Inessa galante biography of michael

Patrick Bade | Two Great Jewish Singers from Riga Hermann Jadlowker and Inese Galante | 09.11.22

Visuals and music played throughout the presentation.

• Thanks, thanks, Trudy. Well tonight I’m talking about two great Latvian Jewish singers who are both born in Riga, they both began their careers there. People often say to me, well with a name like Patrick, how do you land up talking so much about all things and people Jewish. Patrick not being obviously Jewish name. And so I’m going to tell you that because it is actually relevant to what I’m talking about tonight. In the 1980s, I was working at Classic FM Radio with Mel Cooper on a series of programmes about the history of the Metropolitan Opera. And one night we were working very late at Classic FM and Mel said to me that he was due to do a charity lecture for a Jewish charity in Scotland about great Jewish singers. And he was having a bit of a panic because he really couldn’t think of any. Well, I’m sure you know by now that one of my great private passions is for historic recordings of the human voice. So it was quite easy for me to just dictate him off the top of my head to talk about Jewish singers.

I knew what their real names were because in the early 20th century, a lot of singers who had obviously Jewish names changed their names. It was difficult to have a career in the opera house internationally with two obviously a Jewish name. So I knew, for instance, that Rosa Reiser was really Rosa Burschstein, and that Jan Pierce was Jakob Pincus Perlmuth, and that Richard Tucker was Ruben Ticker. So, I gave Mel all this information, then I went home, and I made a tape. And in the 1980s, that was still actually a cassette tape. And he sent a bicycle to my house and picked it up and he went up to Scotland, he gave the talk. And I really didn’t think much more about it for a couple of years until a lady called Brenda Josephs in London, she approached me, she wanted to put o

Music has been a part of my life ever since I was a little child, a significant witness to the passing of the years. I can still remember. Whether it was listening to the Divine Liturgy, which Mother would play on her treasured vinyl records (LPs), or to the easy listening stations at the Reno Café,where the old Philips radio was forever on. And later by choice, when I was older, music would accompany me everywhere from the city across the ocean and into the desert. Whatever the condition of the heart, as King David one of the authors of the Psalms well knew, there is consolation in music. But I have even from my childhood noted a difference between what we might call sacred and secular music.[1] It seemed the natural distinction to make. And the manifest difference between the two? In very simple terms, sacred music relates to God, to ‘the divine’, whereas secular music will typically relate to the human, ‘to the earthly’. Sacred music as well, has a tradition of being accepted as a music genre set apart for worship by a large group of a believing community. It is conventionally in the form of a chant (“a rhythmic speaking or singing”).[2] Another difference between the sacred and the secular is that the former is text confirmed in scripture and liturgical texts, and does not stimulate or arouse violence or wickedness,[3] which secular music can do.

This is a tremendous topic and one which can stimulate much discussion, especially when it comes to definitions and to people’s biases of what actually constitutes the sacred.[4] It could be as difficult as trying to get behind Dostoyevsky’s enigmatic “[b]eauty will save the world” spoken by the Christ-like figure the epileptic Prince Myshkin. But technically, at least, chant, is one of the signature characteristics of sacred music together with its connection to ritual and cultic practices. I can be moved to tears, for example, when I listen to