“THE PIONEERS OF PALESTINE" Opus 18 (1924) (In Hebrew, “Hechalutz”) Scenes of Folk Life in Palestine. by Jacob Weinberg (1879-1956) (Liner Notes by Ellen Weinberg Mausner, the composer's granddaughter) Jacob Weinberg (1879-1956) was my grandfather. He was an accomplished Russian pianist, composer, and music teacher. This CD has the highlights of his folk-opera “The Pioneers of Palestine” (or “Hechalutz”, in Hebrew). It was written in 1924, in Jerusalem. This work is not to be confused with the poem "The Pioneers" by Walt Whitman or the musical work "The Pioneers" (1946) by composer Herbert Fromm, or a rock group called "The Pioneers". This opera won a prestigious international composition contest: the International Contest of the Sesquicentennial Association at Philadelphia, 1926. It has a history of performances - in Jerusalem (1925), Berlin (1938), and in Manhattan (at Carnegie Hall in 1941 and 1946). It was also performed at the City Center (the former “Mecca Temple”) in 1934. This CD consists of three parts: (1) the original recordings from the concert version of this opera which were performed at Carnegie Hall on February 16, 1946, (2) the recordings from a concert version of this opera at the Theater at St. Clements on August 11, 2012, and (3) the complete Act I piano score of the opera (without vocals) performed by pianist Robert Wilson in the Louis Brown Recording Studio in Manhattan. This piano score can be used to appreciate the music itself. The Act I piano score can also be used as a rehearsal tool, for singers preparing the songs. The 1946 production at Carnegie Hall in NYC starred three established opera singers: Sidor Belarsky (baritone), Doris Doree (soprano), and Nathaniel Spencer (tenor). The chorus was the Hazomir Chorus. It was conducted by Mark Silver, a gifted cantor and also a former "first violin" in the St. Petersburg Orchestra in Russia. Interestingly, Mark Silver was also a composer, and on elf his works won the Jacob Weinberg Coposition Prize, offered for a number of years by the Hebrew Union College. The choreography was done by the great dancer Dvora Lapson. There was an earlier concert of this work in 1941 at Carnegie Hall, with different conductor and singers, but Jacob Weinberg of course was also at the piano then. The 2012 concert consisted of myself (Ellen Weinberg) as narrator, Cynthia Hilts, our musical director and pianist, and the four singers were: Asa Fradkin (baritone), Karin Laine (soprano), Daniel Neer (tenor) and Adi Sieradzki (mezzo). One of the tracks ("Hagganah" the Marching Song) is not in the opera but was written by Weinberg and included in the concert to give our lovely mezzo (Adi) another work to perform. I produced this CD as a tribute to Jacob Weinberg’s genius. I dedicate it to Walter Weinberg, who was my father (and Jacob’s only child) – and to my brilliant mother, Adelaide Savitsky Weinberg. My wonderful parents appreciated Jacob’s music. Walter was a magnificent pianist, organist, accordionist, and music teacher in his own right. I hope you enjoy this beautiful music. It is classical with the incorporation of folk melodies of the Jewish and Arab traditions. It captures an idealistic time in history when Jews and Arabs lived together in peace in a desert tract of land called Palestine. It also captures the spirit of the pioneers who came to Palestine for a new life. They worked the desert land tirelessly to turn it into a fertile pIace where they could live with their families and worship in their way, in freedom and peace. I sincerely hope this CD will inspire new productions of “The Pioneers of Palestine”. I invite your feedback and inquiries. I can be reached at emausner@gmail.com and my cell # is 347-729-8292. The opera is registered with ASCAP and copyrighted as well.. There are several CD’s of Jacob Weinberg’s music that were produced through the Milken Archive on the Naxos Label. I invite you to listen to – and enjoy- his many other compositions. Look at the Milken Archive website. His works are registered through ASCAP. Robert Wilson has recorded the Act I piano score which was remastered too by Louis Brown Recording. He is a man of many talents - not only a classically-trained expert pianist, but also a musical director and orchestrator. He is also an accomplished singer, who told me he used to sing Jacob Weinberg's music with the choir at Temple Emanu-el in Manhattan. He is currently working on orchestrations for "The Pioneers of Palestine" and has completed Act I. I myself an a physician specializing in psychiatry. I have an MD and a Ph.D. in neuroscience. I also have an MFA from the Actors Studio Drama School in Manhattan. Amusingly I played a psychiatrist on "The Sopranos' (episode #48, "Whoever Did This") I've done acting, playwriting, stand-up, and especially enjoy writing and performing jokes. I live in Manhattan and have two amazing adult children, Deborah and Mark Mausner. I have been working on preserving and promoting the legacy of Jacob Weinberg for the past eight years. The more research I do, the more I discover. It is a never-ending exploration that has been a joy, thrill, and compulsion. Discovering - and preserving - Jacob's astonishing legacy - over 137 works!- has been a mission full of inspiration and joy. I feel sometimes he is looking over my shoulder from heaven, smiling and urging me on. If he were alive today, surely he would be a master of social media, promoting his works and making new friend daily. I truly hope this album will inspire a new production of this charming, tuneful opera - a full production with sets and costumes - not only a concert version, in the coming years. The rights are managed by ASCAP in Manhattan at 1900 Broadway, NY, NY 10019. I can be reached at emausner@gmail.com. I am now including a wonderful and very personal essay written by Jacob Weinberg himself. It gives us insight into his creativity and his inspired and uplifted musical spirit. It was published in the Jewish Music Forum in 1949 (the 25th anniversary of this 1924 opera) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Why And How I Composed "Hechalutz" " by Jacob Weinberg (the Composer) (Written On the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Opera) (1949) "This is a confession coming from a musician who, though born a Jew, had to be converted to Judaism. Caused by his spiritual contact with the land of Israel, that conversion finally resulted in his finding his own way in the realm of music. When, in 1922, I settled with my