Gerard Schwarz remarks:

Julian Schwarz

In Memoriam is basically in three parts: the first section is funereal in spirit, reflecting on the tragedy of death for someone so young and so gifted - and so remarkable. There is a consistent sadness and poignancy in this opening section. The middle section begins with the string quartet and then the material is repeated and embellished in the cello. I wanted this to be positive in feeling, thinking of all the great accomplishments of this wonderful man, individually and as a father and husband. It has a somewhat otherworldly quality but hopefully the experience is uplifting; a tribute to the extraordinary meaning that David Tonkonogui's life meant to all that knew him. Finally, the coda brings back a little part of first section in a much shortened version, which is also much thinner texturally, to end on a single note - the lowest or purest note on the cello.

1. Overture/The Rabbi's advice
2. Wedding Song
3. Bread Song
4. Who Knows One? Mazel Tov!

In his 1978 Nobel acceptance speech, Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that storytellers might have the best chance of "rescuing civilization." Singer's best-known story, Gimpel the Fool, is the basis for this work by David Schiff. The story is set in Frampol, a shtetl in 19th-century Poland, but it transcends geography and time. Singer relates the tale of Gimpel, a naďve baker, who responds to a lifetime of betrayal and de-ception with childlike acceptance and faith. The character of Gimpel has been seen by some as a tribute to the stereotypic Eastern European Jew, a simple, suffering type, who accepts what the world hands to him. Despite his suffering, Gimpel is never resentful, and retains a steadfast belief in human goodness. Singer's writing captures a vanished world of Eastern European Jewry, and the richness and wisdom in simple people's lives.

Schiff's Divertimento, composed for Chamber Music Northwest, combines various numbers from his 1979 opera, Gimpel the Fool. The virtuosic character of each of the instruments replaces the voices from the original operatic setting. While the piece has a distinctly Klezmer-like quality, Schiff uses very few folk melodies. One can be heard in the introduction to the "Bread Song."

Notes by Mina Miller © Music of Remembrance

World premiere: May 9, 2005, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA, at Music of Remembrance's Holocaust Re-membrance Concert

Poetry written in the Vilna Ghetto by Abraham Sutzkever (b. Smorgon, near Vilna, 1913)

The Seed of Dream was composed for baritone Erich Parce. It is dedicated to Music of Remembrance's founder and artistic director, Mina Miller.

Pre-World War II Vilna ("Vilnius" in Lithuanian) was often described as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania." For centuries it was one of the great Jewish cultural centers, contributing important modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and giving shape to the birth of Zionism and the Jewish Labor Movement.

Germany's invasion of Vilna in June 1941 was followed immediately by a series of anti-Jewish decrees. Within a month, 5,000 Jews were rounded up and taken away. In August and September, 8,000 more Jews were taken to the nearby forest preserve of Ponary and shot. By the end of 1941, the Nazis had al-ready murdered 33,500 of Vilna's 57,000 Jewish residents, and imprisoned the remaining Jews in its two ghettos.

The Vilna Ghetto, even under Nazi rule, did not betray the city's rich cultural heritage. A well-documented artistic life, including musical events and the Ghetto Theatre, attests to the courageous resilience of a decimated community in constant danger of total destruction. Within the Ghetto walls, poetry took on a special importance.

The great Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was imprisoned in the Vilna Ghetto with his wife and mother. He joined the Vilna Ghetto Underground, smuggled weapons and taught Yiddish poetry. As a member of the "Paper Brigade," he risked his life to smuggle out hundreds of rare books and manuscripts. Sutz-kever escaped the ghetto in 1943, and joined a partisan fighters unit. He survived Nazi anti-guerilla of-fensives by taking refuge in the forest and freezing waters of Lake Narocz. In 1944, following the Soviet Army's liberation of Vilna, he was airlifted to Moscow.

In the midst of personal and communal tragedy, Sutzkever wrote poems of classical meter in perfect rhyme, making aesthetic resistance the subject of his verse. Sutzkever's ghetto poems responded to tragedy and human suffering with "lyricism laced with lamentation."

Sutzkever has been rightly portrayed as a romantic poet hero of our time. At age 92, he may be the last of a line of Yiddish writers that began in the Nineteenth Century with Sholom Aleichem. Without direct use of religious language, Sutzkever's poetry translates the inherited faith of the Jewish people, and recounts the quintessential pilgrimage from annihilation to renewal.

