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Tag: Holocaust Music

Viktor Ullmann Music From Terezin
Even under the most unspeakable circumstances, he continued to be Viktor.

Viktor Ullmann was one of the best-known composers to be interned in Terezin, or Theresienstadt, the “model camp” set up by the Nazis to deceive the foreign press and the International Red Cross.

There, concert orchestras, chamber groups and jazz ensembles were formed, operas were staged, and the Verdi Requiem was mounted no less than fourteen times. At Terezin, composers continued to create, until deportation to Auschwitz.

Ullmann wrote in 1944, “…that musically I have been challenged not hindered by Theriesenstadt, that we did not just sit by Babylon’s rivers bewailing our fate, and that our will to create culture was as strong as our will to live.”

We’ll be listening to a cross-section of Ullmann’s music written in the camp, including a piano sonata (performed by Terezin survivor Edith Kraus, who died in 2013 at the age of 100), a concert overture, and a song cycle; also, a piano concerto written shortly before his arrest, a period of hardship for the composer, as he began to be stripped of his rights and his options to make a living. He never heard the concerto performed in his lifetime. Ullmann died at Auschwitz in 1944.

Ironically, most of his unpublished works dating from before his internment are now lost. It is his music written at Terezin, for the most part, which survives. The music written during his confinement, then, becomes a metaphor for the indomitable spirit of the artist.

The composer lives on through his creations, on “Ullmann Victorious,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

To enhance your appreciation of Ullmann’s “Der Mensch und sein Tag” (“Man and His Day”), I am posting English translations of the aphoristic texts below, so that they may be read while listening to the music.

“DER MENSCH UND SEIN TAG” (MAN AND HIS DAY), Op. 47

12 Portraits by Hans-Günter Adler
1. WALK INTO MORNING
  Sight. Hands in front of eyebrows
  and maternal light. Meadowland.
  A blade of grass. A step. Dew on the flowers.
2. SONG
  So much. So much and still more.
  A great ocean, surging and pounding –
  flutes lightly, horns heavily.
3. HOME
  In the ground, the cool ground. So colourful.
  Billowing fields and meadows around.
  In the ground – hidden heart and mouth.
4. TO THE BELOVED
  With you, in smiles and tears.
  Nearness of hand and mouth. Longing
  fades. With you no blind fancy.
5. FLOWERS
  Inward, buried deep and warm.
  Breath – singing to life.
  Bright goblets, lips, tongues.
6. IN THE PARLOUR
  Tightly pressed to one another.
  Planted with care and trouble.
  Animate and inanimate. Mute and loud.
7. THE NEIGHBOUR
  Help is good. Hand in hand.
  Door to door and wall to wall:
  quite united. Bond and band.
8. PRAYERS
  Scattered in the chalice of piety
  ripe corn offered
  to the gladdened protector and creator.
9. IN THE FOREST
  Dappled, close and far and scent.
  The sun dreams, the air slumbers.
  Crepitation. Calcification. Trees. Scent.
10. FADE
  Down, down. The bell tolls.
  Clouds glow. Evening glimmers.
  Down, down. The moon-breath shimmers.
11. NIGHT
  Come, gentle sleep! Come, sweet night!
  The ground relaxes in muted glory.
  Lone thoughts sink to earth.
12. SILENCE
  Stillness. Silence. Looking and watching.
  Tranquil in blessed reflection.
  Sleep before the divine.
January 23, 2022
Yom HaShoah Marcel Tyberg’s Lost Symphony

Yom HaShoah…

Marcel Tyberg was a forgotten casualty of the Holocaust. A devout Catholic, Tyberg was targeted because one of his grandmother’s great-grandfathers was Jewish (comprising a mere 1/16th of his genetic make-up). The fact was made known only when his mother registered with the German authorities then occupying their hometown, Abbazia, in what was then northern Italy (now Opatija, Croatia).

It’s unclear whether Tyberg himself had any prior knowledge of his great-great grandfather’s ethnicity, but four generations’ remove was not enough to pacify the Nazis. Tyberg was transported to Auschwitz, where his death was recorded on New Year’s Eve, 1944.

Tyberg’s music alone should not have attracted unfavorable notice from the authorities. There is nothing in his compositional output that might have frightened the Führer. Quite apart from the modernism being explored by many of the composers interned in the “artists’ camp” of Terezin – the kind of music the Nazis branded “degenerate” – Tyberg’s symphonies are very much in the Austro-German romantic tradition.

With the likelihood of arrest looming, Tyberg entrusted his manuscripts to his friend, Milan Mihich, an Italian doctor and music-lover. Mihich in turn passed them on to his son. In 2005, Dr. Enrico Mihich, then a specialist at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY, brought the scores to the attention of JoAnn Falletta, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

Falletta, in her examination of the manuscripts, discerned what she thought to be real musical worth and gave the first performance of Tyberg’s Symphony No. 3 in 2008. She has since also performed and recorded the Second Symphony – unheard since Rafael Kubelik conducted it back in the 1930s.

Tyberg’s Third Symphony should appeal especially to admirers of Bruckner and Mahler; yet it stands alone as a work of outstanding beauty and, somehow, especially when colored by a knowledge of its history, an expression of hope.

April 21, 2020

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