Ode to joy in Jerusalem: Conducting music in the holy land

Beethoven’s Ninth is many things: the choral symphony in D minor would consistently rank at the top of the pops for listeners of classical music, if such a thing existed. The distinctive Da dadaDA … of the opening chords is even the stuff of jokes: “You’re my inspiration,” the great man reportedly told his butler; “Ha hahaHA …” was the dismissive response.

More problematically the “Ode to Joy” symphony was also Hitler’s favorite; a source of considerable consternation to German Bass-Baritone Yorck Felix Speer, who melted conductor Ada Pelleg’s heart at a Bach Festival in Oregon in 2006. 

“I heard him sing,” she recalls, “and I determined that if we had a suitable occasion in Israel I would invite him here.” What Pelleg didn’t know when she ultimately suggested he join the EinGev Festival, was that Speer’s grandfather, Albert Speer, had been Hitler’s architect and close ally, serving as the minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany. 

“How can I come to Israel?” wondered Speer, “and how can I perform the Ninth if there is even one survivor in the audience?”

In the event, he did perform the following year under Pelleg’s baton, singing Hayden in Gush Chalav. For Pelleg, whose own mother was a Holocaust survivor and father was an officer in the Red Army, this was an extremely emotional event; a kind of closing of many circles.

LET’S BEGIN, like a good Dickensian novel, at the beginning. Pelleg was one of those lucky children who are good at everything: she played the piano from second grade, was a champion swimmer, excelled at school and was active in Scouts. She served in the Paratroopers Unit in Gaza and the West Bank and was the Army liaison spokesperson to foreign reporters during the 1973 War – very powerful experiences. When her husband, Ronan, relocated to Chicago to study architecture, she enrolled in the Roosevelt University of Chicago for a degree in piano and performance, where she won the Molly Margolis Piano Competition. 

“I had no clue that I wanted to conduct,” she recalls, “but I had to do a few extra courses.” She chose Euro Communism and Conducting and “Boom! I fell in love.”

At that point Pelleg could hardly read a score, but when, for her first-ever concert appearance she conducted Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave” at the university, a listener who had sung for Leonard Bernstein said she reminded him of the maestro. 

“At the time I didn’t even realize what a compliment that was,” admits Pelleg.

Various fellowships followed and teaching positions in Baltimore, Maryland, Haifa University and in the Jezreel Valley College. In 1997 she founded the Haifa Music Center for Music Appreciation for students with a passion for music, where she started an annual flute competition in memory of Ilan, a friend who had died in the Yom Kippur War. One year later it became international, with leading flutists like Sir James Galway performing. 

“LADY, LIFE begins at 40,” a traffic policeman once told my mom when she pleaded to be let off a traffic infraction on her big birthday. For Pelleg, conducting began again at 50. With her two kids grown and more time on her hands, she picked up those hands once again and swung into action. Concerts followed in Europe and the States. She formed her own orchestra from principals of the Israel Philharmonic and soon became the musical director and conductor of the Israel String Ensemble, as well as the director of the Galilee Music Center.

Crescendos led to even more crescendos: in Germany she met Syrian composer Nuri El Ruheibany, which led to friendships and cooperation with many Arab composers. Soon Lebanese flutist Wissam Boustany invited her to bring her orchestra to London; at a sold-out concert in St. John’s Smith Square, Boustany played Israeli Maxim Levy’s composition to an ecstatic audience. Ticket money was donated to Neve Shalom – a coexistence town near Jerusalem.

Radio programs, recordings and many international and local concerts later, Pelleg found herself embroiled by chance in Israel advocacy. After Eldad Beck, an Israeli reporter living in Berlin, covered the Speer story, Pelleg became his Facebook friend. During the 2014 war in Gaza a certain Mudassar Shah, from Pakistan, wondered aloud on Beck’s FB why the media is so against “you” if that media is owned by Jews. Pelleg answered him gently, they began to email and she discovered that he was a Pashtun – and maybe a long, long, loooooong lost cousin. The Pashtuns claim to descend from the Tribe of Joseph, who settled in the Afghanistan region when the 12 Tribes of Israel were dispersed from the Kingdom of Israel after its conquest by the Neo-Assyrian Empire circa 722 BCE. A popular tribal name, Yusufzai, is Pashto for “the son of Joseph.” Pelleg and Shah have not yet found a common family recipe for feather-light kneidlach, but there must be one, somewhere. 

Pelleg’s new friend turned out to be a documentary filmmaker. In 2016 he asked her to write the music for a docu-drama following three days in the life of a young tribal girl living in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shah, who is married with nine kids, sends his daughters to university and fights for women’s rights – neither exactly normative for patriarchal Pakistan. His aim – to show that not everyone in his country is a terrorist – resonated with Pelleg, who agreed to help produce the movie. Complications abound: what with COVID and the latest Gaza war, the collaborators have not yet even managed to meet. Many challenges remain.

But in these extraordinary times with a rainbow coalition of Arabs and Jews, secular and religious, Left and Right all sitting together for the common good, it seems only a matter of time till we can fly to Islamabad for a mutton karahi. Who knows, lurking in the folklore of the great-great-great-great grandsons of Joseph, there might even be a kosher version. 

Let’s lift our voices in an “Ode to Joy.” How blessed are we to be living again in an age of hope, where co-existence and cooperation seem possible and the hands conducting civil discourse are not turning one half of the choir against the other half.

Hallelujah!