What do we commemorate
Over the last few weeks Donald Maurice and Inbal Megiddo of the New Zealand School of Music put together an interesting and challenging programme for this year's Kristallnacht Commemoration Concert. This concert has little to do with Kristallnacht, just as Yom HaShoah has little to do with the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising or the UN Holocaust Memorial Day with the liberation of Auschwitz. These all commemorate something much more than the dates of these significant events. Yom HaShoah is part of the Israeli Zionist narrative of 'never again', Jews will never again go to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter. The UN Holocaust Memorial Day is a recognition of the great tragedy that was brought about by the denial of universal human rights.
So what is the Kristallnacht Commemoration concert about. First of all, it is about human experience told in music; not speeches, not ceremonial gestures, candle lighting, just music. Only two of the items to be performed have a direct link to Kristallnacht, Richard Fuchs's setting of Eliot's Song of Simeon and Dachaulied composed by two prisoners as they marched to Dachau.
Richard Fuchs was a successful, prosperous architect living in Karlsruhe, Germany, but in 1938, like many German Jews, he realized that he had to emigrate. On Kristallnacht he was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau. and was only released when he secured a visa to come to New Zealand. Until 1938 all his songs were set to texts by German authors. As he was planning to move to an English speaking country he clearly thought it appropriate to write music to a setting of a poem by possibly the greatest contemporary English poet, T. S Eliot. The fact that A Song of Simeon was about a New Testament personality and had a clear religious overtone was perhaps less significant than that Fuchs identifies with some of the lines of the poem:
Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?
The other works in the programme are either by composers who were murdered during the Holocaust, works by two composers who were imprisoned in Theresienstadt and later killed in Auschwitz, The Finale of the opera The Emperor of Atlantis by Victor Ullman and Gideon Klein's String Trio. Mieczyslaw Weinberg survived the Holocaust because he fled from Poland to the Soviet Union, but most of his family were murdered. He continually referred in his music to his early life in Warsaw, his Cello Sonata will have echoes of that lost world. Then there will be works by contemporary composers who a generation, perhaps two generations later explore the tragedy of the Holocaust through their music, Lori Laitman's Five Vedem Songs for voice, setting of poems by boys who were murdered, Strings of Love by Boris Pigovat whose grandparents were among the 31,000 killed at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. Laurence Sherr's Cello Sonata, which uses themes of Jewish resistance. Thus each of these works reflect a different aspect of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was not one event but a whole cluster of events and individual tragedies, so it is appropriate that its commemoration should embrace the many aspects of these tragedies.
So what is the Kristallnacht Commemoration concert about. First of all, it is about human experience told in music; not speeches, not ceremonial gestures, candle lighting, just music. Only two of the items to be performed have a direct link to Kristallnacht, Richard Fuchs's setting of Eliot's Song of Simeon and Dachaulied composed by two prisoners as they marched to Dachau.
Richard Fuchs was a successful, prosperous architect living in Karlsruhe, Germany, but in 1938, like many German Jews, he realized that he had to emigrate. On Kristallnacht he was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau. and was only released when he secured a visa to come to New Zealand. Until 1938 all his songs were set to texts by German authors. As he was planning to move to an English speaking country he clearly thought it appropriate to write music to a setting of a poem by possibly the greatest contemporary English poet, T. S Eliot. The fact that A Song of Simeon was about a New Testament personality and had a clear religious overtone was perhaps less significant than that Fuchs identifies with some of the lines of the poem:
Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?
The other works in the programme are either by composers who were murdered during the Holocaust, works by two composers who were imprisoned in Theresienstadt and later killed in Auschwitz, The Finale of the opera The Emperor of Atlantis by Victor Ullman and Gideon Klein's String Trio. Mieczyslaw Weinberg survived the Holocaust because he fled from Poland to the Soviet Union, but most of his family were murdered. He continually referred in his music to his early life in Warsaw, his Cello Sonata will have echoes of that lost world. Then there will be works by contemporary composers who a generation, perhaps two generations later explore the tragedy of the Holocaust through their music, Lori Laitman's Five Vedem Songs for voice, setting of poems by boys who were murdered, Strings of Love by Boris Pigovat whose grandparents were among the 31,000 killed at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. Laurence Sherr's Cello Sonata, which uses themes of Jewish resistance. Thus each of these works reflect a different aspect of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was not one event but a whole cluster of events and individual tragedies, so it is appropriate that its commemoration should embrace the many aspects of these tragedies.
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