Change Agents of the Liberal Cantorate: In Celebration of the DFSSM’s 75th Anniversary: Eric Werner

Eric Werner

(1901-1988)

Werner’s back!! Those words at once engendered, excitement, curiosity, and trepidation among my classmates back in 1971 as we heard the news that the celebrated musicologist, Dr. Eric Werner, was returning to the New York campus of HUC after a four-year stint as founding chairman of the Department of Musicology at Tel Aviv University.

The eminent scholar and HUC-JIR Professor Emeritus of Liturgical Music , who taught at HUC in Cincinnati and New York from 1939-1967, was now back at 40 West 68th Street to meet the latest crop of students to be graced with his wisdom, insights and forthright opinions about the history and the current state of Jewish music.

Werner was born in Ludenberg , Austria, near Vienna. His father was a Greek scholar and cultivated Eric’s love for classical languages and history. As a child, Eric was proficient in clarinet and piano. He studied music and religion at universities in Graz, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Gottingen and Strasbourg and focused on composition, musicology and comparative religion, receiving his PhD in musicology at the University of Strasbourg in in 1928. He taught in Saarbrucken (1926-1933) and Breslau (1934-1938) and studied with many illustrious scholars including Curt Sachs and Martin Buber.

He emigrated to the U.S. in 1938 and began teaching Jewish music and liturgy as Idelsohn’s successor at the Cincinnati campus of HUC in 1939. There he continued Idelsohn’s work with the Birnbaum Collection and was also responsible for music at the College’s services serving as organist and choral conductor.

He was the author of seven books, several hundred wide-ranging scholarly articles, numerous chamber and orchestral compositions, including a complete sabbath evening service and other liturgical compositions. He also served as editor of the Union Songster: Songs and Prayers for Jewish Youth.

Upon his return to the New York campus in 1971, he taught a course in the history of Jewish music. It was a freewheeling , but academically challenging, attempt to open his students’ eyes to the depth and breadth of Jewish music. We were not a terribly sophisticated audience for Dr. Werner’s erudition. He was at once intimidating and yet had an innate sense of warmth. He did not speak in dulcet tones. Rather, his unique hoarse, gravelly, raspy voice was often a source of playful imitation by his students. He was not a tall man physically, but he was a giant as a scholar. Clad in his rumpled 3-piece suit with a jaunty bow tie, his lectures were peppered with vocabulary and references in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, German, and, occasionally, English. How I wish we had Google Translate in those days!

The eminent ethnomusicologist, Israel Katz, called Werner “a scholar of scholars” and a “tough cookie to reckon with in any public debate.” He could be irascible and brusque and did not suffer fools easily, often dismissing pompous pronouncements as “shtuss” and declaring suspect opinions as “bowdlerized” (look it up!). One of his hobbies was mathematics, but he was not above occasionally telling a ribald joke and schmoozing with his students, two of whom, Johanna Spector and Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, became renowned musicologists.

 Werner was a vehement critic of the increasing trend toward congregational singing, believing that “it reduced the music to the lowest common denominator of taste.” I am in possession of a letter he wrote to the leadership of the ACC in 1973 lamenting the state of Jewish music to be “badchanut,” and excoriating those ACC members who had “led the ACC to its present intellectual, esthetic and moral decline,” through their use of rock and pop style melodies.

 He referenced the hazzanim of the 17th and 18th centuries, who “by their frequent clowneries and badchan-imitations got the cantorate into so poor a reputation, that in the ensuing struggle over the problems of Emancipation they had to remain silent altogether, as nobody was willing to pay even the slightest attention to their words.” No one could ever accuse Werner of mincing words!

What we students did not know was that Werner was, perhaps, the single most influential driving force in the establishment of the HUC-JIR School of Sacred Music and, arguably, one of the most influential change agents of the modern cantorate.

Fully cognizant of Sulzer’s proposal to the Leipzig Synod in 1869 to establish a school for the training cantors, Werner began floating the idea of establishing a School of Sacred Music in the early 1940’s.Taking advantage of his personal relationship with HUC president, Nelson Glueck and JIR president, Stephen S. Wise, Werner partnered with the Society for the Advancement of Jewish Liturgical Music in 1946 urging the establishing of a School of Sacred Music, ostensibly professing a commitment to klal yisraeil, even though the group support came largely from the reform movement and HUC. Werner passionately appealed to the HUC Board of Governors in 1948 to establish a music school with the enthusiastic support of Israel Goldfarb, A.W. Binder, Jacob Weinberg and Isadore Freed. No doubt Sulzer would have been pleased.

 A brilliant scholar, Werner was also a brilliant marketer. Most reform congregations shied away from hiring a full-time cantor for philosophical and financial reasons. It was Werner who created the concept of “cantor-educator,” thereby, allowing synagogues to fill two leadership roles at the same time. And the rest is history. Today, as we celebrate the 75thanniversary of the DFSSM, we owe an immeasurable debt to this remarkable man whose vision resulted in the re-imagining and the flourishing of the cantorate.

 I have no doubt that if I told Dr. Werner, we all stand on his shoulders, he would respond in his inimitable way -“shtuss!” To which I would humbly and gratefully disagree and respond “No, Herr Professor, emes!”