Jerusalem’s former leper hospital, Hansen House, will become a musical time machine on Wednesday and patrons sent back to the Baroque era, when violinists like Giuseppe Tartini met the devil in a dream.
Tartini was so impressed by how well the Prince of Darkness fiddled, he composed Devil’s Trill Sonata as a result when he woke up.
Beyond meeting the ruler of hell, Tartini also taught one of the very few women composers and performers of that time, Maddalena Laura Sirmen. The afternoon concert, part of the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra’s fourth “Witches?” Festival will include her String Quartets as well as Joseph Haydn’s Hexenminuett.
The festival focuses on the unique and often dark roles pushed on women in the context of witchcraft, self-expression, and social status. Works by Fanny Mendelssohn and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre will be performed.
“There is a moment when you can actually hear the witches’ laughter in this five-minute movement,” violinist Noam Gal told The Jerusalem Post about the Hexenminuett.
Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra performs 'Witches?'
He also warned against accepting a facile breakdown of culture into neat dates.
“I had the honor of playing with an exact replica of the violin bow Tartini used,” he said. “In his personal case, he had two. One was in the fashion of the Baroque and the other in what we now refer to as the Classical style.”
Gal will perform using a 1780 French-built violin with a modified, sharper neck incline in the 19th-century fashion.
“This is perfect for exploring Baroque music because it is both from that time and ours,” he joked. “We will be using classic-style violin bows during the concert,” he hastened to add.
Baroque music offers musicians a great deal of artistic freedom precisely because audience members do not usually come to a performance with their minds pre-set on this or that famous recorded performance, which they expect to hear more of.
Instead, musicians and singers can add their own ornamentations in dialogue with the written instructions left by the composers and the spirit of the work itself.
“Tartini literally wrote the book about this topic,” the 1692 Treatise on Ornamentation, Gal said.
“So as musicians we know what he wanted in a very precise way, yet, because we all love this music, we also enjoy the remarkable freedom to add new ones as well, and the audience feels it.”
As Gal adjusted his violin’s scroll, best-selling fantasy author Judith Kagan noted that while she, too, enjoys the sentiment behind Tish Thawer’s famous sentence “We are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn” – expressed in Thawer’s 2015 fantasy novel The Witches of BlackBrook and now a best-selling shirt slogan – she thinks life is much more interesting.
“During the Salem Witch Trials, men were accused of witchcraft as well and put to death; this, after all, is the brutality of the patriarchy – it tears down both women and men,” Kagan shared with the Post.
Kagan points to what some of these men did.
One was a grandfather who confessed that he was the witch – not his granddaughter – so he sacrificed his own life to save hers.
Another man handled his court case in such a way that he was found guilty of treason. He was still hanged, but his property was passed on to his heirs and not taken by the state, as it would have been had he been “conspiring with the devil.”
“We like to divide things neatly in our heads, girls against boys, but life is not like that,” she added.
Kagan wrote Harashta (Witch), a highly unusual fantasy novel.
In its center is a deeply observant Jewish woman who does not do anything without first checking with her rabbi if it is according to Jewish law. She also casts spells inspired by Jewish incantation bowls, a real-world practice rooted in the Middle East of 1,300 years ago. She also fights demons.
These demons, as Jewish sources describe them, speak Aramaic and mimic our own human world with an eye out to replacing the sons and daughters of Adam.
“Asmodeus studied Torah in the heavenly beit midrash,” Kagan quotes from the Talmud with a smile, “as a writer, I am part of a current trend in fantasy literature. I want to express my own culture, which happens to be that of an observant Jewish woman, and I do not want to be confined to the Western models of what is a witch.”
“My heroine,” unlike one in Thawer’s book, “would not consider herself a witch. She would describe what she does as segula [a virtue].”
It should also be noted that, despite an epic quest in which she meets demons and even secular Jewish people, the heroine stays 100% observant. Now in its fifth print with an English translation in the works, the book is a small magical feat in today’s screen-infused world. Readers might consider adding this gem of a book to a magical two-day music festival.
The fourth edition of the “Witches?” music festival will be held September 17-18. For more, visit Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra at jbo.co.il/en/home_en/ or call 02-6715888.