Here is an interesting nugget that emerged out of a comment on my new website (zemirosaschkenaz.com) this winter.   

I posted a tune for Adon Olam that Dr. Eric Zimmer allowed me to share off of his father’s CD of his Frankfurt memories. In the comment section, someone pointed out that this tune is also on the Spanish-Portugse Chazzanut website. A friend who recently launched a blog for the careful study of minhagim revealed that the tune is written by David Aaron Desola of the Bevis Marks congregation in 19th century London. (See here)  

The original commenter on the post is actually the admin of one of that chazzanut website of Amsterdam and he really opened our eyes, because our resident scholar, Reb Yisroel S. Strauss, informed us that our beloved Chazan Frankel”used that niggun” often.(KAJ uses Adon Olam at the beginning of davening only.) It was later reported by Mr A. Gutmann that it was Chazan Frankel’s choice for the Matnas Yad days of the Shelosh Regalim. The suggestion popped into mind that Chazan Frankel might have known it from Hamburg, which, famously, had a large number of Amsterdam Sephardim. My friend in his blog went with that assumption. (Despite the fact that Henry Zimmer z’l was from Frankfurt, and I don’t believe he learned it in WH from Chazan Frankel. The question then is, did he know it from Frankfurt itself?)  

I bounced this off of Professor Edwin Serrusi in Hebrew University, and here is what he wrote: 

” I do not think that the tune entered the Ashkenazi realm via Amsterdam but via London, where De Sola spent most of his life and where this Adon Olam was composed. Ashkenazi British synagogues (several of which had a strong German affiliation) adopted several Sephardi tunes. My former student and now colleague Dr. Naomi Cohn-Zentner wrote an MA thesis on this phenomenon.” 

This being the case, it is possible that Chazan Frankel picked this up in London – where he spent much of the war. It is also possible that many people in Germany knew it whether via Hamburg or otherwise.