Lullaby and Doina

Gypsies were among the racial groups singled out by the Nazis for persecution. The Nazis subjected the Roma, whom they considered racially inferior, to forced labor and massacre, and sent them to extermination camps. Historians estimate that of the approximately one million gypsies living in Europe before the war, up to 220,000 were murdered during the Holocaust.

Golijov offers the following remarks:

This piece starts with a set of variations on a Yiddish lullaby that I composed for Sally Potter's film The Man Who Cried. These variations were designed to work in counterpoint to another important musical theme in the soundtrack, the aria "Je crois entendre encore" from Bizet's Pearl Fishers. In her evocative film, Sally explores the fate of Jews and Gypsies in the tragic mid-years of the twentieth century, through a love story between a young Jewish woman and a young Gypsy man. Accordingly, the theme of the lullaby here metamorphoses into a dense and dark doina (a gypsy slow, rubato genre) featuring the lowest string of the viola. The piece ends in a fast gallop, boasting a theme that I stole from my friends of the wild gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks. The theme is presented in an almost canonical chase where the clarinet pursues the flute-violin combination flying away.