Similarities To Christian Plainsong
Nineteenth-century pianist Emil Breslauer was the first to draw attention to the similarity of these strains with the first five bars of the sixth movement of Beethoven's C sharp minor quartet, op. 131, "adagio quasi un poco andante".
An older coincidence shows the original element around which the whole of Kol Nidre has been built up. The pneuma given in the Sarum and Ratisbon antiphonaries (or Roman Catholic ritual music-books) as a typical passage in the first Gregorian mode (or the notes in the natural scale running from "d" to "d" ), almost exactly outlines the figure that prevails throughout the Hebrew air, in all its variants, and reproduces one favorite strain with still closer agreement.
The original pattern of these phrases seems to be the strain of melody so frequently repeated in the modern versions of Kol Nidre at the introduction of each clause. Such a pattern phrase, indeed, is, in the less elaborated Italian tradition, repeated in its simple form five times consecutively in the first sentence of the text, and a little more elaborately four times in succession from the words "nidrana lo nidre".
The northern traditions prefer at such points first to utilize its complement in the second ecclesiastical mode of the Church, which extends below as well as above the fundamental "re". The strain, in either form, must obviously date from the early medieval period, anterior to the eleventh century, when the practice and theory of the singing-school at St. Gall, by which such typical passages were evolved, influenced all music in those French and German lands where the melody of Kol Nidre took shape.
Thus, then, a typical phrase in the most familiar Gregorian mode, such as was daily in the ears of the Rhenish Jews, in secular as well as in ecclesiastical music, was centuries ago deemed suitable for the recitation of the Absolution of Vows, and to it was afterward prefixed an introductory intonation dependent on the taste and capacity of the officiant. Many times repeated, the figure of this central phrase was sometimes sung on a higher degree of the scale, sometimes on a lower. Then these became associated; and so gradually the middle section of the melody developed into the modern forms.
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