A National Tikkun or a Personal One? Mordecai Seter’s Midnight Vigil (Tikkun Ḥatzot): Sixty Years Later

2021 marks the sixtieth anniversary of an Israeli musical composition which was tagged, repeatedly and consistently throughout its history since its 1963 premiere, as an Israeli masterpiece (Cohen, 1963; Ben-Zeev, 1998): Midnight Vigil (for soloist, symphonic orchestra, and three choruses, 1961). Merely two years after its premiere, and before he turned fifty, its composer, Mordecai Seter, won the 1965 Israel Prize for his magnum opus. Midnight Vigil was also chosen for the Millennium Festival of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (1.1.2000) along with Beethoven’s Ninth, and concludes the IPO’s festive collection of CDs commemorating their 2016 eightieth anniversary.

Published scholarly work on Midnight Vigil (Grover-Friedlander, 2005; Shelleg, 2014) discuss the work hermeneutically, but stay away from the perplexing double-myth, which hampered the biography of this work and of its composer. On the one hand, the initial reception (fourteen previews and reviews in eleven newspapers) crowned Seter as a national composer; on the other, the reception of his introverted personality—and of his late music—dubbed him as a “composer’s composer.” Beyond the overt celebration of the national Zionist narrative of destruction, exile, and redemption—even in this national (or “national”) composition—we find the “Hidden Seter” in Midnight Vigil: the composer who strove for spirituality in his music, whose drama was both internal and external.

Demythologizing the composer’s reception allows us to argue that Midnight Vigil’s climactic section, the tableau “Jacob’s Dream,” is a crux of Seter’s style, which both summarizes core-repertory among his earlier pieces, and prophesizes his late—indeed, Late Works. We analyze the roots of “Jacob’s Dream” as they appear in Seter’s Sabbath Cantata (1940, “Lecha dodi”; “Yitgadal”); Ricercar (1953, first movt.); and its ethereal reflection in Janus (1972).