Joel David Shtrashonski Levinson — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

                                       Joel David Shtrashonski 1816-1850), called Der Vilner Ba'al Habittel (the yeshiva student of Vilna), was a Lithuanian-born cantor and Jewish opera singer. He was born in Liepaja, in western Latvia, where his father, Tzvi Hirsch Levinson, was the cantor. He was 6 when his father was appointed cantor of the Great Synagogue in Vilna and the family moved there. He had a sound Jewish education and private teachers who taught him Russian, German and Hebrew. From the age of 11 he assisted his father at the prayer services and when his father died, three years later, he was appointed cantor at the synagogue instead of his father, even though he had not yet completed his studies. The community signed a contract with him and began to pay him a salary despite the fact that he was still a yeshiva student. That was how he came to be known as the yeshiva student of Vilna. He formally became the cantor at the age of 22, and a short time later, married the daughter of one of the affluent members of the community, Mordechai Shtrashonski. Shtrashonski had taken the young cantor under his wing from the time of his bar-mitzva, so he added Shtrashonski's surname to his own as a mark of respect. Shtrashonski also toured communities in Grodno, Bialystok, Kalvarija and Warsaw

Despite his success, Levinson sank into a depression after his children died, one by one. When the composer, Stanislaw Moniuszko, who lived nearby, heard Shtrashonski humming the tunes he had composed in perfect pitch, they drew close and the composer would come to the synagogue to hear Levinson sing

Despite strong protests from his family and the community, Levinson joined Moniuszko on a trip to Warsaw where he sang excerpts from Moniuszko's opera Halka at the Warsaw Opera Hall as well as at the prince's palace. While he was in Warsaw, he was informed that his last son had died. Levinson collapsed, decided not to return home and began wandering around the cities of Poland incognito, occasionally appearing as a cantor at different synagogues. When he was no longer able to sing, he returned home and went to live with his sister after he and his wife were divorced. The community continued paying his salary even though he no longer worked as a cantor. When his mental health deteriorated even further, he was transferred to a mental hospital in Warsaw where he died at the age of 34

His tragic life gave birth to a number of literary work

• The play Der Vilner Ba'al Habittel by Marc Orenstein (in Polish, translated into Yiddish, 1908)
• In 1939 a movie was made in America entitled Ha'avrech MiVilna (Overture to Glory, Der Vilner Shtat Hazen) starring Cantor Moshe Oysher.
• When Shalom Aleichem wrote Yosele Hazamir (Yosele the Nightingale) about a cantor who was the son of a cantor who descended into the world of theater and went mad, he must have had in mind Joel David and other cantors of his time with similar biographies.
• The musical comedy Hahazan MiVilna (The Cantor from Vilna) by Osip Dymov (the pseudonym for Yosif Isidorovich Perelman, a Russian writer) which was put on by the Yiddishpiel theater.

source: Wikipedia