As the following essays demonstrate, Judith scholarship in the twenty-first century will continue to open new areas of exploration. This section contains six essays that examine dramatic musical works and theatrical stage produc-tions of Judith. The earliest work addressed in the essays was composed in 1629, the date of the earliest opera on the subject of Judith. The latest work
treated is the production of the 1849 Nestroy travesty of Hebbel’s Judith.
Kelley Harness uses archival source studies to demonstrate the impor-tant influence female patrons had on the art and iconography of Renais-sance and early modern Italy. In this study, Harness looks at five musical works dedicated to or commissioned by nuns, noblewomen, and female regents; the works begin with the first Judith opera, Andrea Salvadori’s La Giuditta (Florence, 1626), which was sung to music composed by Marco da Gagliano. Following a tradition that stretched back to the sacra rappresen-tazione, which flourished during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, virtually every performance of a Judith play included at least some music. Harness argues that texts to be sung bore a special responsibility to focus and amplify a play’s didactic message.
David Marsh’s survey of librettos on the Judith theme shows how the emergence of oratorio around 1600 brought out the dramatic potential of
the biblical Book of Judith, making it attractive to a succession of distin-guished composers, including the fifteen-year-old Mozart, who made bril-liant use of Metastasio’s libretto in 1771. Marsh provides a survey and tex-tual analysis of some sixty years of libretti written on the theme between 1675 and 1734 and set to music as late as 1771.
Following Alberto Mario Banti’s insight that Judith was marginalized during the Italian Risorgimento, Paolo Bernardini shows how the chang-ing treatment of Judith in Italy between 1800 and 1900 can be understood in the context of social and cultural changes that led to the Italian Union and the forging of a new “Italian national identity.” Judith’s model of indi-vidualist action, represented well by the genre of oratorio, was at variance with the need for the representation of collectivist action, for which the per-fect genre was opera. From being an individual and a strong supporter of individualistic action and female agency, Judith gradually changed and be-came the representative of the general will and action in operatic tradition.
Alexandre Lhâa approaches Marcello and Peri’s Giuditta (1860), which was performed at the Teatro alla Scala in March 1860, as a melodrama that echoes and disseminates the Risorgimento’s ideology. Using research on the reception of the opera by audiences, he shows how the opera was changed in subsequent stagings because of Judith’s disquieting challenge to the gender assumptions of a patriarchal society.
Jann Pasler analyzes dramatic musical composition and its reception in opera and concert halls and salons to uncover political, social, religious and cultural trends (conflicts, tensions, and anxieties) in late-nineteenth-century France. Pasler proposes that the representation of Judith changed after France’s defeat by Prussia and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine; instead of an exotic, orientalist femme fatale, Judith became a symbol of individ-ual strength who reignites the French fervor for war. This transformation occurred in the context of important new biblical translation projects, both Catholic and Protestant, which revalued the sanctity and historicity of the text.
Gabrijela Mecky Zaragoza’s essay, “Judith and the ‘Jew-Eaters’ in Ger-man Volkstheater,” addresses a dark and little-known theme in German popular theater: Judith and anti-Semitism. Drawing on the text of the anonymous 1818 drama Judith und Holofernes and Nestroy’s 1849 parody of Friedrich Hebbel’s 1840 tragedy Judith, Mecky Zaragoza brings to light a decisive change in the appropriation of the story. The Jewish narrative is connected to the Jewish Question and used to negotiate images of Jews and Jewishness.
Conclusion
In this introduction I have tried to emphasize unique attributes of the Septu-agint Ioudith – as a Hellenistic book, a new literary genre, and an important source for the recovery of early Jewish religious practice and the status of women in the ancient world. As the earliest extant text, the study of the Book of Judith in the Septuagint is one of the foundations of Judith Studies. There are two other formative factors that set the conditions for the study of Judith.
One is the subject of the thousand-year lacuna in the mention of Judith in Jewish writings and the omission of the book from the Hebrew Bible. The second is the uniquely determining influence of biblical canonical traditions, Catholic and Protestant, on the representation and reception of the Judith story. These two prominent topics, and others, are explored in the introduc-tory chapters on Judith in Jewish and Christian textual traditions.
As P. N. Medvedev has written, seeing (perception) is shaped by genres of expression. As the Book of Judith was translated and the story has been retold in new genres, new aspects of Judith and her tale have been made visible. The essays “see” Judith through the lenses of a broad spectrum of genres – epic, allegory, play, opera, novel, tale, prayer, political tract, paint-ing, fresco cycle, sculpture. As Medvedev noted, “Each genre is only able to control certain definite aspects of reality. Each genre possesses definite principles of selection and a definite scope and depth of penetration.”26 Each genre, that is, provides a new way of seeing Judith.
26 See P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Intro-duction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1985), p. 134, quoted in Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp.
275–76.