Sometimes things work out in an odd way. I have had this video of Harry Belafonte singing Hava Nagila for about four months on a queue to be included in Cantor’s Picks. With holidays and things that needed to take precedence, it just kept getting pulled and reshuffled back into the queue. His recent death, at age 96, calls out for us to watch and enjoy this excerpt from his television special which featured a very varied program.
Hava Nagila is one of the first modern Jewish folk songs in the Hebrew language and the most recognizable of Jewish songs. It went on to become a staple of band performers at Jewish weddings, b’nei mitzvah celebrations and even sports stadiums throughout the world as an exotic sounding cheer song used to change up the pace a bit.
The melody is based on a nigun (wordless melody), attributed to the Sadigurer Chasidim, who lived in what is now Ukraine. Hava Nagila, the song, was composed in 1918, to celebrate the Balfour Declaration and the British victory over the Ottomans in 1917. It was first performed in Jerusalem by a mixed choir.
Its story, in short, goes like this….Abraham Zevi Idelsohn (1882–1938), the famous ethnomusicologist of Jewish music and a professor at Hebrew University (Israel), was teaching classes in musical composition. Idelson presented Moshe Nathanson, a promising cantorial student, as well as the other students in the class, an interesting assignment. They were to take this 9th-century, slow, melodious nigun and add rhythm and lyrics to it to fashion a modern Hebrew song and he needed it done quickly. So Professor Idelsohn presented it as a competition. Thus Moshe Nathanson’s rendition was the winner. Our beloved Hava Nagila was created!
Idelsohn and Nathanson are both attributed to the composition (not always at the same time) as they both had hands in the creation and further refining of the original concept.
Belafonte, a lifelong activist and outspoken champion of human rights, performs a stirring rendition standing before Israeli influenced folk dancers.
