attempting to traverse these walls, the Beau Jew threatens the clear and age-old demarcation of communities and also epitomizes the dangers of these modern times. He is a “blank” and “dead” figure, caught in a state of limbo, whose lack of attachment and consequent antipathy are potentially destructive societal forces that must be recognized and counteracted. As Michael Ragussis has shown, The Duenna was part of a larger theatrical enterprise of codifying and enacting ethnic identities on stage as a reaction to the challenges of the British imperial project.Footnote 5 While attempting to “pass” as Englishmen, these stage strangers became cultural tropes to be deciphered and, through the cathartic mechanism of the drama, relegated to their proper place in society as either insiders or outsiders.
Within the operatic world of The Duenna, these processes of codification, enactment, and recognition are musically reinforced. While the four young lovers express themselves in heartfelt, lyrical vocal lines, Isaac and Jerome—the Jew and the Judaized father—reveal their callous nature through their syllabic, speech-like singing.Footnote 6 In this way, The Duenna participated in another, much older, cultural enterprise, that of marking the Jews through their relation to music. In a recent book, Ruth HaCohen traces and defines what she terms the “music libel” against the Jews: an essentialist view, which grew in western Europe during the Middle Ages, of Jews as noise makers, as un-attuned to the harmonies of music, and as an a-harmonic presence in the world itself.Footnote 7 The prime locus of this libel was, again, the synagogue, where Jews pleaded in cacophonous cries to a God who was no longer listening. Isaac's emergence from the synagogue carries with it some of this sonority, albeit in the mitigated form of comic irony: his utterances are increasingly out of step with reality, thus revealing his flaws and announcing his imminent failure. The opera ends with Jerome making amends with both his children and restoring peace to the community, thus completely nullifying any of the Jew's pernicious effects.
However, precisely on this front, The Duenna, as an actual opera performed on stage, muddied its own waters. While the opera seemed to resolve its tensions through the expulsion of the Jew, it concomitantly placed another Jew—a real, flesh-and-blood Jew—as a leading, virtuoso singer and as one of its prime attractions. This man's stage name was Michael Leoni, but his given name was Myer Lyon; he was a Jew from the Ashkenazi community of London. By casting him in one of the most musically prominent roles in The Duenna, that of the gentlemanly Don Carlos, Sheridan capitalized on the recent discovery of Leoni in no other setting than the Ashkenazi synagogue in Duke's Place, where his singing enthralled London's fashionable society in the early 1770s. During the run of The Duenna, Leoni's Jewishness was widely commented upon, and Sheridan was very particular in the way he presented Leoni within the opera. In light of this, I would argue, Leoni's ability to transport himself from the synagogue to the heart of London's fashionable society stood in stark contrast to Isaac's failure to do the same within the fictional world of The Duenna.
This contrast, between the categorical rejection of the Jew in the fictional world of the opera and the conscious inclusion of him in its performance, points to a unique historical moment in the relation of British society to its Jews. The readmission of Jews into England during the latter part of the seventeenth century, executed within an ambiguous legal framework, was motivated both by instrumental approaches that prioritized economic stimulation and by millenarian beliefs that perceived the Jews' return in eschatological terms.Footnote 8 However, these affirmative approaches were countered by the rise of an elaborate paradigm of Otherness, as Frank Felsenstein has called it, that perceived the actual Jews walking the streets of (mainly) London through traditional formulas of prejudice.Footnote 9 Leoni's career would likewise serve as a lightning rod for the reiteration of a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews but also, importantly, the reconfiguration of those preconceptions. His intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant—a powerful, bodily manifestation capable of transforming its listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself.Footnote 10 In the following pages, I will trace Leoni's career and its reception through the vibrant public discourse that they generated as his career moved between venues and was adapted to different genres. His performance in each of these contexts was often molded in relation to his Jewishness or was experienced as such by his listeners. His very transition to the theater testifies to a cultural climate that allowed, and even sought, the performance of “Jewish” voices. However, opening his listeners' horizons to visions of past and present, fiction and reality, Leoni's performances would quickly prove challenging in a variety of ways, especially when he sang Handel's sacred oratorios. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish opera singers, particularly that of John Braham, Britain's leading tenor in the early nineteenth century, whom I discuss in the last section of the article. Importantly, Braham was Leoni's protégé, and his career served to carry these issues into the nineteenth century and the public debate regarding Jewish emancipation. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession. Conversely, this experience could serve to confront British audiences with their own motivations and prejudices with regard to the Jews.
Leoni in the Synagogue
On Friday afternoon, 29 August 1766, the newly renovated and enlarged Ashkenazi synagogue in Duke's Place was unveiled in an elaborate dedication ceremony attended by a large audience of both Jews and non-Jews. The event was used to present an Anglicized vision of the Jewish community—some of the prayers were performed not in the customary Hebrew but in English, and they were followed by a performance of Handel's Coronation Anthems.Footnote 11 This refashioning of the liturgical soundscape reflected the burgeoning need of the Jewish community to display the synagogue as a more agreeable site, in both aesthetic and political terms. Just thirteen years earlier, the community was reminded of its ambiguous status within British polity when an act of Parliament allowing the naturalization of a limited number of well-to-do Jews was repealed following widespread public outcry.Footnote 12 The renovation of the synagogue, however, affected the surrounding neighborhood in ways that drew criticism. One contemporary guidebook noted: “This synagogue is just now enlarged … and has approached so near to the church of St. James's, that the congregations may be heard from each other.”Footnote 13 This permeation of sound led another guidebook to note that the synagogue “has been lately so enlarged as almost to join the church.”Footnote 14 The overflowing sounds of the synagogue evoke fears of a possible infiltration as they pass uncontrolled over the segregating walls.
However, it was not the church that was soon infiltrated but the synagogue itself. The attendance of foreigners in the dedication ceremony, rather than remaining a singular event, proved to be the prelude for an outburst of public interest by which the synagogue was marked as a thrilling new venue for the musically curious. Thomas Somerville, a minister of the Church of Scotland, pointed out the main attraction: “The Jewish Synagogue allured the attendance of strangers, chiefly by means of the excellency of the performers in vocal music.”Footnote 15 The source of this vocal excellence was Myer Lyon, a German-born Jew who immigrated to England as a child.Footnote 16 At a young age, he performed in a small singing role in David Garrick's 1760 afterpiece, The Enchanter, which was also when he Italianized his name to “Michael Leoni.” Although he was “received with great applause,” no substantial engagements followed these early performances.Footnote 17 It was here, at the synagogue, that Leoni's fortunes would change.
