Ilya Heifetz’s violin concerto: revisiting the issue of the Jewish national identity

Abstract

The article considers the instrumental creative work of a modern Russian-Israely composer Ilya Heifetz. His life and creative experience has two definite stages: Russian (before 1991) and Israely, and each of them is marked with the problem of reconsidering national roots in life and work. One of the examples of addressing this problem in Heifetz’s compositions of the Soviet period is his violin concerto. The author of the research considers the composer’s combination of the patterns of the academic genre and the intonational and structural peculiarities of Jewish folklore as an attempt to comprehend his national identity. The intonation and thematic analysis of the concerto compared with the composer’s statements distilled from his personal letters allows concluding about the presence of a concealed program revealing the problem of the history of the Jewish people and national character and reflecting the peculiarities of comprehension of their national identity by the subethnic group of Russian Jews. Since the main characteristic of this subethnic group is the Russian language and Russian culture perceived through it, the author of the research focuses on the way the peculiarities of the Russian composing school manifest themselves in this piece of music based on the Jewish intonations and genres.