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“A FAMOUS PASSOVER MELODY,” BY THE REV. F. L. COHEN

“... Isaac Nathan, a fashionable singing master of London ... conceived the idea of imitating the ‘Irish Melodies’ of Thomas Moore (batches of which had been published since 1807, with the greatest success).... Less fortunate than Moore, Byron’s verses were not wedded to melodies of the national type they professed, because even before Nathan had thus exhausted his choice, he had made a most superficial search through the repertory of the Anglo-Jewish synagogues of his day, which, by the way, had not yet experienced the inspiringly melodious influence of ‘Polish’ _Chazanuth_.... The opening poem, ‘She walks in beauty,’ for example, he set to a tawdry _Lecha Dodi_.... But among the six actually ‘Hebrew’ melodies, there were one or two exceptions to the general inferiority of the music; and prominent among these was the tender and expressive air to which, by a happy inspiration, Nathan set the verses:――

‘O weep for those that wept by Babel’s stream.’

Here, at least,

‘Music and sweet poetry agreed, As well they should, the sister and the brother’;

and the result became world famous as a type of what Hebrew melody might be. It has often been republished; and has also appeared in other settings, as by the Rev. M. Hast to Ibn Gabirol’s hymn:――

‘At morn I beseech Thee,’

or by Ernst Pauer in his Traditional Hebrew Melodies. But what is more especially known to and prized by musicians, it forms the only pianoforte composition of Robert Franz, the great songwriter, under the title

‘Beweinet, die geweint an Babel’s Strand,’

and as such, it has become famous.... The origin of the melody is ... simply the old chant of the _Cohanim_ on the Festivals, as it used to be sung in London synagogues on the Passover a hundred years ago, with a joyous touch of Pesach tune....”¹

¹ _Jewish Chronicle_, 1st April, 1904, page 21.