“He is much admired and followed on particular Days at the Synagogue,” wrote Benjamin Victor, a theater manager, in 1771, while the lawyer John Baker wrote in 1773, “To Synagogue or Shiloh in Duke's Place; heard Leoni, most excellent treble.”Footnote 18 The adult Leoni did in fact sing in the treble, or soprano, range, employing a technique called falsetto, a “false” upper extension of the vocal range produced by the limited vibration of the vocal folds. A consummate falsettist, Leoni served at the synagogue as a Meshorer, or harmonizer, to the cantor's melody, particularly on Sabbaths and High Holidays.Footnote 19 These performances—foreign and exotic yet virtuosic and familiarly harmonic—contradicted common perceptions of the Jewish soundscape as mere noise, thus allowing visitors to experience the synagogue as a modern incarnation of the Tabernacle in Shiloh.Footnote 20
Leoni's performances at the synagogue quickly became a fixture of London's musical itinerary. Samuel Curwen, a Salem merchant forced to flee the revolutionary colonies due to his loyalist tendencies, described his persistent attempts over a period of several weeks to hear Leoni: “Went out … to the Jews' Synagogue in Duke's Place but the impatience of my companion hurried me from out … went to the Dutch Synagogue to hear Lioni chaunt, but was disappointed the service being over … walkt down to the Jews' Synagogue in Shoemakers Lane, in order to hear Leoni perform in the vocal way, but again was disappointed.”Footnote 21 Spurred by his continued curiosity, Curwen would eventually get to hear Leoni, “the Jew,” sing in no other work than Handel's Messiah, a performance marked by “a solemnity, which swells and filled my soul with an, I know not what, that enobled and exalted it beyond itself.”Footnote 22 The sublimity of this performance, which Curwen is at pains to describe, seems to be informed by the presence of his long-sought-out Jew and what this presence might foretell.
Such attitudes were underscored by millennial and evangelical currents that encouraged greater attentiveness and respect toward the Jews as a prelude to their conversion.Footnote 23 The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, visited the synagogue in February 1770 during a Sabbath evening service, held on Friday night, and found it an exceedingly solemn experience: “I was desired to hear Mr. Leoni sing at the Jewish synagogue. I never before saw a Jewish congregation behave so decently. Indeed, the place itself is so solemn that it might strike an awe upon those who have any thought of God.”Footnote 24 Leoni's singing seems singlehandedly to have disciplined the noisy Jews and transformed the old synagogue into an awe-inspiring place, one that transcended confessional boundaries. One of Wesley's followers, Thomas Olivers, adapted a tune he heard Leoni sing at the synagogue, the “yigdal,” and published it as a Christian hymn, “The God of Abraham praise.”Footnote 25 The spiritual development of the Jews is made manifest in their liturgy, around which both Jews and Christians can commune.
A different account of Leoni's performance and its effects was given by James Boswell, always mindful of London's most recent attractions:
I went to the Jews' synagogue, and heard Leoni, a fine singer … . It was curious to see the Jews talking and laughing together, and no kind of solemnity in their countenances. It was just a plain religion. They executed so much, like a task, and like boys at a task looked off and intermixed other things … . I could not help feeling a kind of regret to see the certain descendants of venerable Abraham in an outcast state and sneered at and abused by every fool, at least to a certain degree.Footnote 26
Unlike Wesley, Boswell finds no solemnity at the synagogue. For him, Leoni's “fine” singing served only to accentuate a conclusion that he had reached through his secularized, comparative outlook—that this was “just a plain religion.” Almost against his will (“I could not help feeling”) and while marking certain persistent reservations (“at least to a certain degree”), Boswell nonetheless offers a sympathetic view of the Jewish community in its liturgical setting. What others might have perceived in derogatory, “noisy,” terms—the Jews' casual, almost perfunctory, approach to their liturgy, while laughing and “intermixing” other things—Boswell deems an appropriate religious attitude.Footnote 27
The transformative powers of Leoni's singing allowed English visitors to listen to the Jews in new ways. In her book, HaCohen analyzes accounts of visits to synagogues in eighteenth-century Europe. These accounts, usually ethnographic in tone and aspiring to unbiased and “enlightened” judgment, generally retained some form of the familiar noise accusation.Footnote 28 Leoni is also measured in these terms—his singing serves as a sort of a temporary antidote to his people's natural inclination toward noise. The experience of listening to Leoni's singing was filtered through the auditor's own worldview, whether grounded in Enlightenment ideals and couched in rational and comparative terms, or in evangelical religious beliefs, discovering in the Jewish soundscape hints for a fulfillment of a prefigured past. The end result was similar: as long as Leoni was singing, the synagogue and the Jewish community were transformed in the eyes of the beholder, whose aspirations to hear the Jews anew were fulfilled.
Transition to the Theater: The Duenna and Its Jews
The sensational discovery of Leoni at the synagogue eventually led him to a public career in London's patent theaters. The eighteenth century was a period of growing acculturation of Jews in major western European cities, a process keenly felt in the London theaters, where the Jewish presence became more prominent.Footnote 29 This presence in itself could become a performance of sorts, scrutinized by members of the general public who were keen to see these Jews fail in their new surroundings.Footnote 30 Thus, the auditoriums of Georgian theaters became contested grounds for the negotiation of Jewish participation in the public sphere. Furthermore, throughout the eighteenth century, the theaters attracted many Jews who sought careers backstage and, eventually, as performers on stage.Footnote 31 This vibrant network of exchange no doubt enabled Leoni's breakthrough: he became one of the earliest Jewish public performers and the first to be consistently associated with his Jewishness.Footnote 32
Other than talent, training, and networking, performing on stage in a leading role usually required the involvement of a dedicated patron. Leoni was first patronized by Aaron Franks, one of the leaders of the Ashkenazi community and a member of its elite, acculturated circle.Footnote 33 Horace Walpole attended one of the concerts at Franks' house and reported, “This morning, indeed, I was at a very fine concert at old Franks's at Isleworth, and heard Leoni, who pleased me more than anything I have heard these hundred years. … Then he sung songs of Handel in the genuine simple style, and did not put one in pain like rope-dancers.”Footnote 34 Leoni's simple style and solid technique allowed for a calm and pleasant listening experience, as opposed to those of other, less-assured performers. A few days later, Walpole concluded a letter to the Countess of Ossory with these words: “The only new thing I know is that I have heard Leoni, and don't remember that I ever was so pleased with a voice since you were born; and yet he was hoarse, by an accident which the Jews don't quite prevent.”Footnote 35 As pleasing and impressive as Leoni was, Walpole's final, and enigmatic, comment makes clear that his ethnic identity was rarely lost on his audience.
In January 1775 we find “Leoni, from the Jews Synagogue” singing Handel's oratorios in a private concert series at Lord Sandwich's country estate.Footnote 36 Gaining the patronage of one of the most prominent politicians in the country, who was also an avid supporter of the “ancient music” movement, placed Leoni in the perfect position to launch his operatic career. Three months later, the Public Advertiser announced to its readers,
The musical world has infinite pleasure in finding that the celebrated Mr. Leoni, so highly and so universally extolled for his very extraordinary Performances in the Jewish Synagogue, is to appear at Covent Garden Theatre on Tuesday next the 25th inst., in the Character of Arbaces in the Opera of Artaxerxes. … We hear that Mr. Leoni has undertaken the above part at the particular Request and Desire, and even personal Solicitation of some great Personage, besides many other Persons of Distinction.Footnote 37
Thomas Arne's 1762 opera, Artaxerxes, was the first English opera to be modeled on the Italian-style opera seria—the serious or tragic opera. As such, it was an important milestone in attempts to adapt the operatic medium to the English cultural sphere.Footnote 38 Leoni's debut in the leading role of Arbaces did not disappoint the audience: “Mr. Leoni … was received with great applause by a brilliant and numerous audience.”Footnote 39 Another critic, however, focused on the composition of the audience that night: “A theatrical correspondent informs us, that last night … the Israelites and their connections had taken entire possession of Covent Garden theatre to hear their favourite Leoni sing.”Footnote 40 A few lines later, the writer concedes that Leoni “as a singer, has much merit” but that the tone of the exposition hints to a certain unease;Footnote 41 the Jews, led by Leoni, are taking possession of the theatrical public sphere.