family in Jerusalem, I was a "gainer", not only as an immigrant, but unfortunately also as a Jew. Brought up in an assimilated bourgeois environment, a graduate of a Russian high school, Russian university and Russian conservatory, I was completely devoid of Jewish education and utterly ignorant in elementary things of religion and history of my people, as well as illiterate in Hebrew and Yiddish. When at the age of eleven I lost my father, I got a sheet of paper with Kaddish written in Russian letters and went twice a day to the "soul" where I recited the prayer as a parrot, without understanding a single word of it. Soon I memorized the strange combination of foreign sounds, and, being musically inclined, got absorbed by the speech-melody of the language. Its inner music struck my imagination. A new, poetic, different and fantastic world emanated from the words. An aroma of the past, the subconscious message of generations who through millennia lisped the same holy and simple words, left a profound and unforgettable imprint on my soul. I did not mind the senselessness of the sounds. It seemed that I loved them not despite of non-understanding, but rather because of it. Much later, I met Catholics who prayed in Latin and confessed of being unable to translate the text. In my ignorance, I held that the "magic" of religion consists of not to be understood, since its superconscious nature is beyond understanding. Perhaps this strengthened my natural inclination to a musical concept of religion and compelled me to express my religious emotions in melody proper, as our Chassidim did of yore. Even later, while reciting the Kaddish with perfect understanding of every word, I could not help remembering the fascinating, mysterious experience of my childhood. When in my thirties I entered Palestine,I still remained a typical product of assimilation, which means a fellow who had to dig deep in the dictionary, to finally fish out the word "Shalom". I was neither a chalutz, nor even a zionist. I was just a refugee from the horror of revolution, its hunger, its cold, its degradation of human dignity. Palestine accepted me with open arms. By this I do not mean any social events, such as receptions, banquets and the like. What composer ever got any? It was rather I who accepted Palestine with open arms. I felt her motherly touch, her friendly greeting all the way around: at Shderot Rotschild or Beth Am in Tel-Aviv, then a small town of 35,000 inhabitants, at Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, in the fields surrounding Petakh-Tikva, or in the tiny community of Talpioth, where I spent my first few months in Eretz Israel. To make a long story short, Palestine opened my eyes on myself as a man and a musician, and love all as a Jew. Just as Palestine was a newborn country, I became a newborn Jew. All the music that I composed thereafter was, and still is, an organic outgrowth of that electrifying stimulus generated by the land. There was, however, even a bigger cause for my enthusiasm, a deeper and more meaningful source of inspiration. This was the people. I asked myself: who is it that injects this laughing spirit of rejuvenation into the country? The obvious answer was: it is the Youth, the young crowds that storm into the land from every part of the world. I felt I was witnessing a formidable event of historic proportions: a nation scattered to the four corners of the earth, a people differentiated through the ages begins to integrate. I saw the ancient dream "l-shana habad G'Yirushalaim" coming true before my eyes. After a fascinating spring evening spent in a Kvutzah near Talpioth, while slowly moving home in bright moonlight, a sudden idea struck me: won't this exotic, colorful environment and these chalutzim and chalutzoth bubbling with energy make an enchanting picture for a stage work! The thought hit malice lightning. Ibecame sort of magnetized to it and began to visualize its dramatic and musical potentiality. An opera! Why, yes, of course. But where is the plot? Where is the grand opera tradition, the prima donna, the romance, the dagger and cloak, the heroic poise, and so on? However, argued I, should the paraphernalia of operatic stage be frozen forever? We haven't got romantic heroism over here, in Eretz Israel. But aren't our chalutzim REAL heroes? Not heroes of love stories, but heroes of their people? Instead of sacrificing their life for a sweetheart, don't they offer "their last full measure of devotion" to their people? Didn't many of them die for their people? Isn't a plot like this immensely more significant than the orthodox opera stuff? In this age of democracy, shouldn't opera be democratized too? I answered in the affirmative and soon after a libretto of a people's opera was written in which the sole hero is the people itself. The music was finished in two months of ardent work. Orchestration took another eight months. Thus, a quarter of a century ago, an Israeli opera was born, a child begotten through the composer's spiritual contact with the soil of Israel and the people of Israel. May that soil and that people continue to inspire us as ever before and for generations to come." ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In his last sentences he states that he hope the people of Palestine (now Israel) will continue to inspire us. It does. I went to Jerusalem in November, 2016 to the National Library of Israel where I studied the Jacob Michael Collection of papers by Jacob Weinberg (more than 10,000 in number). Dr. Gila Flam, the librarian, made me a USB stick with the audio recordings from the 1946 concert of this opera that were made on Tru-Tone Records (a recording company in Newark, NJ) on vinyl. They were then mastered by Louis Brown Recording in Manhattan and are preserved here. I have donated many boxes worth of scores, articles, books about Jacob Weinberg to the YIVO Archives in Manhattan, at the Center for Jewish History, at 15 W 16th St., 3rd Floor, where they have been given the Archive number 1516. (This is easy to remember since it is also the address of the Center itself). My thanks to Louis Brown, Bob Wilson, Dr. Gila Flam (head librarian at the National Library of Israel who helped me so much with the research on Jacob Weinberg when I visited there, and Leo Greenbaum, head librarian and friendly maven of the YIVO Archives. Ellen Weinberg Mausner June 14, 2017 (My father Walter's birthday. Happy Birthday, Dad! This is a tribute to you and to your father, Jacob Weinberg!)