Fall Concert: Innocent!
Nov 16, 2005 - 12:00 pm
Robert Stern offers the following remarks:
As I was thinking about Hazkarah, I was rereading Ruth Bondy's admirable Elder of the Jews: Jacob Edelstein of Theresienstadt. In enumerating the graphic statistics in connection with Ghetto Theresienstadt, Bondy writes:
Somewhere in all this there must be a lesson for the coming generations. I have not found it. I know only one thing: humanity has not learned a lesson and perhaps is incapable of doing so. As for the Jews, they have merely lost their innocence - perhaps not even that. Perhaps they simply became more vulnerable. I would like to be able to say that Edelstein and the children died for something.... But...I cannot do so. They died because they were not allowed to live.
This was one of the most painfully revealing assertions I have ever encountered in my Holocaust-related readings. Some fifty years ago, we resolved that "never again" would genocides take place. Sadly, as Bondy suggests, genocides and holocausts continue. Today we see them live on television. Thus, my dedication of the score quotes Bondy's last line: To those who "died because they were not allowed to live."
Although primarily dark, there are moments in Hazkarah where light does begin to emerge, as in the climax of the cello/piano "cadenza" near the end and in the high and quiet cello solo on the final page. But in the final bars, dissonance intrudes in the stratospheric E flats, and the piece sinks into darkness with the final minor third (g/b-flat) in the lower register of the piano.
In its melodic structure, Hazkarah makes references to two vocal models. In the opening the cello suggests the cantorial style. The second half of the piece is based on a Yiddish folk song, Kum aher du Filizof. I chose the song for its musical poignancy.
Divertissement (1927)
Erwin Schulhoff (b. Prague 1894; d. Wülzburg concentration camp, 1942)
The life and fascinating career of Erwin Schulhoff, an audaciously original voice, came to a tragic end in a Bavarian concentration camp. An innovative composer, he had already seen the performance of his music banned as "degenerate" during the early days of the Reich; as a Jew and a socialist, he was marked for destruction by Nazi hands. Yet during much of the period between the two world wars Schulhoff was a vital creative force in European artistic life, active both as pianist and composer. The extraordinary variety of his music reflects the period's volatile social and political atmosphere.
Schulhoff Trio
Born in Prague, Schulhoff was recognized as a child prodigy by Dvo?ák. He studied piano and composition at the conservatories of Prague, Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne, and in 1913 took lessons with Debussy. He emerged from this relatively traditional musical education as a free thinker who embraced new currents in both popular and art music. With the rise of Nazism, Schulhoff's career in Germany ended, despite his artistic triumphs in Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden. He returned to Prague, but jeopardized his status there by becoming an outspoken Communist. Schulhoff obtained Soviet citizenship in 1939, and sought to emigrate to the USSR after the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia that year. Before his visa arrived, he was arrested in Prague as a Jew, a "degenerate artist," and a Soviet citizen?an undesirable on all counts.
Schulhoff was conscripted into the Austrian army in 1914. He returned four years later disillusioned and angry, and became a committed socialist. In Berlin, he soon became acquainted with the Dadaists, whose absurdist art movement and anti-bourgeois stance resonated with Schulhoff's unconventional ideas and revolutionary spirit. Through his friendship with painter George Grosz, also a collector of contemporary American jazz recordings, Schulhoff became acquainted with this idiom. He worked as a jazz pianist in the "Hot Jazz" clubs of Europe in the 1920s, and was one of the first composers (pre-dating even Gershwin) to incorporate jazz elements. For Schulhoff, jazz represented a break from the conventionally beautiful music of the past, and a means of infusing music with new energy, vitality, and social justice.
As early as 1919, Schulhoff explored an "art jazz" style in piano pieces incorporating syncopated dances such as the foxtrot, a rag, a one-step, and a maxixe. In a letter to Berg in 1921, Schulhoff wrote: "I have a tremendous passion for the fashionable dances and there are times when I go dancing night after night with dance hostesses…purely out of rhythmic enthusiasm and subconscious sensuality; this gives my creative work a phenomenal impulse, because in my consciousness I am incredibly earthly, even bestial…."
The Divertissment reflects this love. The eclectic seven-movement wind trio contains a Charleston and a Florida, a seasonal dance that originated in Paris in 1925. These movements, as well as a burlesca and romanzero, are juxtaposed with traditional forms (overture, theme with variations, rondo). Schulhoff composed this witty and jocular piece in just four days in March 1927, during a period that produced other successful works for winds - his Flute Sonata and the Double Concerto for Flute, Piano and Orchestra. The Divertissement was premiered one month later in Paris - the perfect setting for this charming, elegant and light-hearted work.