Leoni's success in Artaxerxes led to his major breakthrough—a leading role in Sheridan's The Duenna. Sheridan was involved in every aspect of Leoni's performance and in the creation of the character he was to play, an enigmatic companion of Isaac called Don Carlos. Throughout the opera, Isaac identifies Don Carlos as a “friend,” but rather than functioning as an accomplice to the deceitful Jew, Don Carlos has no real dramatic function in the opera. Instead, he usually enters in specific moments to sing lyrically and beautifully to the leading female characters. Thus, while dramatically negligible, Don Carlos is perhaps the most musically prominent character in the opera, with three solo arias and a leading role in the extended finales of both Acts I and II. The peculiarities of the character are probably the result of Sheridan's attempts to insert Leoni, as a leading attraction, into the already structured plot of the opera. His considerations also extended to specific features of Leoni's performance, such as his accent and his vocal technique: by limiting the character's spoken dialogue, Sheridan presumably circumvented Leoni's pronounced foreign accent, which would have been less noticeable in singing than in speaking,Footnote 42 and by describing in detail Leoni's voice and technique to the chief composer of the opera, Sheridan's father-in-law Thomas Linley, Sheridan was able to ensure that Leoni would “show himself advantageously” within the opera.Footnote 43
Perhaps the most telling adjustment Sheridan made to Leoni's role as Don Carlos was in relation to his ethnic identity. Thomas Moore, in his biography of Sheridan, states that “Carlos was originally meant to be a Jew, and is called ‘Cousin Moses' by Isaac in the first sketch of the dialogue; but, possibly from the consideration that this would apply too personally to Leoni, who was to perform the character, its designation was altered.”Footnote 44 It seems that Sheridan, in distancing the Jewish Leoni from the character he was to play, strove to create a space free from religious prejudice for the reception of his virtuoso singer. But this was a halfhearted attempt: Don Carlos is still introduced and serves as a companion to Isaac, who shares with him his manipulations and maneuvers. Furthermore, at a certain point in the play, Isaac refers to Carlos as “coz,” a remnant of the earlier, discarded, version of the character.Footnote 45 Carlos, then, is not only a confidant of Isaac but quite possibly his cousin and a Jew himself, facts that would immediately cast doubts over his intentions and character.
This conflicted manner of handling the character of Carlos—formally de-Judaizing him while leaving him a Jew by association—was not an oversight but a subtle attempt to negotiate Leoni's performance. The star singer, widely known to be Jewish, is made to wander into the production as an outsider and a latent Jew, thus tapping into the audience's fascination with the exotic Other. In a recent article, Mita Choudhury singles out this preference for the contingent (Leoni's Jewishness) and the performative (his singing) as an explanation for the incongruities of the character of Don Carlos.Footnote 46 Such preferences, while straining the traditional notions of dramatic form and genre, played a growing role in the reception of staged works and, in the case of The Duenna, were at the heart of the opera's exceptional success. Sheridan superimposed upon his opera an ethnic spectacle, catering to the widespread fascination with the Other.
However, it seems to me that Sheridan did more than simply tantalize his audience with the spectacle of a singing Jew: he actively guided them toward a certain mode of listening to that Jew. Almost all of the lyrics that Leoni sang to his female counterparts revolved around one issue—the gaining of trust. In the first instance, Isaac and Carlos meet “Clara,” who is in fact Isaac's intended, Louisa, while she is trying to reach her beloved Antonio. Louisa is feigning a call for trust, telling Isaac, “But, sure, sir, you have too much gallantry and honour to betray me,” while all along out-manipulating him. Mistaking her identity and thinking that this will serve his ultimate goal of marrying Louisa, Isaac entrusts “Clara” to his companion Carlos for safe travel. This picture of mutual deception then shifts to Carlos—”May I rely on you, good signor?” Louisa asks. Carlos answers decisively—”Lady, it is impossible I should deceive you”—and then goes on to elaborate in a full aria, of which the first sentence reads, “Had I a heart for falsehood framed, I ne'er could injure you / For though your tongue no promise claimed, Your charms would make me true.”Footnote 47 Carlos suggests that the womanly charms of Louisa would secure his benevolence. The aria was set to an old melody of presumably Irish extraction, a setting Sheridan himself felt “answer[ed] excessively well” the lyrics he wrote.Footnote 48 Carlos begins his aria with a prolepsis, an anticipation of an objection and its rebuttal. This rhetorical move is also musically reinforced—the prospect of him harboring a false heart is contemplated in an ascending line, only to be resolved in a full cadence, promising no injury. This initial statement, musically coherent and independent, creates a foundation of trust that the following phrases further deepen.Footnote 49
This aria is closely followed by the three-part finale of the first act, which again revolves around the trustworthiness of Carlos. The first part, a “pert, sprightly air” as Sheridan requested from Linley, features an exchange between Isaac, haughtily singing in patter of his “expecting mistress,” and Louisa lamenting the fact that “in strangers I'm forced to confide.”Footnote 50 This marks the transition to the second part of the finale, a solo da capo aria by Carlos, who insists, “Gentle maid, ah, why suspect me?” Composed as a stately minuet, the aria conveys Carlos's indignation while allowing Leoni an opportunity to exhibit more of his virtuosity, in a variety of embellishments, as part of his character's insistence on being trusted. The act finally ends in a short trio, in which all three wish, “never may he [Carlos] happy be, If in aught he's false to thee.”
The preoccupation with trust continues into Act II, after Carlos has conducted Louisa to Isaac's house to wait for her beloved Antonio. The increasingly anxious Louisa expresses her lingering doubts over Carlos's conduct toward “a lady who has trusted herself to your protection,” blaming his actions on his ignorance of the pains of love, to which Carlos replies, “Alas, I know it well.” This leads to another of Carlos's solo arias, “O Had My Love Ne'er Smiled on Me,” relating the story of a past lover who ultimately crushed his hopes for marriage.Footnote 51 This disclosure creates a new understanding between Carlos and the young lovers once they are united:
Louisa. Antonio, Carlos has been a lover himself.
Antonio. Then he knows the value of his trust.
Carlos. You shall not find me unfaithful.Footnote 52
The act ends when they join in a catch emphasizing the compassion that dwells at the heart of any past lover, such as Carlos, as a relic of his former sentiments. Carlos's trustworthiness thus confirmed, this trio marks his final appearance within the opera.
