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"Your first deed of arms was, without doubt, to seat yourself and write your 'Lettres Juives," said the king; "those inspiring letters in which the knight of the cross mocks at Christianity and casts his glove as a challenge to revealed religion."
And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks in the desolation of the third of the "Poèmes juives." Once again, the Ecclesiast utters his disillusion, his cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanity of existence in the soliloquy of the 'cello in the rhapsody "Schelomo."
The Karaites were a sect among the Jews, who confined their observances and religious belief to the precepts of Moses, while the Rabbinists followed all the wild fancies of the Talmud. An excellent account of these sects is to be found in the Lettres Juives, or Jewish Spy, by the Marquis d'Argens.
The works that precede the "Trois Poèmes juives," the first of his compositions in which the racial gesture is consciously made, do not really represent the man as he is.
For in the process of searching out a style befitting this biblical drama, and in the effort to master the idiom necessary to it, Bloch executed the compositions that have placed him so eminently in the company of the few modern masters. The three Psalms, "Schelomo," "Israel," portions of the quartet, have but trodden further in the direction marked out by the "Trois Poèmes juives."
Indeed, he risked nothing but the bastinado; while I, if discovered, would be given over to the hangman, and could only escape my fate by becoming a Mussulman." "What an earnest and profitable Christian Holy Mother Church would thus have lost in the author of Les Lettres Juives!" said Frederick, laughing. "But what an exquisite harem the city of Constantinople would have won!" cried Voltaire.
No doubt, one begins to sense the proper personality of Bloch in the delicate coloring of the two little orchestral sketches "Hiver-Printemps," in the mournful English horn against the harp in "Hiver," in the chirruping hurdy-gurdy commencement of "Printemps." Unfortunately, the cantilena in the second number still points backward. But with the "Trois Poèmes juives," the original Bloch is at hand.
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