Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Old Jewish Divas and Some Casting Advice for Dustin Hoffman

Yesterday’s announcement that 43 years after playing a quintessentially confused Jewish college graduate, Dustin Hoffman plans to make his directorial debut, may raise some eyebrows. Hoffman has chosen to adapt “Quartet,” a 1999 play by Cape Town-born Jewish playwright Ronald Harwood (né Horwitz).

In the bittersweet “Quartet,” ancient opera singers in a retirement home lip synch to an old recording to celebrate Verdi’s birthday. Inspired by the unforgettable 1984 documentary “Tosca’s Kiss,” available on DVD from EMI Classics, “Quartet,” Harwood told one interviewer, is “about old age, and triumphing over it. One of the characters in the play says, ‘We’re artists, aren’t we, we’re supposed to celebrate life.’”

All the more reason to note that this Jewish playwright and Jewish director are casting their film with superb actors like Maggie Smith and Albert Finney, both without an iota of Yiddishkeit. Yet venerable Jewish opera performers are not only still vigorous and vehement, but performance-ready. 87-year-old mezzo Regina Resnik has just been honored by a new CD reprint, part of a valuable series of reissues from Arkivmusic.com. Resnik, like many old-time Jewish divas, fiercely incarnates what might be called the “apotheosis of the schrei.”

“Quartet” would be galvanized by her presence, as indeed it would be by Jewish soprano Marisa Galvany, born Myra Beth Genis in Paterson, New Jersey in 1936. With the intensity of a Jewish grandmother who it would be better not to tick off, Galvany made even the stateliest music sound hair-raisingly exciting.

To settle the “Quartet” audience after such thrills, Hoffman might cast the solidly reassuring Canadian Jewish baritone Norman Mittelmann, or the Met Opera tenor Albert Da Costa, a soloist in Bruno Walter’s recording of Beethoven’s Ninth, reissued on CD by Sony Classical.

If the audience still quakes from La Resnik and La Galvany, the light voice of a Jewish soubrette might calm them, like 98-year-old Budapest-born Marta Eggerth, who is still teaching at the Manhattan School of Music and charming listeners, as she has since the 1930s. If Ms. Eggerth is too busy to act in “Quartet,” Hoffman might ask Roberta Peters (born Peterman in the Bronx in 1930), a Jewish American lyric coloratura of legend.

Such Jewish singing elders are immortals, but this does not lessen our feelings when we lose one, like Juilliard’s beloved baritone Mordecai Hirsch Bauman, who died in 2007 at age 95.

Listen to Marta Eggerth sing “”Ein Lied, ein Kuß, ein Mädel” in Berlin, 1932:

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.