These elaborations on trust and compassion, then, follow Carlos from his very first appearance and in fact form his only function within the opera. If Carlos was inserted into the world of The Duenna solely for the exhibition of Leoni's singing and exotic ethnicity, as Choudhury suggests, it is still a most peculiar mode of insertion, leaving his character completely outside the dramatic arc yet continually obsessed with proving the sincerity of his motivations.Footnote 53 However, I would argue that all of these elements—Leoni's singing, his ethnic identity, and his character's preoccupation with being trusted—should be viewed as an interlocking theatrical schema. Leoni was widely associated with the Jewish community and its synagogue. The novelty of a singing Jew was deliberately worked into an anti-Jewish opera, in which his singing became the mark of his distinction. As opposed to Isaac, the self-proclaimed “Machiavel” and ensnarer of innocent women, Carlos represents a different model of a modern Jew: benevolent and true in his dealings with women. His trustworthiness is established through his singing, which is direct and heartfelt, usually set to familiar ballads yet virtuosic when needed. Carlos's flatness as a character and the alteration of his original, overtly Jewish name were only meant to highlight the real presence on stage of Leoni, the modern Jew who is vindicated through song. Critics were indeed impressed that Leoni's singing conveyed his sincere feelings beyond mere theatrical representation: “Such an applause was never given to merely a singer, and which even his musical powers would not have commanded, had not the feelings of the man been added to them.”Footnote 54 However, it is important to note that Carlos's interaction is always circumscribed, through echoing and retelling in song, and that he never threatens his environs by presuming to act the suitor himself. If Isaac has overreached and is stuck as the “dead wall between church and synagogue,” then Leoni, as Carlos, is only able to infuse both spaces with a shared song over and above the communal walls.
One issue that endangered this shared experience was Leoni's decision to keep his engagement at the synagogue throughout the run of The Duenna, a decision that had major implications on the opera's performance schedule. As the Morning Chronicle explained to its readers, “The Duenna … can never be performed on a Friday on account of Leoni's engagement with the Synagogue. The Jews Sabbath commences at six on the Friday evening and terminates on the same hour on the Saturday.”Footnote 55 This informative tone, discussing a simple matter of prior engagements, soon changed:
The most Christian Managers of Covent Garden regard the conversion of Leoni as a thing most devoutly to be wished for! In the midst of a run of crowded houses they are obliged to stop their opera of the Duenna every Friday. Great overtures have been made to him, even to stand neuter in his Faith, remaining (as his friend Isaac expresses it) “Like a dead wall between Church and Synagogue, or the blank leaf that divides the Old and New Testament.”Footnote 56
Unlike Isaac, whose calculated conversion leaves him “dead” and “blank,” Leoni refused such an existence, and so not only endangered the proprietors' incomes but also the dramatic effect of The Duenna. While the opera centers on a Jewish interloper and his failed attempt to infiltrate society, the star singer chose an opposite mode of Jewish operation, the stubborn adherence to their religion. The uneasiness with a Jew's performance on stage was succinctly phrased by London Magazine: “[Leoni is] A Famous Jew singer, in whom the playhouse goes snacks with the Synagogue.”Footnote 57
Notwithstanding these reservations, Leoni's overall reception was enthusiastic: “The highest instance of art exhibited in that excellent Opera the Duenna, perhaps, is the introduction of Mr. Leoni.”Footnote 58 A critical essay on The Duenna attributed much of its success to the “uncommon prepossession of the town in favour of Leoni.”Footnote 59 The laudatory review in the London Evening Post quoted above, after praising the managers “for his presence” and Leoni “for accepting,” concludes with the moral “how diffident is real merit.”Footnote 60 The talent hidden within the confines of the Jewish community found its way into the world in a move that exemplified the liberal and meritocratic ideals of British society. In this sense, The Duenna was a carefully staged performance of a new social reality—the (re)discovery of merit, in the form of operatic singing, in the Jewish community. This reality was staged within the opera as a semi-independent occurrence, in which the lines between real and fictive and between singer and role were deliberately blurred. Building in this way on the performative dynamics of the operatic voice, The Duenna adumbrated the possibility of a trustworthy Jew.
Falsetto and the False Jew
Leoni's public career spanned a total of fourteen years, during which he established himself as a leading virtuoso singer in operas, oratorios, and private concert series. He remained, however, most identified with his two breakout roles, Arbaces in Artaxerxes and Carlos in The Duenna, both of which he performed regularly in Covent Garden up to the 1781–82 season.Footnote 61 His success was common knowledge—“Leoni’s incomparable melody is so well known, and generally admired, that it would be fruitless to enlarge upon it”—and his name became synonymous with vocal excellence: “Medal and Vocal Chair, for the best singer … were adjudged to Mr. John Jones … now justly honoured with the appellation of The Welsh Leoni.”Footnote 62 The quality of Leoni's falsetto was much appreciated and frequently commented upon. Horace Walpole noted that “there is a full melancholy melody in [Leoni's] voice, though a falsetto, that nothing but a natural voice ever compasses,” while a critic of London Magazine extolled Leoni for “singing in a manner sufficient to create jealousy and envy in the breasts of some of the most celebrated castrati at the Haymarket.”Footnote 63
It was exactly this proximity to the castrati, however, that troubled many contemporaries. Since the introduction of Italian opera into Britain in the early eighteenth century, these paragons of song were accused of undermining British national standing with their gender ambiguity and effeminate singing.Footnote 64 Their arrival bode ill for the falsetto voice that, tainted by association, gradually disappeared from the parallel English musical drama of the early eighteenth century, after enjoying a prominent role in Restoration theater.Footnote 65 In this respect, Leoni's career was part of an important attempt, after decades of absence, to reintroduce high-pitched male singing as dramatically viable within English musical theater.
The spectacular success Leoni enjoyed with The Duenna seemed to indicate that this attempt would succeed, but it was very soon followed by growing anxieties and resistance to the spectacle of the high-pitched man. As operatic culture changed in the last decades of the eighteenth century, the castrati themselves were losing public appeal.Footnote 66 A new regime of vocal categories was beginning to form, giving precedence to sopranos and tenors and striving toward well-defined and relatable individual identities.Footnote 67 This change was perhaps a specific manifestation of a much larger cultural shift. In his book, The Making of the Modern Self, Dror Wahrman argues that, in the last few decades of the eighteenth century, English society grew increasingly intolerant toward any manifestation of an ambiguous self in categories such as gender, race, or the human-animal divide.Footnote 68 Leoni's career was therefore shadowed by a growing reluctance of British audiences to listen to men singing in a “female” voice. The eminent philosopher James Beattie was explicit:
I was shocked at Leoni, in “Had I a heart for falsehood,” &c. A man singing with a woman's voice sounds as unnatural to me as a woman singing with a man's. Either may do in a private company, where it is enough if people are diverted; but on a stage, where nature ought to be imitated, both are, in my opinion, intolerable.Footnote 69
Theatrical mimesis, according to Beattie, has an educational function of denoting the “natural” through proper imitation. Leoni's performance, then, is not only bad imitation but also has the potential of perverting the audience's concept of what is natural.
