This talk discusses the only elegy written in memory of Moses Mendelssohn that
was set to music: the 1786 cantata Sulamith und Eusebia, probably the first
publicly performed musical work by a German Jew, and that to a libretto by a
Protestant poet. Construing the piece against the backdrop of contemporary
musical works in this genre and in counterpoint with some of Mendelssohn’s own
writings, I illustrate how it engages with and interprets Mendelssohn’s
aesthetic, political-theological, and language philosophy, performing in words
and music his utopian design of Judaism as a universal, enlightened religion.
My reading ultimately underscores the incompleteness of the historical moment
that engendered the piece - a singular if brief moment of Christian-Jewish
encounter at the outset of German modernity in late eighteenth-century Berlin.

Bio:
Yael Sela-Teichler is a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
this year. As a music historian, her research crosses boundaries between
musicology, Jewish cultural history, and the cultural history of Germany and
England. Since the completion of her dissertation at Oxford University in 2010,
she has published articles on music in German Jewish Enlightenment as well as
music and female domesticity in early modern England, for example, in the
Jewish Quarterly Review and Renaissance Studies. She is currently preparing a
monograph on music in the writings and commemoration of Moses Mendelssohn, and
is editing a collection on Music and Memory in the German Jewish Experience of
Modernity. In September 2014 she is expected to take up a position as assistant
professor and head of the musicology program at the Open University of Israel.