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GARY HOFFMAN | LIÈGE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC | CHRISTIANARMING 21 Ernest Bloch , commenting on the final pages of Schelomo , noted: ‘Even the darkest of my works end with hope. This work alone concludes in a complete negation, but the subject demands it!’ The subject and the era! The philosophical content of this ‘Rhapsodie Hébraïque’written at the height of the Great War of 1914-18 is wholly encapsulated in King Solomon’s maxim ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’. The work resonates today like the bitter echo that Bloch perceived, in his American exile, of the slaughter that was devastating Europe, in a parable that is at once biblical and embedded in the history of the twentieth century.