The Lost Symphony of Israel

The Israel Philharmonic, Paul Ben-Haim, and what we’re dangerously close to forgetting

To mark the Deutsche Grammophon release of Ben-Haim’s Symphony No. 2 on October 10, 2025

Some people get excited about the release of a new film, a long-awaited sequel in a beloved franchise, something they’ve carried since childhood. Others wait months for a concert, a play, or a book.

I get excited about something a little more unusual.

This week, on October 10, Deutsche Grammophon, the world’s most prestigious classical label, will release the Second Symphony of Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984), performed by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Lahav Shani.

To most people, that may sound esoteric. But it shouldn’t. Because Paul Ben-Haim is, quite simply, the greatest Israeli composer, and his story is the embodiment of what Israel once stood for and must stand for again.

Paul Frankenburger (Ben-Haim), at 17

He was born Paul Frankenburger in Munich and served as Kapellmeister at the Augsburg Opera, a position of great prestige and responsibility. Earlier in his career, he had worked under Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler’s closest disciple, at the Bavarian State Opera, an experience that deeply shaped his musical sensibility.

But by the early 1930s, the world around him was closing in. Dismissed from his post in Augsburg because he was Jewish and faced with growing antisemitic persecution, he found himself unemployed and exiled within his own country.

In 1933, he made the defining decision of his life: to emigrate to Tel Aviv, a city without an orchestra, without an opera, but full of promise. Upon his arrival, he changed his name to Paul Ben-Haim, a symbolic act of renewal. From there, he began to build, almost from nothing, the musical life of a new nation.

By then, Ben-Haim had already seen what so many refused to see: the growing darkness in Germany, the venom that was seeping into its culture. He recognised, with quiet foresight, that there was no future left for a Jewish artist in that world. And so he left, not in fear, but in conviction, to preserve the light of a civilisation that Europe itself was preparing to destroy.

In Munich, Ben-Haim absorbed the living language of the late-Romantic world, the belief that the symphony could contain all of life, its struggle and its beauty, within it. He admired Mahler, Wagner and Strauss deeply, and his own music carries that same sense of moral purpose and inner drama, though transposed into Hebrew light.

When Ben-Haim left Europe, the musical world of Mahler and Walter was collapsing. Yet on the shores of Tel Aviv, he preserved its flame. In his works, the Romantic tradition survived, transformed, renewed, and sung in a new tongue.

Ben-Haim teaching composition at the Gymnasium

He came here to teach music at the Herzliya Gymnasium, a city high school by the sea. It sounds almost absurd, but that humble act helped shape the soul of this country.

Ben-Haim’s legacy paved the way for generations of Israeli musicians. He orchestrated Hatikvah, our national anthem. He composed the First Symphony, the defining example of Israeli classical music. And now, after nearly a century, his Second Symphony is finally getting the recognition it deserves, a world-class release on Deutsche Grammophon.

This release feels like watching Israel win an Olympic gold medal; that same surge of pride when the flag rises and the anthem plays.

For the first time, Deutsche Grammophon is releasing both of Ben-Haim’s symphonies, performed by the Israel Philharmonic. It completes a long-overdue circle, a symphonic homecoming, almost a century in the making.

Who deserves it more than Ben-Haim, the man who came to a land without an orchestra and helped build one? The man who gave sound to our anthem, who shaped the musical voice of Israel? And who deserves it more than us, the listeners, the inheritors of that dream, to finally see our founding musical father stand among the greats, where he always belonged?

The Forgotten Founder

We all know the great poets of Israel: Bialik, Shlonsky, and Alterman. Their faces hang in schools, and their words are quoted on every Memorial Day. We even know our painters, Gutman, Rubin, and the bright colours of early Tel Aviv.

But who remembers the man who gave Israel its sound?

Paul Ben-Haim, a meticulous German Jew, a true yeke, devoted his life to music, not to myth. Every morning, he would walk down to the Mediterranean to bathe and indulge in a newfound local delicacy: hot corn, to clear his mind before composing. The humidity of Tel Aviv was hard for him to get used to; he considered moving to Jerusalem, but he stayed because of the sea, and from that sea came the shimmering, sunlit sound of Israel.

Ben-Haim wrote music that blended East and West: German discipline and Middle Eastern warmth, European counterpoint and the yearning of Jewish song.

The slow movement of his First Symphony (1940) is one of his finest achievements: heart-piercing, mournful yet defiant, a hymn of longing that refuses to despair. In eight minutes, it captures what Israel means: sorrow transfigured into strength, exile turned into home.

His Violin Concerto (1960) burns with different energy: vibrant, lyrical, full of life. The Bernstein-Perlman performance on Israel’s 20th Independence Day (1968) is both a musical and historical treasure.

His Fanfare to Israel (1950) captures the defiant spirit of a nation rising from tragedy. But the First Symphony remains his noblest work, the sound of a new land learning how to use its own voice.

He was there before the orchestra existed. He waited for it.

And when the Erez Israel Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in 1936, he gave it a voice.

The Continuation of a Civilisation

When Paul Ben-Haim arrived in Tel Aviv, the world he came from, the Europe of Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, of the great humanist tradition, was collapsing. Within a few years, that civilisation would burn. And yet, on the sun-drenched shores of Tel Aviv, its music lived on.

Ben-Haim became the last vessel of the Romantic spirit, the quiet inheritor of a lineage stretching from Munich to Vienna to the Mediterranean. Through him, the moral and aesthetic world of Western civilisation, the belief that beauty, structure, and emotion can reveal truth, found refuge and renewal in a young Hebrew city.