The question of nature stood at the center of public discourse concerning Leoni's falsetto. Characterized by a breathy, flute-like timbre and creating almost no overtones, the dry sound of the falsetto was often perceived as manifesting its innate falseness—a manufactured voice born of laryngeal manipulation.Footnote 70 Commentators offered a variety of analogies in describing Leoni's voice as instrumental or otherwise non-human.Footnote 71 Leoni sounded as if he was transgressing the bounds of the human, and he was always in danger of being classified as another castrato.Footnote 72 One critic took Beattie's warning to heart and portrayed Leoni's “mechanized” singing as a fundamental distortion of human expression:
[The Duenna] has been a favourite entertainment with that enervated and sentimental part of the public, who die at soft notes, though squeezed out of such a wretched machine as Leoni. That man is a burlesque on all character, expression, and taste; and yet, by producing a merely sensual effect on the lax nerves of our depraved audiences he has been the means of giving the Duenna a run, which no English Opera has had since the days of Gay. We are sorry to observe that our countrymen are gradually losing their taste for manly and rational entertainments.Footnote 73
Leoni's singing is reduced, in a torrent of adjectives, to a physical and “sensual” effect, operating on the nerves of an already desensitized audience. His vocalization is admittedly “soft” and alluring, but this only serves to hide what is really a grotesque, “squeezing” machine. The writer has no tolerance for Leoni's seduction—his artificiality must be exposed and rejected.
Importantly, this anti-falsetto discourse led many commentators to associate Leoni's high-pitched voice with his Jewish identity through the proximity of castration to the ritual act of circumcision. When Leoni performed in Dublin in June 1777, one newspaper discussed the “arrival of the celebrated Israelite, whose warbling abilities are the only theme of polite conversation,” then added, “the effeminacy of his voice being analogous to the Italian that several ladies who are very good judges of things have declared that circumcision alone could never produce such harmony.”Footnote 74 Leoni, then, is just another castrato.
A long letter from a reader to the Morning Chronicle claimed to quote a backstage conversation between two of Covent Garden's performers, John Lee and Frederick Charles Reinhold, and their growing displeasure in light of Leoni's rising star. Lee is quoted as saying “Damme, I hate the unnatural, squeaking tone of that son of Israel,” while Reinhold replies,
Leoni's singing always sickens me so, that I can scarcely stand to hear one of his songs out … there is something in the shrill pipe of that circumcised dog that grates my ears cursedly; I never can get rid of it, it haunts me in my dreams, and I often wake myself by endeavouring to imitate him.Footnote 75
Employing extremely abusive language, this dialogue reiterates Leoni's “known” faults—his shrillness and artificiality—but this time couched in anti-Jewish terms. His vocal emissions are here contingent upon his ethnic identity as a “circumcised dog,” whereupon the sound of his falsetto becomes the haunting sound of Jewish noise.Footnote 76 At a certain point, Leoni himself enters, whereupon both actors attempt to persuade him to convert so as “not be pointed at for a Jew.” Leoni replies,
Why, gentlemen, my tenet is, that the profession never disgraces the man, though the man may the profession. Take care you are never pointed at Mr. Lee; if performers had but CHRISTIANITY enough about them to lower themselves, in their own opinion, they would rise in the same proportion in the publick judgement.Footnote 77
The initial abusive language of the dialogue only prepared the ground for Leoni's decisive rebuttal. Lee acknowledges that “this last tune of his was not quite in the squeaking tone; it was in a tolerable manly voice.”Footnote 78 Leoni's character and manliness are vindicated not by his falsetto but by his public conduct and Christian humility. These principles, as they are articulated in his speech, constitute the real essence of his voice—manly and tolerable.
Leoni's speech calls for a distinction between the character of a public singer and the effects of his singing, between the sincerity of his speech and the supposed artificiality of his song. Therefore, although this text strives to rehabilitate Leoni's reputation, it in fact does so by completely eliding the question of his falsetto. The fact remains that, for some listeners, Leoni's falsetto became a powerful emblem of the supposed inherent femininity and artificiality of the Jews, rooted in their bodies.Footnote 79 These associations, with deep cultural roots, had many expressions in British history.Footnote 80 With his singing, Leoni called attention to his own body, to its resonance and sonority; the listener, for his part, could easily juxtapose Leoni's falsetto with his presumed circumcision, thus deciphering his performance as a Jewish spectacle. For anyone inclined to make that connection, Leoni's falsetto served as the perfect manifestation of the Jews' inherent falseness as exposed in their voices.
The Resurrection of the Jew in the Oratorio
Leoni's career faltered in the 1780s for a number of reasons. In late 1779, he was embroiled in a public scandal involving Miss Montague, the illegitimate daughter of the second earl of Halifax and a ward in chancery, who was to inherit a sizable sum upon her marriage. Leoni was acquainted with the mother, a singer herself, and was accused of assiduously pursuing the heiress. The affair was portrayed in the media as another instance of the “Beau Jew” imposing on an innocent Christian girl, and Leoni, made famous for portraying the benevolent Don Carlos, found himself cast in the role of the sinister Isaac.Footnote 81 Eventually, Leoni married within the confines of the Jewish community and at the synagogue: “In Duke's Place, Mr. Leoni, of Covent Garden theatre, to Miss Sarah Isaacs.”Footnote 82
During the 1783–84 season, Leoni co-founded a new opera house in Dublin, a substantial financial investment that failed by the end of the season.Footnote 83 This venture was also perceived by some as a form of Jewish imposition: “Leoni, who sung between the Acts, Was on his first Appearance received with some Hisses amidst the Applause, and a Cry of ‘No Jew Manager!’”Footnote 84 The financial repercussions of the failed venture would cripple him for the rest of his life.Footnote 85 Concomitantly, the high fees that he continued to demand for his performances were also associated by some with his Jewishness: “[Leoni] stated his note of mouth at twenty guineas: a little too much even for the conscience of the hardest of the Synagogue to exact. But monies, monies, monies! is the word with him on all occasions.”Footnote 86 Alongside these career setbacks, Leoni seemed to suffer from a material decline of his voice; as one of his auditors noted, “[Leoni's] voice, always feigned, is not so good as it was.”Footnote 87 Repeated notices in the papers informed the audience of Leoni's cancellations due to illness.Footnote 88 Toward the end of 1786, the Times, in a somber tone, would note, “Leoni, once the most popular singer ever known—no longer warbles the wood notes wild of Carlos.”Footnote 89
This declaration was premature, however, as 1787 marked Leoni's successful return to Covent Garden with his signature roles as well as his participation in the opening season of the new Royalty Theatre.Footnote 90 Apart from his own performances, Leoni used both of these engagements to introduce to the public his most recent discovery, a young Jewish boy from the Ashkenazi community of London called John Braham (truncated from Abraham).Footnote 91 Braham was orphaned at a young age, and Leoni, recognizing Braham's talent, took the boy under his wing.Footnote 92 The papers promoted his debut: “The very great encouragement this young Gentleman has received from those that have heard him (and particularly from his own people) will venture to proclaim that he will become as great a favorite of the public as his master.”Footnote 93 Braham would, in fact, greatly surpass his master and become the leading British tenor of the early nineteenth century.