Die tote Stadt, Op. 12 (1920)
Erich Korngold (b. Brno 1897; d. Hollywood, CA 1957)
- Marietta's Lied
- Pierrot's Dance
- "O Freund, ich werde sie nicht wiedersehen"
Korngold completed his most successful opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) in 1920 at the age of 23. Acclaimed internationally, the work had a sensational beginning with dual premieres in Hamburg and Cologne Two months before the premiere, Korngold played the work on the piano for Puccini, who declared the young composer "the strongest hope for new German music."
As early as 1922, Nazi demonstrators tried - unsuccessfully at first - to disrupt performances of this work of Viennese derivation by a non-Aryan composer. Later, Nazi musicologists and publicists refined this ideological premise for the removal of Jewish musicians and composers from German musical life. Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed: "Jewry and German music are opposites, and by their very nature exist in gross contradistinction to each other."
Soon after coming to power, the Nazi regime banned performances of music by both living and historical Jewish composers, and by many others they deemed degenerate. At first, the Nazis faced a challenge in banning the music of Korngold and other well-established Jewish composers such as Mendelssohn and Mahler whose work was already accepted as part of the German musical tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries. In fact, in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, one of Vienna's most distinguished newspapers, a 1932 poll identified Korngold, and Arnold Schoenberg as the day's most highly regarded living composers. Quickly, though, musical scholarship and criticism became tools of the Nazi state. Nazi musicologists discredited Korngold as a plagiarist of Puccini and Strauss, and dismissed his music's emotional power as an appeal to banal sentimentality. Korngold's career was swept into the same oblivion as that of his more radical contemporaries.
In 1934, Korngold and his wife joined a growing wave of artist-emigrants to Hollywood, accepting director Max Reinhardt's invitation to compose the music for the Warner Brothers film of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Korngold returned to Vienna in 1937, busying himself with public performances of his chamber music and opera despite the looming political crisis. In January 1938 he received a telegram from Hollywood asking him to be here in ten days to begin working on the music for Robin Hood. That telegram saved his life and his family. By that March, Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany. Korngold's Vienna home was soon occupied by German troops, but his publisher Josef Weinberger bravely rescued most of Korngold's manuscripts by breaking into the house at night. The manuscripts were sent across the ocean a page at a time, inserted into newly bound scores of Beethoven, Offenbach, and Richard Strauss.
Korngold continued writing film and concert music in California, where he died in 1957.
Die tote Stadt is based on the symbolist novel Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach. Its action swings between dream and reality through various visions of the principal character Paul, who believes that the dancer Marietta is the reincarnation of his deceased wife Marie. Within subject matter that ranges from reality to hallucination, Korngold's musical style includes harmonies with the complexity of Strauss, and contains both late romantic and nostalgic pathos as well as musical expressionism.
Two arias stand out in contrast to the opera's overall Expressionist style, and these became instantly popular: Pierrot's Dance and Marietta's Lied. Tonight we hear these arias as duos for violin and piano, in Korngold's own transcriptions that became signature items for violinist Fritz Kreisler. The opera's final aria - "O Freund, ich werde sie nicht wiedersehen," sung by Paul - is a musical restatement of Marietta's Lied. This evening we hear it performed in an arrangement by Arkadi Serper for piano quintet and our guest soloist, tenor Vinson Cole.
I Never Saw Another Butterfly (1995-96)
Lori Laitman (b. Long Beach, NY, 1955)
Laitman offers the following remarks:
The Butterfly opens the cycle with a cantorial-style part, conjuring up images of a fluttering butterfly. The vocal line enters with speech-based rhythms that are melodic and lyric. The long clarinet interlude symbolizes the freedom of the butterfly. The poem was written by Pavel Friedmann, who was born on January 7, 1921, deported to Terezín on April 26, 1942, and died in Auschwitz on September 29, 1944. Despite the tremendous sadness of the text, the message of the poem is one of undying spirit.
Butterfly Trio
Yes, That's the Way Things Are written by three children -- Kosek, Löwy, and Bachner who wrote under the name "Koleba". Reflecting the irony of the poem, the music has a quasi-folk song feel -- a dancing, shifting rhythm, and a modal melody switching between a minor and major seventh, typical of Jewish folk song. Miroslav Kosek was born on March 30, 1932 at Horelice in Bohemia and was sent to Terezín on February 15, 1942. He died October 19, 1944 at Auschwitz. Hanus Löwy was born in Ostrava on June 29, 1931, deported to Terezín on September 30, 1942, and died in Auschwitz on October 4, 1944. There is no information on Bachner.
The author of Birdsong is unknown. In this poem, the author is able to rise above the living conditions to focus on the loveliness of life. Ascending phrases are used to portray hope.
The Garden was written by Franta Bass, who was born in Brno on September 4, 1930. He was sent to Terezín on December 2, 1941, and died in Auschwitz on October 28, 1944. The little boy walking along the garden path is portrayed by a weaving clarinet part with subtle rhythmic changes.
