WELTSCHMERZ

A personal coda about Jewish music. Although as I said before many of the Jewish melodies are derivative, and much of Jewish music is heavily influenced by the specific environments that had historically become geographical homes of the Jews, Jewish music, nevertheless, has preserved a distinctive flavor, manifested by such traditional prayer tunes as Avinu Malkeinu, Kol Nidre, and others, and by such traditional tuneful songs, as Meine Yiddische Mama, among scores of others.

All traditional Jewish music may be characterized by one single word Weltschmerz, and in this melancholy mood I find it having a certain affinity with the Russian brand of Weltschmerz. Not surprisingly, critics of Tchaikovsky often cited his overindulgence in Weltschmerz as the primary reason for their criticism. They used the metaphor of “taking a cello bow to the raw human nerves, used as strings,” in describing some of the greatest masterpieces of Tchaikovsky’s genius, particularly his Piano Trio and the Sixth Symphony, also known as La Pathetique, and also nicknamed The Tortured Symphony, to mention just these two.
Tchaikovsky was by no means alone in his emotional extremism. Other Russian composers are famous for it as well, and the same undoubtedly goes for all Russian folk music both sad and merry, which is of course hardly a revelation to world music lovers.
Thus, a very special brand of brooding, melancholy spirit permeates both Russian and Jewish music, quite unlike the melodramatic excesses of, say, Italian music, epitomized by Puccini, as the highest artistic form of such excesses. The word Weltschmerz which I am using here, says it all, making it possible to clarify my meaning and to differentiate this particular type from the rest of the world’s emotional overindulgence, to include Chopin, the German romantics, in addition to the Italian artists of the melodrama, and everybody else in this genre, whom I may have overlooked, or omitted, for the sake of brevity.
Thus, my admiration for the beauty of traditional Jewish music, aside from my personal taste, may exhibit some cultural predisposition as well, which, however, does in no way inhibit my eclectic aesthetic sense of beauty, shaped by my typical Great-Russian upbringing in the perennial values of Western Civilization.