World premiere: May 12, 2008, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, WA, at Music of Remembrance's Holocaust Remembrance Day concert.
Ghetto Songs draws on the lyrical legacy of Mordecai Gebirtig (1877-1942), a self-taught folksinger and actor who earned his living as a carpenter, making furniture. Born in Krakow, he was drawn to performance, joining the Jewish Amateur Troupe there, and writing theater reviews for a Yiddish newsletter put out by the Jewish Social-Democratic Party. Five years of service in the Austro-Hungarian army exposed him to songs from all over, and in 1920, he gathered for publication a song collection titled Folkstimlekh ("of the folk"). Soon they were being sung by Poland's leading singers, becoming the hits of their day, and Gebirtig had gained his name as Poland's "Yiddish troubadour." At 60, outraged by the violent Nazi outbursts of the late '30s, in particular a pogrom in the Polish town of Przytyk in 1936, Gebirtig wrote the song "Undzer shtetl brent" ("Our Town is On Fire"): "Don't stand there, brothers, douse the fire!" went one line. (Later the song became the anthem of Krakow's underground resistance movement.) Another song, "S'tut vey" ("It Hurts"), depicted the lack of compassion Polish Jews felt from other Poles after the German invasion. Deported to the Krakow ghetto in April 1942, two months later he was shot and killed by German soldiers for refusing to be deported to the Belzec death camp. It was "Bloody Thursday," June 4, 1942. He was 65 years old.
Paul Schoenfield offers the following remarks:
I am extremely indebted to my colleague Bret Werb, resident musicologist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for introducing me to the music and poetry of Mordecai Gebirtig. Bret also steered me to Polish-American Yiddishist Joseph Mlotek, who places Gebirtig in a select group of poets and bards: "What emerged from his pen, as well as his heart, was a pure hymn of love for his people, a hymn touched with sorrow, sad news and -- on occasion -- happiness. With tenderness and gentle humor Gebirtig offered an insight, not only into the everyday life and milieu of the people he immortalized in song, but into their feelings and emotions, their hopes and dreams."
Ghetto Songs is a setting of six Gebirtig poems fortuitously preserved in the notebook the poet kept with him in the ghetto. It is very different from Kulisiewicz's unrelenting sarcasm and black humor in the texts I used for Camp Songs. Mina Miller and I settled on these poems by Gebirtig because they are written across this whole range between hope and gladness and despair. Paralleling other folk settings that I've done, Gebirtig's poems were used as a broth to nourish a relatively large-scale work. Of course everyone has socially learned musical tastes so when composing you have to take that into account. To ears accustomed to European music, for instance, an Arab love song might sound funereal, and so with Yiddish tunes. I used a very simple melodic and harmonic vocabulary. Anything else would distract from the poet's intent. Six songs were appropriate for the length of the piece, and I ordered them to create the song cycle's portrait of Gebirtig, so they are not presented in the order they were written. Ghetto Songs was completed in February 2008.
Shifreles portret (Shifrele's Portrait) Krakow, December 1939
Cut off from his oldest daughter by the Soviet annexation of Lemberg, where she lived, Gebirtig talks to his photograph of her, hoping that their separation will soon be over.
Minutn fun yiesh (Moments of Despair) Krakow, September 1940
Hope is in short supply a year after the German invasion, and Gebirtig wrestles with the anguish of not knowing what's to come.
Glokn klang! (Tolling Bells) Łagiewniki, October 1941
To this day it is the custom not to directly mention the name of negative entities, realizing that naming them can only add to their strength. So with Gebirtig, who speaks only of the oppresssiveness of evil.
Undzer friling! (Our Springtime) Krakow Ghetto, April 1942
Gebirtig's third spring under Nazi rule brings forced confinement in the Krakow ghetto. It is a bitter spring, with nothing new to celebrate.
A zuniker shtral (A Ray of Sunshine) Łagiewniki, May 1941
Gebirtig meditates on a ray of sunshine that pierces the bitter gloom, and dreams of home, of spring, of peace.
Minutn fun bitokhn! (Moments of Confidence) Krakow, October 1940
Gebirtig turns to the Book of Esther for a story of resistance and endurance: Haman, a counsel to the Persian King Achashverosh, tries to eliminate the Jews, but is himself killed instead.
For the basis of the poems' description, I owe thanks to Bret Werb for his notes to the CD recording Krakow Ghetto Notebook (Koch International Classics).
Paul Schoenfield (b. 1947, Detroit)
Paul Schoenfield, composer and pianist, fulfilled both roles for the May 12, 2008, world premiere of his second MOR commission, Ghetto Songs, a work based on the poetry of the beloved Polish "troubadour," Mordecai Gebirtig, murdered in the Krakow ghetto. His first MOR commission, Camp Songs, was a chamber music setting of five poems written by the political dissident Aleksander Kulisiewicz, while imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II. Recorded on MOR's first CD, Art from Ashes, Vol. 1 (Innova), Camp Songs was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Music. (The disc itself was nominated for a 2003 Grammy Award.) Born in 1947 in Detroit, MI, Schoenfield studied piano with Julius Chajes, Ozan Marsh, and Rudolf Serkin, and holds a degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, as well as a Doctor of Music Arts degree from the University of Arizona. He has lived on a kibbutz in Israel and was a freelance composer and pianist in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. As a composer, Schoenfield has received commissions and grants from the NEA, the Ohio Arts Commission, Chamber Music America, the Rockefeller Fund, the Minnesota Commissioning Club, American Composers Forum, Soli Deo Gloria of Chicago, and many other organizations. Though he rarely performs now, he has toured the United States, Europe, and South America as a solo pianist and with ensembles. Among his recordings are the complete violin and piano works of Bartok with Sergiu Luca. His compositions can be heard on the Angel, Decca, Innova, Naxos, Vanguard, EMI, Koch, BMG, and New World labels. Paul Schoenfield's music was first heard at a MOR concert in November 1999, which featured the West Coast premiere of Sparks of Glory. He joined MOR's Advisory Board in January 2000.