Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe

By Joy H. Calico

Joy H. Calico examines the cultural history of postwar Europe through the lens of the performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw—a short but powerful work, she argues, capable of irritating every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. Schoenberg, a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been one of the Nazis’ prime exemplars of entartete (degenerate) music, immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, he wrote this twelve-tone piece about the Holocaust in three languages for an American audience. This book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe during the early Cold War in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Each case is unique, informed by individual geopolitical concerns, but this analysis also reveals common themes in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces on both sides of the Cold War divide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780520957701

Joy H. Calico

Joy H. Calico is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Musicology and Professor of German Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Arnold Schoenberg's 'A Survivor from Warsaw' in Postwar Europe.

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Jewish Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the S. Mark Taper Foundation.

The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Constance and William Withey Endowment Fund for History and Music of the UC Press Foundation.

Arnold Schoenberg’s

A Survivor from Warsaw

in Postwar Europe

CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC

Richard Taruskin, General Editor

1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard

2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison

3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch

4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal

5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider

6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis

7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music, by Klára Móricz

9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico

10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long

11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut

12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott

13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller

14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy

15. In Search of a Concrete Music, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack

16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, by Leslie A. Sprout

17. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, by Joy H. Calico

Arnold Schoenberg’s

A Survivor from Warsaw

in Postwar Europe

JOY H. CALICO

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Calico, Joy Haslam, 1965-, author.

    Arnold Schoenberg’s A survivor from Warsaw in postwar Europe / Joy H. Calico.

        pages cm. — (California studies in 20th-century music ; 17)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28186-8 (hardback) —

ISBN 978-0-520-95770-1 (e-book)

    1. Schoenberg, Arnold, 1874–1951. Survivor from Warsaw. 2. Schoenberg, Arnold, 1874–1951—Appreciation—Europe. I. Title.

    ML410.S283C25 2014

    784.2'2—dc23

2013048526

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Cover image: Original manuscript page from A Survivor from Warsaw by Arnold Schoenberg, mm 78–80. Used by permission of Belmont Musical Publishers. Image courtesy of The Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna.

For Chris

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

West Germany: Retrenchment versus A Survivor from Warsaw

Austria: Homecoming via A Survivor from Warsaw

Norway: Performing Remembrance with A Survivor from Warsaw

East Germany: Antifascism and A Survivor from Warsaw

Poland: Cultural Diplomacy through A Survivor from Warsaw

Czechoslovakia: A Survivor as A Survivor from Warsaw

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

MAP

Central Europe after 1949

PHOTOGRAPHS

René Leibowitz in Paris, ca. 1952

Hermann Scherchen, 1950s

Pauline Hall, c. 1953

Herbert Kegel in Poland, October 1958

Herbert Kegel rehearsing the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir in the Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall, 28 September 1958

Karel Berman

Acknowledgments

Many institutions and individuals made it possible for me to research and write this book, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge their support. A Howard Fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and two Research Scholar Grants from Vanderbilt University funded extensive archival research in Europe over the course of three summers. A Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies enabled me to spend academic year 2009–10 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where I was challenged and inspired by a cohort of extraordinarily intelligent colleagues. At Vanderbilt I am fortunate to work with two generous deans, Carolyn Dever of the College of Arts and Science and Mark Wait of the Blair School of Music, who have supported this project in ways both great and small.

