My Life in (Jewish) Music
by Leonard J. Lehrman
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, then when?"
My father, Nathaniel S. Lehrman, M.D. tried to live by these tenets of Hillel, as have I. Yet how many times have we heard the accusations of "self-promotion," "cultural appropriation," or "radical chic," disparaging the sincerity of one's efforts and intentions, to contribute to causes larger than oneself?
"Are you now or have you ever been
A member of a conspiracy
To make life better for other people?"
Those lines come from Alger, Kim Rich's and my opera-in-progress about Alger Hiss. On October 24, 2025, we'll honor him, and others, in a United Nations 80th Birthday Concert at Vladeck Hall in the Bronx, where my wife Helene Williams co-founded Bronx Opera in 1967, and performed in public with me for the first time in 1987. Over 700 performances later, we continue to "keep on keepin' on," in the words of Pete Seeger, with whom we performed numerous times, including a setting I wrote of his translation from the Xhosa:
We've been waiting here too long. Perhaps we should use The Stairway?
No, The Stairway is dark. It's dangerous. Don't use it.
If we all go together, I'm sure it's safe to use The Stairway.
Neither Pete nor Alger was Jewish - nor Kim, for that matter - but all understood the need for Tikkun Olam, and the power music brought to words, fighting against fascism. That's what my parents expected of me: Friday the 13th of February, 1942, they met at a dance in Boston, where Dad played the fiddle, and Mom spoke for Russian War Relief. A year later she was interpreting for Solomon Mikhoels, the greatest Yiddish actor of all time. (A year after that, she became a US citizen, on D-Day; 12 days later she married my father and became Emily Rosenstein Lehrman.) When Helene & I performed in Minsk, Bobruisk, Vitebsk and Moscow in 2016, and mentioned her and Mikhoels, we were suddenly treated like royalty, and invited to the St. Petersburg premiere of Sergei Slonimsky's opera based on Boris Pasternak's translation of Shakespeare's King Lear, Mikhoels' greatest role. I translated the libretto back into English as a labor of love. An excerpt will also be sung on the October 24 concert.
Mom took me to a BAN THE BOMB demonstration at the U.N. in June 1962. That summer I wrote my first musical, San Po Jo, on atomic testing and U.S. imperialism. On September 8 at Temple Sinai of Roslyn came my Bar Mitzvah Cantata, aka Prayer for Peace:
"I pray that I may someday make people happy with music."
Dad took me to the August 28, 1963 March on Washington. A quarter century later, at Harlem School of the Arts, I would conduct my Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus in the Manhattan premiere of my teacher Elie Siegmeister's cantata, I Have a Dream.
Yevgeni Yevtushenko's "Do the Russians Want War?" was my first, singing, translation, published by my high school newspaper. Then came my own setting, in Russian and English, of Vladimir Mayakovsky's "My University," which I performed for Slonimsky's class in Leningrad in 1971. I had found my own voice, creating music and words that go together - Russian, German (Brecht; Heine; Jewish Voices in Germany), Spanish (Lorca, Neruda), French (Césaire), Yiddish (Naydus), Hebrew (Shir L'Shalom), Ladino, Ancient Greek (Euripides: "What Is God? An End to War"), and Romanian (Eminescu, Tauberg).
Most of my 12 operas and 7 musicals embrace Jewish themes. Hannah, the subject of my first article for Jewish Currents (April 1981), has been called "the quintessential Jewish opera," a subject I taught at Hebrew Union College. In 1987 Jewish Currents also featured my musical on Emma Goldman, which will be revived, alternating with the orchestral premiere of my opera Sima, at Theater for the New City next January. Operas based on Bernard Malamud stories were begun by Marc Blitzstein, completed by me. Leonard Bernstein called me "Marc's dybbuk." Elie Siegmeister called me his "Continuator" - hence the title of my autobiography. Please come hear me talk about it Wed. Sept. 10 7pm at Theodore's Books in Oyster Bay; Tues. Oct. 21 7:30-8:30pm on Zoom hosted by Bryant Library and Harvard Club of Long Island. Thank you.
https://www.leonardjlehrman.com
https://tinyurl.com/ContinuatorPreOrder