As I wrote in “Tel Aviv: The Last Western Dream”, Tel Aviv itself was founded as a continuation of that same Western ideal, a place where the Enlightenment dream could live on when Europe betrayed it.

Ben-Haim’s life gives that idea sound. His music is the echo of Europe’s Romantic spirit finding new life on the shores of the Mediterranean, the same transformation that built the city itself.

Through him, Tel Aviv became not only an architectural or intellectual project, but a musical one: the rebirth of Western beauty, discipline, and freedom in Hebrew form.

Joy and the Fullness of Life

This moment is more than recognition; it’s a celebration of great music. To discover Ben-Haim’s work is simply to gain, to encounter beauty, vitality, and pride.

It’s also a tribute to a man who lived and composed here quietly, whose music reflects the deeper character of this nation. Because Israel, at its best, is not a people merely surviving, not only fighting wars, building tech startups, or sitting in cafés. We are here to enjoy life, to live it to the fullest, to create, to go to concerts, to compose the sounds of tomorrow, to feel everything that existence offers.

Ben-Haim’s music embodies that spirit. It is the ultimate voice of a people learning not just to endure but to rejoice, to turn sunlight, sea, and struggle into sound.

And so, I also want to salute the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Their opening season this year, both in Israel and abroad, features Ben-Haim’s First Symphony, Second Symphony, and Violin Concerto, from Tel Aviv to Carnegie Hall, from Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie to the great halls of Paris and Prague.

All over the world, people will finally hear Ben-Haim’s gift. His music isn’t just for Israelis; it’s universal. It speaks to anyone who’s ever loved beauty, courage, or hope. Anyone who still remembers what beauty is, and what it stands for.

And it is especially important now.

What the Philharmonic is doing under Lahav Shani, whether consciously or not, is reminding us, in these difficult times, who we are. They are reconnecting us with our roots, with the spirit that built this nation and defined its greatness.

The message it sends is profound: we are not a minority fighting to survive among barbarians. We are a proud nation, the heirs of the greatest artistic tradition in history. We lead the world in innovation, science, and creativity, and we stand for something far greater than survival.

This music is the embodiment of that defiant, independent spirit, the very essence of what Israel was meant to be.

And we are dangerously close to forgetting it.

In the noise, the despair, and the fatigue, it’s easy to lose sight of what we are fighting for.

That’s why this release matters so much, because it reminds us of our highest self. Two years after October 7, amid all the madness of the world, the Philharmonic’s choice to present Paul Ben-Haim to the world is monumental. It is a moral and cultural act, a statement of identity.

I salute them for doing this now and with such conviction.

Finale: The Return of the Symphony

It began with a tempo marking.

I was sitting in the hall, program in hand, skimming the page: Paul Ben-Haim, Symphony No. 1, I. Allegro Energico.

Wait—what?

I felt it instantly: that’s Mahler’s Sixth. The same rare opener. Not a coincidence—a statement.

Only later, reading his biography, I found the proof.

“After some early, tentative attempts at orchestral composition, Frankenburger (Ben-Haim) began, in early 1916, his most ambitious endeavor up to that point—composing a large symphony. The source of inspiration for the symphony was the great symphonies of Mahler.”

I hadn’t planned to mention Mahler in this essay.
But as it turns out, he was here all along, waiting, quietly, inside the score.

Then the thread snapped into place. He started that big Mahler-inspired symphony in 1916; the First World War pulled him into the German army; the work was left behind. Decades later, he completed his first true symphony, not in Munich, but in Tel Aviv. The vision interrupted by war finds its voice in freedom.

And that Allegro Energico? It isn’t just “Mahlerian spirit.” It is the exact marking that opens Mahler’s Sixth (the “Tragic”); a marking almost no one else ever used. Ben-Haim chose to begin his First with the same words. That’s deliberate. It reads like a nod to the tragedy engulfing the world, especially the tragedy of the Jewish people, and a refusal to let the symphony die with Europe.

Mahler’s Sixth begins with a call: Allegro Energico, the march of a doomed hero.

Ben-Haim’s First begins with the same call, but as an answer.

As Ben-Haim himself wrote in the programme that was handed at the symphony’s premiere in 1941:

“It goes without saying that this work, which I began writing at the end of August 1939 and completed on June 20, 1940 (the days of France’s fall), is not free from the influence of the events of the time; the terrible rampage of the forces of hell undoubtedly left its mark on my composition (at least on its first movement, and to some extent on the last as well).”

The prophecy of destruction becomes the music of survival.

Mahler’s symphony ends in defeat; Ben-Haim’s begins with renewal, the renewal that rises only from these shores.

From this sand, from this little city by the sea, the hammers of fate are finally defeated.

Mahler’s tragic hammer blows: the sound of Europe breaking, finds its answer here, in Tel Aviv, in sunlight and freedom.

In 1933, the hammers were already coming. Ben-Haim heard them. He answered the call, and he won.

From the October 5, 2025, concert featuring Ben-Haim’s 1st Symphony

And here I am, a hundred years later, in Tel Aviv, at the Israel Philharmonic’s 89th season opener, Lahav Shani on the podium. The First Symphony begins: Allegro Energico, and the same marking that once opened the Tragic now rises again, but this time, it wins.

This moment is proof that the symphonic ideal belongs here. In this country, in this city, in this language. In this life.

Look at the world today. And listen.
Here, the torch still burns.

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