About the creation

Despite being completely European in culture and spirit, Boskovich felt an innermost necessity to enhance his connection with the treasures of his Jewish heritage. As part of this quest for his roots, Boskovich undertook a tour of diverse villages in the Carpathian Mountains in 1935-6, to get acquainted with the rich folklore and collect the beautiful songs of the Jewish communities who lived there. Inspired by the experience of this tour, he composed his suite Chansons Populaires Juives (1937), based on seven Eastern European Jewish folksongs, in versions for symphony orchestra and for solo piano; and wrote an essay titled “The Problems of Jewish Music”, in which he presented his ideas about the particular goal of the Jewish composer.

In 1938 Boskovich was invited by the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) to attend the premiere of this suite. Following this visit he decided to make his home in Eretz Israel. He subsequently renamed the suite The Golden Chain (after a play by J. L. Peretz), considering this title symbolic of the historical continuity of Jewish tradition and culture – from past to present, and looking towards the future. In retrospect, this suite became a memorial and part of the golden chain of a Jewish tradition and culture that perished in the Holocaust.

In 1995, the pianist Yahli Wagman arranged the suite’s orchestral version for piano four hands. While editing this version, I compared the manuscripts of the orchestral score and two versions of the piano solo. I transferred performance indications and some chords from one version to another in order to enrich the pianistic sonority, and added slurs to enhance the music’s suitability for pianistic performance.

Miriam Boskovich