Eili Eili: A Song History
"Eili, Eili" (also printed "Eli, Eli") is a Yiddish lament built on the second verse of Psalm 22.[1][2] Jacob Koppel Sandler, a theater composer who had come to the United States in 1888, wrote the music for M. Horowitz's 1896 operetta The Hero and Bracha, and he later maintained that he had composed the song's melody for that production.[1][2] The actress Sophie Karp introduced it on stage, singing it in a scene of a Jewish girl's crucifixion.[1][3] The Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University catalogs a voice-and-piano edition issued in 1909 by M. Richmond Music Co. of New York, which credits the music to Sandler and the words to Boris Thomashefsky.[4]
Noël Bellemare and the 1520s Hours Workshop, Adjoining Leaves from a Book of Hours: Penitential Psalms and King David in Prayer, ink, tempera and liquid gold on vellum, c. 1530–35. Shown for its subject, King David at prayer; it has no connection to the song.
In the years that followed, the song traveled far from the Yiddish stage, often billed as an anonymous folk melody: cantors such as Yossele Rosenblatt sang it, Sophie Breslau performed it at the Metropolitan Opera in 1917, Belle Baker put it on record in 1919, and violinists issued arrangements that called it a traditional tune.[1] In April 1919 Chicago's Daily Jewish Courier told Sandler's side of the story and pressed his claim to authorship.[3] Sandler sought a copyright that same year, and in 1925 he sued the publisher Joseph P. Katz in federal court in New York; Judge John C. Knox found for Katz on a technical point of copyright law without ruling on who wrote the tune.[1] Sandler compared himself to "a father that's told he can't have his own child."[1] The Encyclopaedia Judaica records Rosenblatt's claim that the melody was sung in Europe before the operetta, calls the question unresolved, and observes that the anonymous "folk song" versions all came later than the operetta.[2]
Both the Hebrew University catalog and the Encyclopaedia Judaica credit the music to Sandler, though the authorship question remains open.[2][4] Judy House arranges "Eili Eili" in A Collection Of Jewish Music For The Mountain Dulcimer, a book of Jewish music arranged in DAD tuning that gives each song its own page on history and meaning.[5]
Sources
- Musicology Now (American Musicological Society): "'Eili, Eili' as a 'Traditional Yiddish Melody'".
- Jewish Virtual Library (Encyclopaedia Judaica): "Jacob Koppel Sandler".
- Newberry Library, Foreign Language Press Survey: "How the Famous Jewish Classic Song 'Eli, Eli,' Was Created" (Daily Jewish Courier, April 10, 1919).
- Jewish Music Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem: "Eili, eili".
- Judy House: "A Collection Of Jewish Music For The Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Noël Bellemare and the 1520s Hours Workshop, Adjoining Leaves from a Book of Hours: Penitential Psalms and King David in Prayer, ink, tempera and liquid gold on vellum, c. 1530–35. The Cleveland Museum of Art.