Laitman sets five of Sutzkever's Vilna Ghetto poems in The Seed of Dream. She offers the following re-marks:

Scored for baritone voice, cello and piano, The Seed of Dream was composed between March and Octo-ber of 2004. Four of the five poems were translated by Pulitzer Prize winning poet C.K. Williams; "Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars" was translated by Leonard Wolf. Poet Abraham Sutzkever wrote these first-person accounts between 1941 and 1944. They bear witness not only to the destruction surrounding Sutzkever, but also to his undying belief in the beauty of the word and the world.

Written on August 30, 1941 in the Vilna Ghetto, "I Lie in this Coffin" is based on Sutzkever's own hiding from the Germans in a coffin. The song begins sparsely, then the texture grows as the cello enters, and the vocal line becomes more plaintive as the singer cries out, appealing to the spirit of his dead sister. (Sutz-kever's sister died when they were children). Buoyed by the presence of her spirit, the music assumes a happier character, before returning again to the opening pathos. The hope derived from the memory of his sister returns to end with a sense of optimism.

"A Load of Shoes" was written in the Ghetto on January 1, 1943, when Sutzkever glimpsed his mother's shoes a year after her death. Sutzkever has described this poem as the most macabre of "death dances." This poem is indeed chilling, particularly the line "but the truth, shoes,/where are your feet?" The song has the feel of a slightly oft-kilter Jewish folk song. The driving accompaniment suggests the wheels of the cart.

"To My Child," written after Sutzkever's son was murdered, contains some of the most horrific images and some of the most beautiful. This longer song is divided into distinct sections. The opening is conver-sational in nature, with silence punctuating the vocal line. After a variation of the opening theme, a qui-eter, lullaby section ensues. These musical sections alternate as the poem alternates between emotions.

"Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars" (Vilna Ghetto, May 22, 1943) combines my setting of Sutzkever's words with the beautiful melody composed in the Vilna Ghetto by Abraham Brudno (? - 1943) for the same text. Just like Sutzkever's spirit, the opening music is depleted of energy, but prayer-like, beautiful and simple. Here, the beauty of the natural world is contrasted against the world of Sutzkever's pain and horror, and the striking alteration of harmony on the word "me" calls attention to this fact. Brudno's mel-ody appears in the first instrumental interlude. Afterwards the melodies alternate and intertwine. A glitter-ing accompaniment suggesting the firmament sets the stage for the final rendition of Brudno's tune, sung in the original Yiddish.

In keeping with Sutzkever's belief that words and nature would help to heal tortured souls, I chose to end the cycle with his poem of hope, "No Sad Songs, Please," written in the Narocz forests on Feb. 5, 1944. His hopefulness is expressed by a very lyric melody above accessible harmonies. The song ends with the voice repeating the words "No sad songs, please," ending the cycle with a plea for understanding and hope.

I wish to thank Mina Miller who commissioned this work for Music of Remembrance.

Notes by Mina Miller © Music of Remembrance

Presto con fuoco
Allegretto con moto e con malinconia grotesca
Allegro giocoso alla Slovacca
Andante molto sostenuto

Born in Prague, Schulhoff was recognized as a child prodigy by Dvorák. He studied piano and composi-tion at the conservatories of Prague, Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne, and in 1913 took lessons with De-bussy. He emerged from a relatively traditional musical education as a free thinker who embraced new currents in both popular and art music. A formidable pianist, Schulhoff championed the music of his time - Scriabin, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern - as well as the avant-garde quarter-tone piano music of his Czech compatriot Alois Haba.

Schulhoff was conscripted into the Austrian army in 1914. He returned four years later disillusioned and angry, and became a committed socialist. In Berlin, he soon became acquainted with the Dadaists, whose absurdist art movement and anti-bourgeois stance resonated with Schulhoff's unconventional ideas and revolutionary spirit. Through his friendship with painter George Grosz, also a collector of contemporary American jazz recordings, Schulhoff became acquainted with this idiom. He worked as a jazz pianist in the "Hot Jazz" clubs of Europe in the 1920s, and was one of the first composers (pre-dating even Gershwin) to incorporate jazz elements.

With the rise of Nazism, Schulhoff's career in Germany ended, despite his artistic triumphs in Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden. He returned to Prague, where he jeopardized his status by becoming a Communist. In 1939 he became a Soviet citizen, and sought to emigrate there following the Nazi takeover of Czecho-slovakia that year. Before his visa arrived, he was arrested in Prague as a Jew, a "degenerate artist," and a Soviet citizen - an undesirable on all fronts.

Despite his fate, Schulhoff had a unique impact on evolving musical styles during his brief lifetime. In a letter to Berg in 1921, Schulhoff wrote: "I have a tremendous passion for the fashionable dances and there are times when I go dancing night after night with dance hostesses…purely out of rhythmic enthusi-asm and subconscious sensuality; this gives my creative work a phenomenal impulse, because in my con-sciousness I am incredibly earthly, even bestial…."