I benefited from the assistance and expertise of a great many archivists. I must thank Therese Muxeneder and Eike Fess of the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna; Werner Grünzweig, Anouk Jeschke, and Daniela Reinhold of the Musikarchiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Jörg-Uwe Fischer of the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv; Ulf Rathje of the Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde; Ulrich Geyer of the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts Berlin; Rüdiger Koch of the MDR Rundfunkchor, Archiv; Steffen Held of the Ephraim Carlebach Stiftung Leipzig; Roswitha Meister and Alexander Hartmann of the Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen; Mieczysław Kominek, Izabela Zymer, and Beata Dz´wigaj of the Polish Music Information Center, which houses the Archiwum Związku Kompozytorów Polskich; Joanna Mitko and Jacek Konecki of the Archiwum Akt Polskiego Radia S.A.; Jolanta Szopa of the Archiwum Ministerstwa Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego; Andrzej Budzyński and Edyta Pawłowska of the Ośrodek Dokumentacji i Zbiorów Programowych Telewizja Polska; Sidsel Levin of the Jødisk Museum i Oslo; Øyvind Norheim of the Nasjonalbiblioteket Norsk musikksamling; Rolf Jonsson of the Norköpings stadsarkiv; Christine Sundby of the Riksarkivet, Sweden; Thomas Bab and Brigitta Bredskog of the Judiska Församlingen i Stockholm; Anders Hammarlund of the Svensk visarkiv; Jan Kahuda of the Národní archiv; Zuzana Petrášková of the Hudební oddělení Národní knihovny České republiky; Bohumil Sládeček of the Archiv Pražského filharmonického; Helena Bartíková of Supraphon; Zdeněk Jeřábek of the odbor Archivních a programových fondů České rozhlasu; and James Keller of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Archival research can be an adventure, and navigating the archives in Norway, Poland, and the Czech Republic would have been impossible without the help of some extraordinary research assistants. Audun Jonassen did exemplary work in Oslo, where I also had the great good fortune of meeting Astrid Kvalbein, who generously shared her knowledge of and enthusiasm for Pauline Hall and tracked down the photograph of Hall that appears in chapter 3. I will be forever grateful that, when I told Tereza Havelková at Charles University in Prague I was looking to hire an assistant there, she put me in touch with Kateřina Nová. Kateřina and I worked together in Prague on two separate research trips, after which she continued to track down leads, conduct correspondence, and proofread Czech without ever losing her trademark sense of humor. Lisa Jakelski was still a graduate student when I hired her to work with me in Warsaw, and her expertise on the ground was invaluable. Since then she has patiently answered countless questions and shared insights gained from her own work. I am enormously grateful for her generosity and her friendship.

Andrea Bohlman and Lisa Cooper Vest kindly followed up on archive leads for me in Warsaw. In Leipzig, Bernd-Michael Gräfe became an unofficial research collaborator of sorts, facilitating contacts and providing a wealth of valuable information. He and his wife, Heidemarie, were the most gracious of hosts. Inbal Prag of Tel Aviv conscientiously compiled the materials pertaining to Heinz Freudenthal’s career in Israel. Liv Glaser, Sidsel Levin, and Peter Freudenthal graciously answered questions about their fathers. When Tina Frühauf and I discovered that we were using the same Jewish publications from East Germany, she kindly shared her findings with me. Julian Ledford doggedly and cheerfully followed leads on René Leibowitz through Paris. Mary Mathews assisted me as part of an Undergraduate Research Supervision Grant from Vanderbilt.

Numerous other colleagues shared their knowledge of archives and sources, both primary and secondary: David R. Beveridge, Evan Burr Bukey, Timothy Frieze, Jarmila Gabrielová, Jay Howard Geller, Steffi Kandzia, Violetta Kostka, Libor Koudelka, Mark Kramer, Ralph Locke, Pamela Potter, Else-Beth Roalsø, Peter Schmelz, Anne C. Shreffler, Jan Straka, Tove Træsdal, and John Tyrrell. Beatrix Brockman, Malgorzata Hueckel, and Kirsti Spavin provided invaluable copyediting in German, Polish, and Norwegian, respectively. Joseph Auner, Walter Frisch, and Bryan Gilliam wrote letters of support for fellowships from the ACLS and the Howard Foundation, without which the book could never have come to fruition.