As for Leoni, his return to the stage divided the critics, some commenting on his declining powers while others stressed newfound subtleties.Footnote 94 One issue that was frequently mentioned, as in the promotion of Braham, was the support that his performances received from his fellow Jews. One critic cited his performance as a reason for the low attendance at the rival Drury Lane Theatre: “As Leoni sung at Covent-Garden—there was not one Jew before the curtain.”Footnote 95 Years later, James Boaden would write, “The bill at Covent Garden on the 2d of June, for Leoni's benefit, operated as an epistle to the Hebrews, and they crowded to assist a singer whom they so justly admired.”Footnote 96 Despite the favorable tone, Boaden's choice of words hints at Leoni's evangelical effect in reinvigorating the Jewish community.
The tensions inherent in such a move were most palpable when Leoni performed in oratorios, a musical genre that strove to constitute a sense of community that is decidedly Christian. The fact that the Jewish congregation allowed one of their own to participate in such performances is in itself quite surprising.Footnote 97 For the British Christian auditors, the use of a Jewish singer in oratorios could, as we have seen, cater to certain eschatological outlooks, but on the other hand, it could also prove debilitating for the symbolic functioning of the oratorio itself. As the Morning Chronicle succinctly declared, “We hear Leoni is engaged at the Resurrection.—A Jew!—How the Devil can that be?”Footnote 98 This genre of religious musical drama, especially as it was developed in the early eighteenth century by Bach and Handel, endeavored to transcend the limits of space and time dictated by direct mimetic representation, as it placed its audiences on a temporal continuum that extended from historical to meta-historical and eschatological times through a variety of “fictional planes.”Footnote 99 In the British context, the transformative power of Handel's oratorios was at the center of eighteenth-century attempts to formulate national identity on the basis of a specific vision of Christianity and through a specific theological identification—that of ancient Israel.Footnote 100 Handel's oratorios were, in this respect, part of a widespread cultural endeavor to crown Britain as the modern-day chosen nation of God—heroic, Protestant, and destined for glory. Leoni's performances in these oratorios challenged this process of identification, as the figuration of Britain as ancient Israel now depended upon an actual Jew.
This problem stood at the center of a long column published in the British Mercury, a periodical edited by the radical journalist John Oswald.Footnote 101 Titled “La Bagatelle” (“trifles”), the column is a satirical reportage of supposedly recent fluctuations in commerce and the tastes and manners of society. At a certain point, the writer turns to discuss the recent sensational triumph of Daniel Mendoza, a Jewish boxer, in a match attended by the Prince of Wales: “Nothing now is talked of among the disciples of the Broughtonian School but the celebrated Mendoza, the Jew bruiser.”Footnote 102 A twenty-two-year-old Portuguese Jew, Mendoza was now making the first, sensational moves of his boxing career. The writer describes the Jews' ecstatic reaction to Mendoza: “The children of Israel regard this jaw-breaking Jew as the Fore-runner of the Messiah, and now pant in present expectation of those happy days, when they shall rule over the heathen with rods of iron, and break in pieces the rulers of the earth, like a potter's vessel!”Footnote 103
The writer paraphrases Psalms 2:9, “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.”Footnote 104 This psalm deals with the triumphant coming of the Messiah and his victory over his enemies. Christian exegesis interpreted it as describing the passion of Christ and his final triumph, thus charging it with distinct eschatological meaning.Footnote 105 However, Mendoza's manifestation of superior physical power is supposedly seized by the Jews as calling into question this interpretation—the Messiah in the verses is their own, and Mendoza is his “Fore-runner.”
However, the writer used Psalms 2:9 for another reason: it was meant to echo in the reader's mind the tenor aria from Handel's Messiah, which sets this very text to a fierce musical texture, full of leaps and breaks, that evokes the violent vengeance of God. This aria appears toward the end of the second part of the oratorio, which covers the period from Christ's passion to the spreading of his gospel and its rejection. The final scene of this part, titled “God's Ultimate Victory” by the compiler of the text, Charles Jennens, expresses the continuous anticipation of God's providential retribution, which represents historical time until the Last Judgment. This historical time, the very present of the oratorio's listeners, is spent rejoicing in God's triumph over his enemies, represented in this aria and in the singing of Hallelujah, the chorus that concludes this part of the oratorio. By alluding to this aria, the writer suggests that the Jews are trying to appropriate not only the sacred text but also Handel's music, as it represents and evokes a sense of an increasingly triumphal present.Footnote 106
The allusion to Handel's oratorio is not left as a mere hint—the writer proceeds to describe the Jews as they perform an oratorio of their own, led by none other than Leoni:
A jubilee was lately held by the sons of Jacob, to celebrate these glorious hopes, and a psalm suitable to the occasion was sung by Leoni. The following verses sung in chorus, formed the burden or refrain of the anthem: The Lord hath said it, ye Sons of Israel, the merciful God of Jacob hath made it sure, o! ye daughters of Jerusalem! Ye shall break with clubs of iron the bones of their mighty men of war; ye shall thrust their young women through with spears; ye shall dash out the brains of their little ones against the wall! Ye shall utterly exterminate the nations, saith the Lord, and Jerusalem shall be the metropolis of the universe; and the sun, in his daily course, shall see nothing but JEWS upon the whole surface of the earth! Footnote 107
For their oratorio, the Jews have chosen one of the most gruesome passages in the Bible, 2 Kings 8:12: “I know the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel: their strong holds wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with the sword, and wilt dash their children, and rip up their women with child,” words uttered by the prophet Elisha to Hazael, enemy of the kingdom of Israel. The writer suggests that the Jews have appropriated the qualities of the oratorio genre as a communal and transformative experience but infused it with their own violent sentiments as they prepare themselves for revenge. The prophet's horrid vision, originally ascribed to an enemy of the Jews, is now espoused by the Jews themselves, marking their complete inversion.Footnote 108 Leoni plays a key part in these proceedings—he is once again leading his brethren in prayer, as he did in the synagogue, but now he is voicing their aspirations for a violent doomsday. By associating his own resonating body with that of the triumphant Mendoza, Leoni is also perceived as exhibiting the rightful claim of the Jews on history. Two powerful manifestations of the human body, boxing and operatic singing, coalesce into one triumphant Jewish body.
This elaborate column did not appear out of thin air but was in fact a response to an actual event, one that took place not at the synagogue but at the theater—Leoni's benefit at Covent Garden. This benefit took place just a few weeks earlier, and it presented Leoni in his most famous role—Don Carlos in The Duenna. Importantly, it was attended by none other than Daniel Mendoza, the boxing sensation, as reported in the World and Fashionable Advertiser:
Our old friend little Isaac Mendoza [the character in The Duenna], will this night in particular, receive a hearty applause from his brother Denny Mendoza, who has so dexterously shewd his skill in the Broughtonian science, who, we hear, means to lead above 200 levites in procession from the Three Nuns, Whitechapel, to the Theatre, to his brother Leoni's benefit.Footnote 109
According to this report, The Duenna, which at its heart is a staunchly anti-Jewish work, was in fact celebrated by a great number of Jews who assembled to support its one redeeming element—the performance of Leoni as Don Carlos, highlighted on his benefit night. The writer of the column in the British Mercury reconfigured this perceived act of Jewish mobilization into a theological drama. The celebration of Leoni's performance, coupled with the presence of the triumphant Mendoza, is here presented as transforming Covent Garden theatre into a Jewish synagogue and The Duenna into an oratorio of Jewish supremacy.
