Yossele Rosenblatt

The Ukrainian-born hazzan whose recordings made cantorial singing a mass medium, and who turned down an opera career rather than shave his beard or sing on the Sabbath.

Hazzanut is where the wordless impulse and the liturgical word have to share a room, and Rosenblatt is where you can hear the negotiation. The written text is fixed; everything expressive happens in the ornament between the syllables — a whole art of saying more than the words while adding none. ⚠ He appears in The Jazz Singer (1927) as himself, refusing to sing liturgy in a theatre, in a film about a cantor's son who does exactly that. The tradition's argument with the modern world, filmed while it was happening.