I am humbled by and grateful to the friends and colleagues who took the time to read the manuscript as it developed. I am indebted to Amy Beal, Klára Móricz, and Sabine Feisst in particular for providing insightful and comprehensive feedback on the entire book. Tina Frühauf, Fritz Hennenberg, Lily Hirsch, Lisa Jakelski, Hillel Kieval, Helga Kuschmitz, Neil Lerner, Brian Locke, Arnulf Mattes, Michael Meng, Alexander Rehding, Laura Silverberg, Thomas Svatos, Simon Walsh, Gregory Weeks, and Amy Lynn Wlodarski read one or more chapters and asked probing questions, challenging me to sharpen arguments and tighten prose. My friends and colleagues in the GFC writing group constitute the ideal interdisciplinary audience. A group of super-smart women whose areas of expertise have nothing to do with those addressed in this book, they are cheerfully insistent that scholarship be intelligible to nonspecialists. The contributions of all these individuals have made the book immeasurably better.

I count myself fortunate to work with the University of California Press again. Portions of the introduction and a previous version of chapter 1 were originally published as "Schoenberg’s Symbolic Remigration: A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar West Germany," Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (2009): 1743. © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California. Mary Francis has supported this project for many years. I am very grateful to series editor Richard Taruskin for including the book in the California Studies in Twentieth-Century Music series. He read the manuscript with a keen eye for improving both prose and argument, and I cannot imagine a better reader. Kim Hogeland, editorial assistant at the Press, has been a stalwart companion in the production process, a veritable font of knowledge and logistical troubleshooting. My thanks to Jordan Holland, who was looking for work at precisely the moment I needed an assistant for the final stages of manuscript preparation. The process was made much smoother by his project management skills. Given the extraordinary assistance acknowledged in these pages, any remaining errors in fact or judgment are clearly mine alone.

The role of friends and family in such an undertaking can scarcely be overestimated. In addition to those already mentioned, I am happy to thank Vanessa Beasley, Britta Duvigneau, Hilary Poriss, Despina Stratigakos, and Laurel Zeiss. My parents, Larry and Malissa, and my sister, Hope, have always been great sources of inspiration and strength, while my husband, Chris, remains my favorite in every way. This book is dedicated to him.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Central Europe after 1949.

Introduction

Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) seemed designed to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been the Nazis’ prime exemplar of entartete (degenerate) music. Said composer was both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony and had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. Clocking in at approximately seven minutes, A Survivor is too short to occupy either half of a concert yet too fraught with meaning to easily share the bill with anything else. For all of these reasons, the decision to program, perform, review, or otherwise write about A Survivor in postwar Europe was not taken casually. Its presence was always by design, and it was always understood to mean something important.

That meaning proved remarkably multivalent, and A Survivor was susceptible to appropriation for a surprising range of designs. Like all meanings and uses, these were determined by time (the early Cold War, between 1948 and 1968) and place (six different countries in postwar Europe). A Survivor might signal acknowledgment or commemoration of the Holocaust, as in Norway or, obliquely, Czechoslovakia; it could represent an endorsement of Schoenberg specifically, of dodecaphony, or of modernist music generally, as in West Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Resistance to A Survivor is also telling, as it was frequently met by recourse to easy anti-Semitic or anti-American tropes and sometimes both, as in West Germany and Austria. In the Eastern Bloc, A Survivor acted as a canary in the cultural-political coal mines. In the early years of the Cold War, Schoenberg’s music was officially endorsed there only during occasional moments of relative relaxation, such as the Thaw. Otherwise, ad hominem attacks on the composer and rejection of his music typified the early status quo as well as noxious episodes of retrenchment. Thus A Survivor’s appearance behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1950s was an indicator of just how warm the Thaw had gotten in each satellite, although even then its presence required de-Semitization in the name of antifascism, most obviously in East Germany. A Survivor could also be a vehicle for cultural diplomacy, as when East Germans gave the Polish premiere in Warsaw. For all of these reasons and many others, the performance and reception history of A Survivor as it circulated through postwar Europe is uniquely suited to serve as the basis for a cultural history of that time and place.

