Voices From the Holocaust Reverberate Across
Time
New York Times - Saturday, May 6, 2000
THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
The balmy spring night belied the occasion of sad
memorial, and as the cantata played out around the city on the radio,
listeners paused
at the very idea of a spirited tango composed by some forgotten Buchenwald
prisoner, not to mention the bold humor enduring beyond long gone lyricists
at Auschwitz.
''Hey! There's no life like life at Auschwitz!'' go the sardonic words,
composed in a hidden gathering place at the camp by a group of inmates
who had managed
to filch some of their keepers' alcohol and imbibe.
''Something inside is happening again,'' the anonymous composers attest
in the intoxication that preceded their fate. ''We're beginning to feel
like
someone again.''
Priceless snatches of such words and music drifted out across the capital
on Wednesday night as part of Holocaust memorial week, bearing witness
to some of the very toughest and most unconquerable victims of Nazi
Germany's extermination machinery. While the secret classical music
compositions
of
some prisoners survived them and have long been treasured, there is
also a rich trove of the camp music of the common people that the
United States
Holocaust
Memorial Museum has meticulously collected for anyone with the heart
to delve into it.
Donald McCullough was such a one when, as a newcomer to Washington,
he turned to the museum in seeking to create a fresh work for the
Master Chorale of
Washington, the 150-member professional group that he serves as
music director. The result is the Holocaust Cantata, a choral pastiche
of
authentic
music
and song from inmates translated from the Polish. The chorale's
chamber singers performed its premiere two years ago.
''What I found ultimately was, I think, the music of spiritual resistance,''
he said. ''They couldn't resist physically or verbally. But music
was a way for them to resist, and that's the over-arching theme.''
As it sounded forth from the local classical music station, WETA,
the cantata was a reminder of the extraordinary preservation
labors that
some inmates
carried on. They protected a legacy of tunes, some rebelliously
composed on the spot, others fondly clung to by the millions
who perished.
Bret Werb, the musicologist at the Holocaust museum, directed
Mr. McCullough to an enormous archive left by Aleksander Kulisiewicz,
a Polish journalist
and songwriter who was imprisoned for anti-fascist activities
and
became the camp troubadour at Sachsenhausen in Germany. He
was regularly beaten
for his
lyrical resistance. But he survived, and upon liberation he
dictated to bedside nurses 700 songs and poems he had memorized.
''I came to this earth to share with you pain, in the same
manner in which others come to share pleasures,'' Kulisiewicz
declared
while spending
the remaining 37 years of his life on a monumental study
of the music culture
of the Nazi camps.
Mr. McCullough said: ''Rather naively I went into this thinking,
'O.K., I'm going to call this ''Light in the Darkness''
or some such.' But
that seemed
trite once I really got into it because while there are
some readings in the cantata about music giving them hope,
so many
other songs
are about nothing
but despair.''
Josef Kropinski, imprisoned for editing an underground newspaper,
spent five years in the camps and jotted down more than
500 musical pieces,
some of them
on the backs of Nazi bureaucratic forms. He smuggled out
much of what he heard and sang, some of it now among the
saddest
parts of
the cantata.
''In
Buchenwald
the birch trees rustle sadly,'' goes one tune he carried,
''as my heart sways languishing in woe.''
Most of the material Mr. McCullough researched tells of
the sufferings of the non-Jewish Polish slave laborers,
dissidents
and intellectuals,
among
the categories targeted by Hitler for destruction or
decimation that the Holocaust museum continues to research.
When he began, Mr. McCullough, a musician, not a linguist,
could only search out promising tunes in the museum's
archives. He
discovered more fully what
he had when a member of the chorale, Laura Kafka,
the daughter of a Polish slave laborer, translated some
lyrics. The story
of her
mother,
Irena,
a camp survivor, is now included as a terse spoken
prelude to ''The Train,'' a farewell
song that survived the Brzezinka camp. (''The dark
hour's on us, our fate is sealed, I must forget you.'')
Eventually Mr. McCullough hired a young Pole, Marcin
Zmudzki, to scan and translate archive selections.
Those translations
were then
adapted
as cantata
lyrics by Denny Clark, a member of the chorale.
Mr. Cullough said: ''To me the cantata's broad message
is simply: This happened. It can happen. And the
line between
good and
evil in every
single one of
us is so thin.''
Mr. McCullough specializes in what he terms ''music
of the commoner'' that ''translate the statistics''
of history
into a sense of
individual experience.
His latest choral work is rooted in the spirituals
that aided the flight of American slaves along
the underground
railroad.
''I love music that speaks of daily life but
lasts for generations and generations,'' he
said. ''I
wondered if there was music
like that that
speaks of daily
life in the camps that can give some insight
into what
it was like through music.''
Josef Kropinski eventually answered the question
in leaving one of the most mournful songs
to survive now in the Holocaust
Cantata:
Dreams of yore will not return,
Nor the reveries that burned,
Nor the nectar of sweet lips,
Nor those longing eyes!
Cello, play the sad song,
Song of pining, pain and tears,
Song remembering dreams of love
And of days now gone.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
