Hazzanut / Cantorial Music

Hazzanut is the work of the hazzan (cantor): a solo male voice that leads the prayers of an Ashkenazi synagogue service. The melodic vocabulary draws on the Jewish modes (the steiger) which carry seasonal and liturgical meaning — different prayers require different modes. Phrasing is rubato, ornamented and openly emotional, with extended melismatic runs on key words. A choir may support the cantor, but the cantor is the protagonist. Recordings from the early 20th century — Yossele Rosenblatt foremost — preserve the form before the Holocaust and emigration thinned the great European cantorial schools.

The cantorial tradition in Ashkenazi Judaism goes back to the medieval period, but its modern operatic flowering belongs to late-19th- and early-20th-century Eastern Europe — Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany — where the great cantors became local celebrities. The early commercial recording industry put figures like Yossele Rosenblatt, Gershon Sirota and Mordechai Hershman onto international 78s in the 1900s through 1930s. The Holocaust destroyed the communities that had supported these cantors at home; postwar hazzanut continued primarily in the United States and Israel.

Listen for how the cantor stretches and ornaments certain syllables — the long melisma is not vocal display for its own sake but a theological gesture, dwelling on a key word of the prayer. The accompanying choir's role is to frame the soloist, not compete with him.

Yossele Rosenblatt's 'Eli Eli' (1916) is the standard early-20th-century entry. Moshe Koussevitzky's mid-century recordings show how the tradition adapted to American synagogues.

Yossele Rosenblatt was so admired as a tenor that he was offered the role of Eléazar in Halévy's opera 'La Juive' at the Chicago Opera in the 1910s; he reportedly turned it down because the role would have required him to sing the part as a non-Jewish character on the operatic stage.