‘Making a Scene’: Returning a Jewish Comic Opera Star to the Stage
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Lecture
Produced by the American Society for Jewish Music’s Jewish Music Forum Co-sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Leonora Braham (1853-1931), creator of five principal soprano roles in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas between 1881 and 1887 (including Yum-Yum in The Mikado, 1885), first appeared in my research during a visit to the West London Synagogue archives in 2015. As Leonora Abraham, she sang in the Synagogue’s choir between 1870 and 1874, prior to her first professional engagement with the German Reed Entertainments. Having featured Braham’s life and work in two further pieces of scholarship, I was inspired by her opening words in a 1930 interview, ‘So someone has found me at last’, to write The Honour: a new 45-minute play with music which returns Braham to the environment in which she was happiest and best known.
This presentation gives an overview of Braham’s life on- and off-stage, and describes the reasons for and methods involved in giving her a platform beyond traditional scholarly materials. Danielle Padley will discuss the challenges of incorporating the subject of a performer’s Jewish background into theatre intended to appeal to and educate a wide and varied audience, and will look ahead to plans for incorporating more performative media into her research on Jewish music-making in Victorian England.
About the Speaker
Dr. Danielle Padley is a musicologist specialising in Jewish music-making in nineteenth-century England. She investigates musical activities within geographically and socially diverse Jewish communities to enhance and challenge accepted narratives about Jewish life in England. She is a Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, where she teaches the module ‘Music at the Margins of Victorian Society’. Danielle has an interdisciplinary publication and research record which explores Jewish musical activity in a variety of contexts, including synagogue worship, education, theatre, concert and drawing-room entertainments, and literary fiction. She is a trained singer and theatre performer, regularly performing both established and new writing within Cambridge’s local theatre scene. She grew up singing in and conducting synagogue choirs, and for nearly 12 years was Musical Director of Cambridge’s Hebrew choir, Kol Echad. Danielle also sings and plays violin, keys, and folk harp with folk-rock band Once Again.