Musicians of Jewish Origin in Northern Croatia: Between Tradition and Modernism

The musicians of Jewish origin in Northern Croatia in the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century belong to the Ashkenazi families who were an integral part of the Austro Hungarian cultural circle.

Music has a very important place in Jewish culture and represents an important segment of education. As an important social activity, music and musical education have become for the Jews a possibility to achieve social esteem.

Musicians of Jewish origin were active in the Croatian culture on two levels. On one side they took care of preserving their own tradition within Jewish societies and temples, and on the other side, they contributed to Croatian music through numerous individual artistic works in the area of composition, performance and musicology. The spiritual conflict between tradition and assimilation of Jewish musicians caused by the modernization of civil society has best been exemplified by composers Žiga Hirschler (1894 – 1941), Rikard Schwarz (1897 ‒ 1941/42?) and Aron Marko Rothmüller (1904 – 1993). Every one of the mentioned composers’ work is permeated with the dichotomy of preserving the Jewish tradition and blending in the European music mainstream of Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism. The specificity of the Jewish origin composers in Croatian music, lies in their being or not involved in the neo-national Croatian music style during the period between the two wars and in the way they were able to handle the neo-national tendencies at the same time preserving their own tradition during the modernization of Croatian society.