- Person
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Lived
- 1874–1951
- Field
- Composition
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
As the full scale of the Holocaust became known after the Second World War, Arnold Schoenberg, by then an American citizen living in Los Angeles, answered in music. Early in 1947 the Russian-born choreographer Corinne Chochem suggested a work about Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto who began to sing as they went to their deaths. That plan fell through, but a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in Boston gave Schoenberg the chance to realise the idea his own way.
He wrote the text himself, in English with German interjections, saying it was based partly on reports he had received. He sketched it between July and August 1947 and composed the music in under two weeks, from 11 to 23 August. Because his health was poor, he wrote only a condensed score, and his friend René Leibowitz completed the orchestration under his supervision.
The work, for narrator, men's chorus and orchestra, lasts about seven minutes. In a half-spoken, half-sung style, the narrator recalls a group of Jewish prisoners beaten by guards and ordered to count off so the sergeant can know how many he will send to the gas chamber. As the count speeds up, the men suddenly break into the Shema Yisrael, the central declaration of Jewish faith, sung in Hebrew. Their prayer becomes an act of defiance and dignity at the edge of annihilation.
The premiere came from an unexpected place. Kurt Frederick, conductor of the semi-amateur Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra, asked permission to perform it, and Schoenberg offered him the first performance. On 4 November 1948, at the University of New Mexico, with ranchers and cowboys among the singers, the audience responded so strongly that Frederick played the work a second time on the spot. Leibowitz conducted the European premiere in Paris the following month.
The scholar Alexander Ringer, quoted by the Milken Archive, called it the ultimate artistic expression of Schoenberg's lifelong Jewish trauma and his abiding faith. The novelist Milan Kundera described it as the greatest memorial ever dedicated to the Holocaust. Orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic have programmed it to lead directly into Mahler's Second Symphony or Beethoven's Ninth, and it remains one of the most performed musical memorials to the victims.
Why it matters
A Survivor from Warsaw gave the murdered a voice in the concert hall and remains a central work of Holocaust remembrance.
About Arnold Schoenberg
Viennese composer who broke with traditional harmony, invented the twelve-tone method, and returned to Judaism in defiance of the Nazis, writing Moses und Aron and A Survivor from Warsaw.
More about Arnold Schoenberg
- Schoenberg's harmony textbook is still studiedArnold Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) in 1910, a teaching book that musicians still study more than a century later.
- Arnold Schoenberg created the twelve-tone methodIn 1923 Arnold Schoenberg announced his method of composing with twelve tones, a new way of organising music that shaped composition for half a century.
- Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire created a lasting ensembleSchoenberg's 1912 Pierrot lunaire, 21 poems for a half-sung reciter and five players, created the 'Pierrot ensemble' that composers still write for today.
- Schoenberg's society gave 353 performances of new musicIn 1918 Arnold Schoenberg founded Vienna's Society for Private Musical Performances, which gave 353 carefully rehearsed performances of new music for its members.
- In America Schoenberg taught John Cage and Lou HarrisonAfter fleeing Nazi Germany, Arnold Schoenberg taught in Los Angeles, becoming a UCLA professor in 1936; his students included John Cage and Lou Harrison.
- Schoenberg taught Alban Berg and Anton WebernArnold Schoenberg's Vienna pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern became major composers in their own right, forming with him the Second Viennese School.
- Schoenberg's Transfigured Night became a beloved classicArnold Schoenberg's string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1899 when he was 25, remains one of the most performed works of its era.
- Schoenberg's Moses und Aron wrestled with an unseen GodArnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron, composed 1930–32, dramatises the Jewish idea of a God who cannot be pictured, through the clash of two brothers.
Sources
- A Survivor from Warsaw Wikipedia
- Arnold Schoenberg Milken Archive of Jewish Music
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