The writer of the column in the British Mercury, however, continued with one final, and redeeming, observation: “A small minority of Israelites, however, are doubtful whether the prediction will ever take place; and it was observed, as an omen unfavourable to their hopes, that Leoni sung more than commonly in Falsetto the above anthem.”Footnote 110 The Jews' effort toward performative ratification of their eschatological visions founders under Leoni's falsetto. The true essence, or non-essence, of the Jewish body is revealed in Leoni's throat, and thus also Mendoza's body, a much more challenging target, is disarmed.Footnote 111 Both are unveiled as false prophets of a false messiah, a truth that even some Israelites concede.Footnote 112
The underlying threats throughout the text are the uses and abuses of music; anyone can play or sing music, if properly trained, and the constitutive musical expression of one community can easily be appropriated by another. By resorting to the genre of oratorio, the writer is able to stage a performance not only of contested music but also of contested sacred text and its attendant conflicting eschatological interpretations. The performative impulse of the text—evoking in the reader's mind familiar biblical verses set to his own canonic music—gives thrust to the threat that Leoni and the Jews imply.Footnote 113 With their performance, the Jews subvert and turn ominous the very basis of the listener's identity as Christian and Briton—Handel's Messiah. In the process, they reveal themselves as menacing duplicates that operate from the very core of the listener's consciousness, threatening the constitution of his identity.Footnote 114 However, this uncanny and unsettling effect is eventually put to rest as Leoni exposes his true non-essence. The reader, having deciphered the various allusions throughout the text, is finally inculcated with the understanding that the Jew's body, however surprising some of its manifestations may be, is always rooted in a fundamental deficiency decreed from heaven.
The fact that this column was a reaction to an actual event—the Jews' supposed “appropriation” of The Duenna during Leoni's benefit—is particularly important. If The Duenna was a carefully staged performance of a trustworthy Jew who merits a degree of inclusion in society, then here the Jews are portrayed as taking advantage of this narrow opening, planting themselves firmly in the public sphere as triumphant duplicates of the British nation while subverting its sacred musical canon. What emerges from this description is the listener's psychological difficulty in accommodating Leoni's performance over and beyond his old prejudices. This ambivalence, which is already ingrained in the juxtaposition of Carlos and Moses in The Duenna itself, is almost inevitably brought to the fore when the performance of the Jew is extended as a recurring, social reality, one with which the listener has to contend in his public sphere.
Conquering the Shibboleth: The Emancipation of the Jew as Singer
Leoni's last appearance on the Covent Garden stage was in June 1788, again as Don Carlos. In March 1789, the Times reported that Leoni left for Jamaica to serve “as reader to the Synagogue there,” probably in order to escape his creditors.Footnote 115 Leoni died in Jamaica in 1796 and was buried with this inscription on his tombstone: “Mr Michael Leoni, Principal Reader of our Congregation and one of the first singers of the age.”Footnote 116 This seems a succinct summary of the two aspects which dominated his life.
The ambivalence which characterized Leoni's public reception would go on to define the careers of his protégé John Braham and of many other Jewish performers on both the British and the European stages in the following decades. Braham's status as the leading British tenor of his generation was indisputable. Michael Kelly, a renowned English tenor and rival of Braham, honestly declared, “[he] is, decidedly, the greatest vocalist of his day.”Footnote 117 The German composer Carl Maria von Weber, upon hearing Braham, was reported as saying: “This is the greatest singer in Europe!”Footnote 118 Braham's prominence, however, only accentuated the tensions inherent in the performance of a Jewish singer, which, as with Leoni before him, rose to the surface in oratorios:
It is impossible always to divest oneself of particular circumstances, relating to the private character and persuasion of persons. Who can hear Mr. Braham sing in the Messiah, “They that have seen him have scorned him,” without sensations of a ludicrous kind, or something worse?Footnote 119
Referring to the short tenor recitative in the scene depicting Christ's passion in the Messiah, the writer insists on the need for compatibility between the liturgical work and its performer's religious persuasion. The tenor's vocalization in the oratorio is more than just singing; it is the mediating agent that enables the community of believers to direct their emotive capacities toward sympathy with Christ in his passion. If the performer is suspected of directing his own sympathies elsewhere, the result would be ludicrous or worse. Braham, as a Jew, is suspected as still scorning the Messiah, thus leading the performance of the oratorio into a complete inversion of its original meaning.
Unlike Leoni, who remained Jewish to the end of his life, Braham at some point converted to Anglicanism. This was not necessarily enough to clear his name. In his 1821 essay “Imperfect Sympathies,” Charles Lamb, under the pseudonym Elia, berated him for it:
B[raham] would have been more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of—Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, “The Children of Israel passed through the Red Sea!” The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph.Footnote 120
Braham's proselytism could not solve the tension inherent in his voice as he sings Handel's Israel in Egypt. Like the biblical shibboleth, Braham's stubborn “Hebrew spirit” breaks out contrary to his intentions, revealing the contempt that is ingrained in his voice. Braham latches on to the equivocal term “Israel,” thus completely overturning the symbolic array at the basis of the oratorio—ancient Israel is usurped by the Jew, and now the Britons in the audience are the ones drowning in the Red Sea under the riding voice of the scornful tenor.Footnote 121 Like Leoni before him, Braham subverts the performance of the oratorio, effecting alienation and uncanniness in Lamb's mind. However, unlike Leoni's listeners, Lamb does not even have recourse to mark Braham's voice as false—his was a full, heroic tenor.Footnote 122
The issue of Braham's religious persuasion became the focus of public attention in the opening months of 1826. It started with a blunt letter to the editor of the John Bull magazine: “To hear MR. BRAHAM at any time, seriously telling twelve or fifteen hundred people ‘that he knows his Redeemer lives,’ when if he have any religion at all, he believes no such thing, is a little disgusting.”Footnote 123 Handel's Messiah is marked as exclusively Christian territory, while Braham, in his Isaac-like conversion, is stuck in the dead wall of faithlessness. Braham felt compelled to respond to this offense with a public letter. Appealing to the readers' compassion, he emphasized the suffering caused to himself, his family, and his wife and—after hoping that “it would not have been necessary for me now to declare to the world what can only be of vital importance to myself”—he eventually confessed that “I have long been a member of the Protestant Church, that I have married a protestant, that I have educated my children as Protestants, and that I trust I possess a greater portion of Christian charity than my unrelenting reviler.”Footnote 124
Even this ratification of formal religious boundaries, however, did not solve the tension but only raised the question of Braham's sincerity in his conversion. Charles Lamb interjected in this debate as well. In an essay titled “The Religion of Actors” and published anonymously, he judged Braham's declaration of faith to be evasive: “This gentleman, in his laudable attempt to shift from his person the obloquy of Judaism, with the forwardness of a new convert, in trying to prove too much, has, in the opinion of many, proved too little.”Footnote 125 Lamb's obsession with Braham is particularly interesting, since it started out as admiration. Almost twenty years earlier, he had described in a letter his feelings toward Braham: “Do you like Braham's singing? The little Jew has bewitched me. I follow him like as the boys followed Tom the Piper. He cured me of melancholy as David cured Saul; but I don't throw stones at him, as Saul did at David in payment.”Footnote 126 This early admiration, itself formulated in ambivalent terms of overpowering bewitchment, eventually turned sour, whereupon Lamb indeed found himself publicly “throwing stones” at Braham. In this, Lamb exemplifies the shift from initial fascination to growing hostility, as the Jewish singer was perceived to impose his “Hebrew spirit.” As the debate moved into increasingly private spheres—Braham's household family, his faith, and his very consciousness—some commentators were eager to discern any shibboleths in Braham's singing and to trace them to their inborn, Jewish origins.Footnote 127 This search was extended to other aspects of Braham's public performance, such as his fashion or his speech, as manifesting his failed habituation to British social codes.Footnote 128 In this way, Braham's performances—assertive and acculturated while adhering to the bounds of national identity—served as a powerful impulse for the rise of reactionary, essentializing tendencies in the anti-Jewish discourse of the nineteenth century.
