Conclusion on Jewish Composers

Even though some of them (Mahler, Bernstein and others) were omitted in this review one may wonder ``what those (all great) composers do have in common?'' They are from different epochs, cultures and styles and they are all Jew. Can we point on some ``trademark'' of being a Jewish composer?

Actually there are than a few common points among them. They are adventurous, sometime straight revolutionary although they never claimed to be so. Schoenberg was always claiming that he is the ``natural continuation'' of the German romantic tradition, Gershwin never advertised he is a ``revolutionary'' composer, yet he was...in his own way. Rossi has innovated many of his epoch's musical forms and norms.

Mendelssohn, even if he has not ``innovated'' the musical language of his epoch, a language he knew like few other musicians, still ``re-created'' J. S. Bach and doing so influenced many of the most important composers of his time.

Composers of the ``Opera de Paris'' style, Meyerbeer, Halevy, did used very effective and unusual orchestration and staging procedures were none was required for being successful in a rather ``conservatively looking for things new'' period of ``Gaité Française''.

Bloch, even not a revolutionary composer have also created some extremely interesting and varied instrumental and sonic textures in his best works.

Another aspect I find striking is the high intellectual range of those composers. From Rossi to Mendelssohn and from Meyerbeer to Schoenberg, descendants from a culture who sets the education as an activity as high as serving God this is no surprise.