”A Wagner of the Jews” Moses Pergament

Moses Pergament is a forgotten oddity in Finland’s musical history. In spite of a publicly acclaimed composition concert debut in 1914 in Helsinki, his colourful and cosmopolitan music has mostly remained unperformed in his country of origin. One explanation is that Pergament during his lifetime had to fight actively against the strong forces of antisemitism; after having settled in Sweden in 1915, it would still take him several decades before he was accepted in the Society of Swedish Composers, and when Jean Sibelius discusses Pergament’s debut concert in his diary entries, he expresses himself unabashedly antisemitically. When the Swedish composer and music critic Wilhelm Peterson-Berger called Pergament a “foreign parasite” in an interview, Pergament traveled to Peterson-Berger’s home and delivered him a slap in the face that made him famous overnight – though not as a composer.

After having been unjustly neglected for so long, we now want to highlight his music in a unique portrait concert – likely the first of its kind in Finland since his debut over a hundred years ago. We discover a composer of many stylistic shifts – from the late-Romantic early works and the French-influenced violin sonata, via selections from The Jewish Song to the late, free-tonal works.

The concert will be preceded by a panel discussion at 18.00 with music writer Carl-Gunnar Åhlén and historian Henrik Rosengren, who both have written books about Pergament. The talk will be introduced by professor emeritus Eero Tarasti.

The concert is arranged with generous support from Svenska Kulturfonden, Pacius Minnesfond and Emilie och Rudolf Gesellius minnesfond.

"I wanted to be a Wagner of the Jews. I worshiped Wagner - along with Sibelius, whom I knew personally - and read everything by and about Wagner. Just as he drew inspiration from Germanic mythology, I wanted to take mine from the Bible." - Moses Pergament 

Tickets: 25 / 20 / 15 €

Moses Pergament was born into a Jewish family in Helsinki in 1893 and began playing the violin at an early age. After studies in St. Petersburg with Leopold Auer's assistant he decided, due to a hand injury, to focus on composition, although he did continue to play the violin and was active in the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra for several years. As a Jew, he could not become a Finnish citizen at this time, and in 1915 he decided to move to Sweden. He would soon get a job as a reviewer in major Swedish newspapers, and even though it was a job he never felt at entirely home with, his texts on music are among the most significant in the history of Swedish music criticism. In book form, he published the Siamese twin couple “På vandring med Fru Musica” and “Ny vandring med Fru Musica”, as well as a book about Swedish composers and a Jenny Lind biography.

In Sweden, he ended up outside the musical circles in several ways. Swedish was Pergament's mother tongue, and in 1919 he also became a Swedish citizen, but he would soon learn from more established composers that he could never ever become classified as a "Swedish composer". That he was a Jew hardly made things better.

Pergament’s Jewish background would become increasingly important in his artistic life. When German Jews fled from the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, Pergament formed a Jewish choir and orchestra in Stockholm, for which he arranged Jewish music. When the Second World War broke out, he once again tried to find something unifying and humanistic in music; after the Soviet Union invaded Finland, he organized a concert in aid of “Finlandshjälpen” at the Stockholm Concert Hall. When the news came about the horrors of the Holocaust, Pergament wrote his magnum opus - The Jewish song, for large orchestra, two vocal soloists and choir. We hear a movement from this choral symphony in a version for piano and voice in this portrait concert.

This concert includes a cross-section of Moses Pergament’s creative career, from the early works written while he was still living in Helsinki, to his last works before his death in 1977. We hear songs in Yiddish, German, Swedish, French and Italian, chamber music in different constellations, as well as the unusual Fantasie differente for cello and string nonet. Most of the music is probably played for the first time in Finland.