Moses Pergament: ”A Wagner of the Jews”

Moses  Pergament is a forgotten oddity in Finland’s musical history. In spite  of a publicly acclaimed composition concert debut in 1914 in Helsinki,  his colourful and cosmopolitan music has mostly remained unperformed in  his country of origin. One explanation is that Pergament during his  lifetime had to fight actively against the strong forces of  antisemitism; after having settled in Sweden in 1915, it would still  take him several decades before he was accepted in the Society of  Swedish Composers, and when Jean Sibelius discusses Pergament’s debut  concert in his diary entries, he expresses himself unabashedly  antisemitically. When the Swedish composer and music critic Wilhelm  Peterson-Berger called Pergament a “foreign parasite” in an interview,  Pergament traveled to Peterson-Berger’s home and delivered him a slap in  the face that made him famous overnight – though not as a composer. As  he was not a native Swede, and in addition to that was…