Man Proposes, God Disposes was also written by the three children who signed their name "Koleba." This text is a commentary on what used to be, and what is. Like a cabaret song, the vocal line uses a simple melody, and ends each section with a glissando.
The Old House, also written by Franta Bass, ends the cycle. The barren image of the deserted house is captured by the clarinet repeatedly playing one note, like a bell tolling. The voice and clarinet become more expressive as the poet recalls happier days, but then return to the opening texture.
Yiddishbbuk: Inscriptions for String Quartet (1992)
Osvaldo Golijov (b. La Plata, Argentina, 1960)
Golijov offers the following remarks:
"A broken song played on a shattered cymbalon." Thus, writes Kafka, begins Yiddishbbuk, a collection of apocryphal psalms, which he read while living in Prague's street of the alchemists. The only remnants of the collection are a few verses interspersed among the entries of his notebooks, and the last lines are also quoted in a letter to Milena: "No one sings as purely as those who are in the deepest hell. Theirs is the song we confused with that of the angels." Written in Hebrew characters and surrounded with musical notation, marks similar to those of the genuine texts, the psalms' only other reference to their music is: "In the mode of Babylonic Lamentations." Based on these vestiges, these inscriptions for string quartet are and attempt to reconstruct that music.
The movements of the piece bear the initials of persons commemorated in the work. The first movement commemorates three children interned by the Nazi's at the Terezin: Doris Weiserova (1932-1944), Frantisek Bass (1930-1944), and Thomas Kauders (1934-1943). Their poems and drawing appear in the book "…I never saw another butterfly…", published by the US Holocaust Museum. The second movement bears the initials of the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), and the last movement the initials of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990).
Osvaldo Golijov has received numerous awards and commissions. He is currently Associate Professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he has taught since 1991. He is also on the faculties of the Boston Conservatory and the Tanglewood Music Center, and is Composer-in-Residence for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Music Alive series. In January of 2005, the European Broadcasting Union televised Golijov's last work to date: TEKYAH. This work was commissioned by the BBC especially for a film commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and was filmed there, performed by David Krakauer, Michael Ward-Bergeman, and the Sinfonietta Krakovia. In January and February of 2006 Lincoln Center will present a Festival called "The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov," featuring multiple performances of his major works, chamber music, late nights of Tango and Klezmer, and a night at the Film Society.
La Juive (1835)
Jacques Fromenthal Halévy (b. Paris, 1799; d. Nice, 1862)
Rachel! quand du Seigneur
Halévy's 1835 opera La Juive, with libretto by Eugène Scribe, involves a complex critique of social, political and religious intolerance. The opera is notable not only for its rich music, but also for the stereotypic and caricatured depiction of its Jewish characters. It was one of the most popular operas of the 19th century, staging the problems of clerical intolerance and religious fanaticism with great drama. Mahler considered it an amazing work, and conducted it often. Richard Wagner, despite his notoriously anti-Semitic beliefs, remained a steadfast advocate for both the opera and its Jewish composer. The lead tenor role was favored by Caruso, and it was one of the most frequently performed roles of his career. But La Juive was banned by the Nazis in 1936, and subsequently fell into obscurity. Even long after the war, the Holocaust's painful legacy made the opera difficult to stage. La Juive was revived by the Vienna State Opera in a new 1999 production, and at New York's Metropolitan Opera in a 2003 production. The opera has been added to future programming at Paris, London, Berlin, Zurich and Venice. The recent documentary film "Finding Eléazar" chronicles the journey of American tenor Neil Shicoff in developing that role and depicting the La Juive's world of intolerance and fanaticism.
The opera is set in Constance, Switzerland, in 1414. Rachel, the daughter of Eléazar, a Jewish goldsmith, is condemned to death by Cardinal Brogni for her liaison with Prince Leopold in violation of a law forbidding relationships between Jews and Christians. The Cardinal, however, does not realize that Rachel is actually his own daughter, saved from a fire in Rome years ago by Eléazar, and then raised as Eléazar's own daughter. Although Eléazar realizes that he can save his daughter's life by revealing this fact, he is unable to reconcile his Jewish beliefs with forcing his daughter to change her faith. Rachel! quand du Seigneur, Eléazar's riveting final aria of Act IV, reveals a father's inner turmoil: desire to spare the child he saved, loyalty to his Jewish faith, and vengeance. The haunting lyrical melody following the opening recitative is of distinctly Jewish origin, and contains the frequent repetitions of augmented intervals characteristic of Judaic chant.
Halévy, an assimilated Jew, was born in Paris just ten years after the French Revolution. He lived his early years during the Napoleonic regime, during a period of significant religious tolerance when Napoleon offered French citizenship to all Jews in his empire and was responsible for tearing down the ghetto walls.