Notwithstanding these belligerent reactions, the dominant public perception of Braham was as a national hero. This, however, usually necessitated omission of his Jewish origins. Braham facilitated this process by his conversion and by increasingly restricting his interaction with the Jewish community.Footnote 129 Nevertheless, some of his fellow Jews wished to emphasize his origins in an attempt to gain public recognition. Isaac Nathan, a musician and the composer of Byron's Hebrew Melodies, wrote the following in his book of vocal pedagogy: “Those who have listened with enthusiastic delight to the sweet strains of Leoni, the perfect and masterly tones of Braham … will all bear testimony that the power of song has not forsaken [the Jews].”Footnote 130 This statement was made in the midst of public debates regarding Jewish emancipation. Although British Jews had enjoyed a steadily growing variety of social and economic privileges, they still felt themselves to be politically excluded, especially following the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, which marked the United Kingdom as an ecumenical Christian realm.Footnote 131 This situation mostly preoccupied a limited circle of ambitious individuals of Jewish extraction, and it was expressed in a public discourse intent on validating the Jews' civic virtue.Footnote 132 One of the prime exponents of this discourse was the young member of Parliament, Benjamin Disraeli, whose political career was enabled by his conversion to Anglicanism. In his 1844 novel, Coningsby, Disraeli presented a direct connection between the Jews' vocality and their standing in society. Disraeli used his novels as a platform to promote his political agenda, and in Coningsby that agenda is embodied in the character of Sidonia, a rich banker of Jewish descent, who guides the young eponymous hero in his political maturation and who is widely acknowledged to be voicing Disraeli's own opinions.Footnote 133 Halfway through the novel, Sidonia embarks on a long soliloquy pertaining to the impressive involvement of Jews in all aspects of modern life. This long speech ends with a distinctly musical note:
But the passionate and creative genius that is the nearest link to divinity … has found a medium for its expression, to which, in spite of your prejudices and your evil passions, you have been obliged to bow. The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations… have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of MUSIC; … I speak not of the past … . But at this moment even, musical Europe is ours … . Almost every great composer, skilled musician, almost every voice that ravishes you with its transporting strains, spring from our tribes. The catalogue is too vast to enumerate … . Enough for us that the three great creative minds to whose exquisite inventions all nations at this moment yield, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, are of Hebrew race; and little do your men of fashion, your “muscadins” of Paris and your dandies of London, as they thrill into raptures at the notes of a Pasta or a Grisi, little do they suspect that they are offering their homage to the sweet singers of Israel!Footnote 134
Jewish genius found its highest expression in the field of music in a process that came to fruition in modernity. The perception of music as the medium enjoying the closest accord with the metaphysical and thus capable of revealing the highest truths was itself a burgeoning idea in Romantic Europe.Footnote 135 Importantly, this long speech of Jewish exceptionalism concludes with the singer, who seems to embody most perfectly the right of Jews to voice themselves in the public sphere.Footnote 136 Although taking a cosmopolitan perspective and completely omitting Leoni or Braham, the text addresses the political question of Jewish emancipation in Britain, arguing that the operatic voice, as a powerful bodily manifestation that requires a deep process of acculturation, reveals the Jews as rightful participants in modern British society.
However, more than simply a metaphor for envoicement, Sidonia implies that there is a unique fallacy in the image of the singer, a built-in blind spot, that reinforces the Jewish cause. The work of a Jewish composer could always be suspected as implicated by his Jewishness, and indeed this became a major preoccupation during the nineteenth century.Footnote 137 The singer, conversely, is simply executing a finished work, dictated to him by the composer's will.Footnote 138 If the composer's output is marked by innovation and difference, then the singer's production is marked by faithfulness and adherence. The listeners, for their part, “little do they suspect” that these singers are Jewish, as they operate from the inner core of the musical work, giving it life. For Sidonia, the Jews' ability to assume the majority's identity, via the faithful rendition of its music, is the perfect proof of their right to inclusion, a proof that asserts itself even beyond the “prejudices and evil passions” of the unsuspecting listener. Thus, the performance of Jewish singers can operate as a sort of litmus test, isolating the listener's own prejudices from the thick cultural environment of modern society. What earlier writers described in uncanny and subversive terms—the Jewish singer's ability to inhabit his listeners' identity from within by performing “their” music—is here reasserted as an ultimate manifestation of the Jews' right to share in that identity. Disraeli, as Sidonia, employs the singers as a final rhetorical gesture that forces the reader—now amazed to find that his singing idols are Jewish—into self-examination.Footnote 139 The shibboleth is not ingrained in the singer's voice but in the listener's own prejudices.
Evil passions, suspects, and prejudices—these, according to Sidonia, were the psychological constructs that Jewish singers confronted. However, the relation between the performative effect of their singing and the psychology of prejudice was multifaceted. At first, with Leoni's performances at the synagogue, their singing served to destabilize old notions regarding the Jews. This, in fact, was the impulse that accompanied their move into the public sphere, a manifestation of the inclusive and meritocratic ideals of British society. However, this transfer soon revealed an inner conflict, as the performances of these Jews were perceived as making increasing demands on listeners' consciousnesses. This conflict often arose in reaction to the performance of oratorios, or was imagined as such, thus restoring the performance of these Jews to the conflicted, and insoluble, theological terrain. Some listeners strove to reconstitute older “walls” through the search for difference—first with Leoni's manifest falsetto, but then, in a changing social terrain of acculturated and converted Jews, with a growing variety of essentialized shibboleths. Throughout these historical dynamics, the allure of the operatic voice drew its listeners toward the singer and into contemplations of his identity, faith, and sincerity. In the process, listeners were confronted with their own sincerity regarding the Jews. The difficulty of accommodating them in modern society, over and above old prejudices, was powerfully brought forth once Jews started singing music that “belonged” to other people.