Schulhoff's return to Prague in 1923 inspired a new creative period that was marked by a synthesis of avant-gardism with European mainstream tradition. Czech music, with its roots in native folklore, brought Schulhoff in contact with invigorating musical sources. His great chamber works for strings - the Five Pieces for String Quartet (1923), the two string quartets from 1924 and 1925 and the Sextet for Strings (1924) - reflect the influence of Slavonic folksong and the dance music of the day.

Schulhoff clearly sheds his Dada skin in the First Quartet. Far more than in the Five Pieces that preceded it, this quartet is marked by regular and repetitive rhythms that are metrically aligned. The bold and dra-matic opening of the work, and Schulhoff's frequent use of doublings at the octave and fifth to intensify structure, contrasts with the hushed and sustained tone of the last movement. Here the soft rustle of oscil-lating thirds creates a distant sonic effect, reminiscent in texture and character to On an Overgrown Path, by Janácek, whose music was an important model for Schulhoff.

After a half-century of obscurity, Schulhoff's extraordinary music has struck the eyes and ears of per-formers and audiences discovering the composers and music once banned by the Nazis as "degenerate." These admirable efforts are beginning to shed long-awaited light on a nearly-lost legacy of music between the wars.

Notes by Mina Miller © Music of Remembrance

English translations and arrangements by Kobi Luria

Cabaret was an important part of life at Terezín, and grew out of the harsh realities of ghetto conditions and the fear of transports to unknown destinations ("The East"). The Nazis turned the former Czech for-tress, which they named Theresienstadt, into a transit camp from which many of Europe's most talented musicians and composers were sent to their deaths. To become an inhabitant was to be condemned to die, and of the approximately 141,000 Jews deported to Terezín between 1941-45, fewer than 17,000 Jews at Terezín were alive at liberation on May 7, 1945.

While disease, starvation, and brutality accompanied daily life in Terezín, the Nazis permitted, and even encouraged, performances of both serious and cabaret-style music. As time went on, cabarets proliferated because they were easy to assemble: small groups could move from attic to attic if needed, and works could be performed in small spaces as well as larger ones. A "Café" was opened in Terezín in December 1942 by the Freizeitgestaltung. An inmate was eligible to apply for a ticket to a cabaret evening after two months of slave labor (at 80-100 hours of work per week). For the brief period of two hours, one had the privilege of sitting in the café. There were no coffee, cigarettes, spirits or cakes to be found at the table, but one could listen to music. Ironically, here one could hear jazz and other music that was banned as "degenerate" throughout the Reich.

The first cabaret show in Terezín, The Lost Food Ticket (1942), was the work of the talented Czech writer, producer, director and performer Karel Svenk (1917-45). A native of Prague, Svenk arrived with the first transport to Terezín in November 1941, and became a talented cabaret director while there. An avowed communist, he expressed his social message in the cabarets. His first production was an all-male cabaret staged in the potato-peeling room of the Sudeten barracks. Aimed at strengthening the morale of its prisoners, the cabaret's final number, Terezín March, became the camp's anthem. Svenk's cabaret Long Live Life spoke of social problems, but not directly of life in Terezín, and included songs composed by Svenk before the war. Svenk's cabaret The Last Cyclist was an allegorical play set in a mad kingdom. It was so frank in its metaphor of cyclists (representing Jews) as targets of persecution by fools (representing Nazis) that its performance was forbidden by the Council of Elders after one dress rehearsal. In "Farewell," the only surviving song from this cabaret, heroine Manka sings to her imprisoned lover, the last bicycle rider, on the day he is to be exiled to the moon (the ultimate transport). Svenk was sent to Auschwitz in the fall of 1944, and from there to heavy labor at a factory in Menselwitz, near Leipzig, where he died in April 1945.

In contrast to the accomplished professional performers in Terezín's German-language cabarets, the Czech-language cabarets mainly used amateurs. Their enthusiasm compensated for the lack of professional experience. We are indebted to Israeli composer/arranger Kobi Luria for sharing his extraordinary work in reconstructing these Czech cabaret songs. Through his determined efforts collecting survivor testimonies, he was able to reconstruct both music and words to 13 songs by Karel Svenk, of which we pre-sent six this evening. We are also grateful for his English translations of these texts for our world premiere.

We would also like to thank Russian pianist/composer Sergei Dreznin for making his collection of German cabaret songs and satire available to us. The seven songs we present this evening were part of a larger theater production, Chansons und Satiren aus Theresienstadt, which was premiered in Vienna in 1992. English translation of these texts is by Tom Neile.

Notes by Mina Miller © Music of Remembrance