It is also a piece that continues to provoke discussion, although the critique is more often framed in terms of taste and artistic quality than symbolic content; such questions, in fact, have been part of its reception from the beginning. Plenty of erudite people take issue with A Survivor: some find it campy and melodramatic, arguing that the extreme expressionist musical gestures reduce the Holocaust to the clichés of a B-grade Hollywood film soundtrack; others find the choral finale distasteful because it panders to an audience’s preference for the heroic redemptive narrative arc and lets the listener off the hook; there are also those offended by what they perceive to be its exploitation of the suffering of others for entertainment. Nonetheless I pursue the project of reading the cultural history of the early Cold War in Europe through its performance and reception history for several reasons. First, A Survivor occupies a unique position in the oeuvre of a major composer. It may not have been the first piece of art music to treat the subject of the Holocaust, but it has been surprisingly popular.¹ The prestige of its composer’s name, its status as a late work, and its subject matter have all drawn keen critical interest, and it has had a significant, even disproportionate, influence on the composer’s overall reception as well as on perceptions of his Jewishness.² For these reasons, reconstructing its reception history as it circulated through postwar Europe fills in gaps in our knowledge about a well-known work by a historically significant figure.

Second, there is no minimum aesthetic standard a piece of music must meet to be historically, culturally, or personally significant. Because of the unique combination of attributes and conditions outlined above, the performance and reception history of A Survivor is ideally positioned to teach us about the postwar period in Europe. Furthermore, it is still not a work people program merely to fill seven minutes of air time; if anything, its presence may be weightier now because it has accrued more meanings with the passage of time. In 1992 the World Monuments Fund kicked off a fund-raising campaign for the restoration of Tempel Synagogue in Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Kraków, with a televised broadcast of the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra performing A Survivor in the unrestored sanctuary. On 9 November 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the musical highlight of the day’s festivities was a concert at the Brandenburg Gate, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim carefully crafted this concert’s highly symbolic program: it featured music by Wagner (overture to the third act of Lohengrin) and Beethoven (fourth movement from Symphony no. 7), the premiere of a new piece by a former East German composer (Es ist, als habe einer die Fenster aufgestoßen by Friedrich Goldmann), and A Survivor. Barenboim said he wanted to remind people that long before the ninth of November became known as a day of rejoicing, it had had a far darker historical significance: Kristallnacht.

For better or worse, A Survivor lends itself to the grand gesture. It is quite common to follow A Survivor with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, resulting in what might charitably be described as a problematic if audience-friendly narrative trajectory of heroic redemption. Celia Applegate has written about the inverse as well, in which Beethoven’s Ninth is followed, and perhaps neutralized, by A Survivor.³ Simon Rattle has conducted A Survivor and gone directly and without pause into Mahler’s Symphony no. 2 (Resurrection). At the 1948 premiere in Albuquerque, Kurt Frederick opened with Leopold Stokowski’s arrangement of Bach’s Come Sweet Death followed by A Survivor and Jaromir Weinberger’s Timpani Concerto; after intermission he offered Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. In November 2012 Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra offered a concert described in the program notes as a tribute to true idealism: the overture to Beethoven’s Fidelio was followed by Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon and A Survivor, and the second half featured Luigi Nono’s Julius Fučík, based on the diary Notes from the Gallows that Fučík had written while imprisoned under the Nazi regime. The audience was instructed not to applaud after the Nono piece but to wait until after Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the final piece on the concert, was complete. From the podium Jurowski announced that the program was dedicated to all who had suffered oppression and was conceived as a spiritual journey or dialectical confrontation.⁴ Others have taken aggressively interventionist approaches. In 1972 Hans Zender inserted A Survivor between parts 1 and 2 of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion; the singer performing the role of Christ also narrated the title role of A Survivor. In 1978 Michael Gielen wedged it between the third and fourth movements of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in an effort to disrupt what had become the normative relationship between the two works. Whatever one makes of these choices, all have some root in the pragmatic issues of concert-giving: it doesn’t make much sense to bring in a choir for a single, seven-minute piece, and putting Schoenberg last on the program risks an early audience exodus.

