LOVY, ISRAEL

LOVY, ISRAEL (Lowy; Israel Glogauer; 1773–1832), ḥazzan and composer. Born near Danzig, Lovy received his talmudic education in Glogau, where his father officiated as ḥazzan. From the age of 13 he acted as assistant ḥazzan in various communities of Moravia, Bohemia, Saxony, and Bavaria. In 1799 Lovy was employed in Fuerth, where he continued his education in European music. After temporary employment in Mainz, Strasbourg, and London, he went to Paris in 1818, and in 1822 he became the chief ḥazzan of the newly founded synagogue in the Rue Notre Dame de Nazareth. There he organized a four-voiced choir, for which he composed his Chants religieux… pour les prières hébraïques (1862). He had already appeared as a concert singer in Germany, and in Paris was urged to go on the stage, but refused. His tunes were popular among the German cantors, but his priority as a "reformist" passed to solomon sulzer whose innovations had a wider influence. The "Polish airs" notated at the end of his Chants (149–57) are the first appearance in print of the "ḥazzanic-klezmeric" (folk) repertoire for weddings and other family rejoicings and an important relic of 18th-century traditions. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Manuel, in: Archives Israelites, 11 (1850), 298–306, 344–52 (abbreviated version in the preface of Lovy's Chants…); Idelsohn, Music, 219, 226–9, 287; Sendrey, Music, 5687–88, 6260, 6707. (Bathja Bayer)