The Music of Jewish Prayer (and something about my music)

Judit Niran Frigyesi's book, Writing on Water, the Sounds of Jewish Prayer, is about a unique kind of music: the way that traditional Hungarian Jews used to chant their prayers. As she describes it, the chanting is inseparable from the words of the prayers, and the meaning of prayer is conveyed as much by the chant as by the words.
The word "chant," is my own. Figyesi does not use it at all in reference to the prayers she describes. The basic musical foundation is what we would call nusah in modern Hebrew (she renders the word in the Ashkenazic pronunciation of her informants: nisech). Cantors improvise on this foundation and add melodies. The Jewish men whose prayer she studied would never think of praying without this chanting.
They were children in the 1920s and 1930s, and they grew up learning to pray, with melody, as they learned how to talk.
Toward the end of the book, Frigyesi describes the revival of the Hungarian Jewish community after the collapse of Communism, in the mode of Modern Orthodoxy, which is essentially the kind of Judaism I have come to know here in Israel.
It's not the same thing.
But many musical experiences are deeply meaningful and not the same thing. Judit describes the many concerts she went to when she was a high school student and then a student at the music academy, and she also describes the experience of recording Gregorian chants with a chorus of which she was a member.
Neither Judit nor I can make ourselves into the elderly Holocaust survivors she describes, who kept alive the organic Judaism of their childhood. For me, music is something largely separate from my religious observance, though when I attend services I am carried along by the music and join in the singing. This morning I had an unexpected and unfamiliar feeling while I was practicing flute: I suddenly felt as if someone else were playing, and I was both standing outside it and doing it.
This is connected with to what Frigyesi writes about music and prayer.
I wonder whether I will ever recapture that feeling.

Another Opera

I attended a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera Company's production of Turandot by Puccini, an extravaganza. Everything was on the highest professional level: the singing, the orchestra, the staging, the costumes, and the sets. And it was mainly sublime.
Because it was broadcast, there were English subtitles, and I knew exactly what they singing and what was going on in the plot, which is, to my mind, offensive. At the moment I' listening to a Youtube clip of the opera performed by the Wichita Opera Company, a production that probably cost fifty times less than the Metropolitan production. But it sounds pretty damn good.
What was the point in the mid-1920s, of writing an opera based on a Persian folk tale, transposed to China, about a princess who, to avoid marriage, arranged to have her suitors beheaded, until, along comes a hero who solves her three riddles and forces her to marry him? Did it mean anything to a continent recovering from a murderous war, on the brink of political crises that eventually led to another, even more murderous war? Did it have any plausible relevance then? or now? Are we to take this as a serious exploration of the myth of the femme fatale? Or is it just an operatic convention?
My take on it is that a serious exploration of the mythical dimensions of the plot would be a waste of intellectual energy. The ridiculous plot is merely an occasion for fantastic singing and musical performance. It's trivial.
But I'm not an opera fan. I find it astonishing that people are prepared to spend so much money on staging operas and attending them. That people train for years and years to become opera singers. That composers still write operas. I acknowledge that they are a significant part of Western musical and theatrical culture, and it's impressive that a city as small as Wichita, Kansas (fewer than 400,000 population) should have such a high level opera company.
Still, what's the point?
Later this year I'm going to attend a couple of more Metropolitan broadcasts. Maybe I'll be converted.