In February 2013 the Nashville Symphony opened a concert with A Survivor followed attacca by Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, then Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto no. 1; in a nod to the Schoenberg piece, the second half was given over to John Adams’s Harmonielehre, which owes its title to Schoenberg’s 1911 treatise on harmony of the same name. Ives’s tone poem presents a hushed, sustained soundscape of diatonic strings over which a trumpet poses an atonal question seven times. Woodwinds attempt to respond until the trumpet’s final query is left hanging in the air, suspended above a sustained G-major triad. The Unanswered Question provided the audience with a contemplative transition away from the Schoenberg. It also functioned as a buffer between A Survivor and applause, as audience members frequently express uneasiness about applauding at the end of that work. The narrator for A Survivor was George Takei, actor of Star Trek fame and queer icon. Takei has a distinctively resonant bass speaking voice, but that is not the primary reason he has begun performing this part. Born in Los Angeles in 1937, he was imprisoned with his family from 1942 to 1945 in Japanese-American internment camps in California and Arkansas. This history is part of the public relations campaign that attended his performances of A Survivor in Little Rock and Nashville, and it forms the basis of the musical Allegiance, in which he plays the starring role. Takei has uniquely American survivor credentials, and his embodiment of A Survivor could represent what Holocaust scholar Cathy Caruth calls an encounter with the real.⁵ This concert provides a tantalizing link to the Czech case study in chapter 6, in which I discuss how a Holocaust survivor frequently performed the title role in A Survivor. Takei’s recent embrace of the role suggests that Schoenberg’s piece is still relevant, and that it is doing some cultural and political work in the United States today. In the Nashville performance he narrated the text entirely in English, translating the original German quotations to English. (We will see that other performers have made adjustments to the text as well, either through translation, as here, or through word substitution, in an apparent attempt to soften the impact of graphic description.)

Third, when Schoenberg wrote A Survivor in 1947, there was no established vocabulary—literary, musical, or visual—for responding to the Holocaust. There were no extant ceremonies or rituals for mourning such loss, either. Hasia R. Diner has challenged the prevailing wisdom that Jews in the United States remained silent about the Holocaust in the immediate postwar period, demonstrating that they actually said and did quite a lot about the matter. But because the Holocaust was without modern precedent, and because American Jewish life takes so many different forms, there were no common models and no agreed-upon modes of behavior or expression: Holocaust commemorations of the postwar era reflected a set of on-the-ground realities that deeply influenced how American Jews constructed their commemorative culture. They had no obvious precedent to guide them as they took first steps toward creating new ceremonies, writing new liturgies, setting aside days of mourning, and orchestrating pageants that confronted the horrendous story of death and destruction, mass murders, gassings, and cremations of millions of Jews.⁶ In other words, they were making it up as they went along—adapting rituals and language, what Diner refers to as the deeds and words they already knew—to commemorate the victims of heretofore unknown and unimaginable events.⁷

Schoenberg was doing something similar in A Survivor: adapting rituals (concert-going and performance, recitation of the Sh’ma) and musical language (expressionism, whose gestures had become part of the vocabulary of Hollywood film scores for horror movies and thrillers, and dodecaphony) in an effort to commemorate events that defied description. Diner interprets the deeds and words of millions of Jews in the United States during this period as constituting a vast unorganized spontaneous project that sought to keep alive the image of Europe’s murdered Jews, all of which contributed to the creation of a memorial culture.⁸ A Survivor is part of that memorial culture because Schoenberg was a citizen of the United States writing a piece for an American audience, even if that piece was naturally informed by his European background. As Diner has shown, there were many Jews in the United States responding to the Holocaust in a variety of ways, and European Jewish emigrants were surely among them. In that context, Brigid Cohen’s observation that accounts of musical modernism in migration should recognize those forms of belonging that arise through emergent affiliations rather than simply reaffirming pre-given national identities is pertinent.⁹ We will also see that many Europeans who wrote about A Survivor experienced it as a work from the United States, because of its predominantly English-language text, Schoenberg’s naturalized citizenship, its tonally-inflected dodecaphony and social engagement (both associated with the composer’s late, American style), or its promotion by US-backed institutions. Even while A Survivor is part of an American Jewish memorial culture, it is also, simultaneously, a piece of art music for concert performance, and one written by a prominent composer at that. Its dual identity as memorial and concert work is necessarily an uneasy fit. Appropriate representation and commemoration of the Holocaust remain important topics of debate; and yet, just as Diner casts a compassionate eye upon other documents of early Holocaust memorial culture, I am inclined to give A Survivor the benefit of the doubt as well.

