Original Wraps. 4to. 91 pages. 27 cm. First edition. Musical scores throughout. Heinrich Schalit is one of the principal names associated with serious mid-20th-century American synagogue music for Reform worshipalthough some of his settings had currency at one time in liberal Conservative synagogues as well.
Schalit was born in Vienna, where he studied composition with Robert Fuchs (18471927) and with Joseph Labor (18421924) , who was also one of Arnold Schoenbergs teachers. In 1927 Schalit was appointed to the position of organist at the principal Liberale synagogue in Munich, whose learned cantor and productive resident composer, Emanuel Kirschner (18571938) a former singer in the choir of Louis Lewandowski in Berlin and a follower in his path, albeit in a more artistically sophisticated veinappears to have exerted a lasting influence on him. His first synagogue composition was a setting of vshamru for the Sabbath eve liturgy, which he then incorporated into his first full Sabbath eve service, Eine Freitagabend Liturgie. That service, published in Germany in 1933 and later revised for American publication in 1951, remains one of his seminal achievements, notwithstanding his substantial subsequent oeuvre. By that time he had grown dissatisfied with what he called an 'unorganic mixture of traditional cantorial chants with congregational and choral music in the German style of the 19th century, ' and he felt that the synagogue of the 20th century required its elimination. Liturgical composition became for him a sacred calling, with a sense of mission that he posed as a challenge to contemporary Jewish musicians to 'prepare a change in style and outlook, ' as he wrote in the preface to his first service. His goal was to 'create a new, unified liturgical music growing out of the soil of the old-new, significant and valuable source material' that had become available through recent musicological studies. (Milken Archive) Subjects: Synagogue music - Sabbath services. Choruses, Sacred (Mixed voices, 4 parts) with organ. OCLC lists 22 copies. Institutional stamps on endpages and on wraps edges. Light wear to wraps, otherwise fresh and clean. Very good condition. (MUSIC-2-10)