Schoenberg wrote A Survivor in his adopted home of California in 1947. The composition appears to have emerged from discussions with the Russian dancer and choreographer Corinne Chochem (1905–90), whose efforts to commission a work stalled as she was unable meet the composer’s price.¹⁰ The project came to fruition when shortly thereafter the Koussevitzky Music Foundation contacted Schoenberg about writing a piece, and the composer responded that he was already working on something he could complete quickly. He did so in the fall, and René Leibowitz (1913–72) prepared the orchestral score under Schoenberg’s supervision in December of that year. Schoenberg also wrote the text.¹¹ The survivor, a male narrator, recalls in English the terror of internment during the Holocaust: the roll call, the abuse of prisoners, the selection of those who would be put to death. This account is twice interrupted by German phrases when the narrator quotes the words of the feldwebel (German sergeant). At the end of the narration, the survivor recalls that those going to their deaths "all of a sudden, in the middle of it, [they] began singing the Schema Yisroel," and the work ends with a male chorus singing in Hebrew a portion of the Sh’ma (Hear, O Israel), the Jewish statement of faith and the most important prayer in Judaism:

I cannot remember ev’rything.

I must have been unconscious most of the time.

I remember only the grandiose moment

when they all started to sing as if prearranged,

the old prayer they had neglected for so many years

the forgotten creed!

But I have no recollection how I got underground

to live in the sewers of Warsaw for so long a time.

The day began as usual: Reveille when it still was dark.

Get out! Whether you slept or whether worries kept you awake the whole night.

You had been separated from your children, from your wife, from your parents;

you don’t know what happened to them how could you sleep?

The trumpets again—

Get out! The sergeant will be furious!

They came out; some very slow: the old ones, the sick ones; some with nervous agility.

They fear the sergeant. They hurry as much as they can.

In vain! Much too much noise; much too much commotion—and not fast enough!

The Feldwebel shouts: Achtung! Stilljestanden! Na wirds mal? Oder soll ich mit dem Jewehrkolben nachhelfen? Na jutt; wenn ihrs durchaus haben wollt!

The sergeant and his subordinates hit everybody:

young or old, quiet or nervous, guilty or innocent.

It was painful to hear them groaning and moaning.

I heard it though I had been hit very hard,

so hard that I could not help falling down.

We all on the ground who could not stand up were then beaten over the head.

I must have been unconscious. The next thing I knew was a soldier saying:

They are all dead,

whereupon the sergeant ordered to do away with us.

There I lay aside halfconscious.

It had become very still—fear and pain.

Then I heard the sergeant shouting: Abzählen!

They started slowly and irregularly: one, two, three, four

Achtung! the sergeant shouted again,

"Rascher! Nochmal von vorn anfangen!

In einer Minute will ich wissen,

wieviele ich zur Gaskammer abliefere!

Abzählen!"

They began again, first slowly: one, two, three, four,

became faster and faster, so fast

that it finally sounded like a stampede of wild horses,

and all of a sudden, in the middle of it,

they began singing the Shema Yisroel.¹²

The narrator’s Sprechstimme part is notated on a single staff line, with explicit rhythmic values and pitch symbols that indicate ascending and descending gestures relative to that central line, as well as chromatic alterations of those relative pitches. The plot is not taken from any single historical record, and the text combines accounts from various concentration camps and ghettos with ideas from the composer’s imagination in what Camille Crittenden describes as the composer’s "own