The Collegiate Chorale at Central Synagogue

A Moving Tribute to Songs of the Concentration Camps

By: Susan Hall - Mar 13, 2011

A once beautiful fortress was turned into a way station leading to death.

Even today the whitewashed walls peel away to reveal the block numbers painted on when Terezin was a concentration camp.

 

The Collegiate Chorale
Central Synagogue
March 10, 2011
We Remember Them: Choral Music from the Camps and the Ghettos
Host: Cantor Angela Warncik Buchdahl
Pianist: Kenneth Bowen
Conductor: James Bagwell
Dremlen Feygl, arr. Joshua Jacob
A Child's Journey, Michael Horvit
An Accidental Meeting
I Once Had a Friend
There Are No Stars in the Sky
Reading by James Bagwell
Ashrei Hagafrur, Lawrence Avery
Reading by Cantor Buchdahl
Tsen Brider, Choral Arrangement, Joshua Jacobson
Even When God is Silent, Michael Horvit
Introduction and Reading by James Bagwell
Bachuri Le'an Tisa, Gideon Klein
Three Yiddish Songs for Men's Chorus, Viktor Ullmann
Three Yiddish Songs for Women's Chorus, Viktor Ullmann
Two Partisan Songs, arr. Paul Epstein
Reading by Cantor Buchdahl
Ani Maamin, arr. Erwin Jospe

Music holds out hope for beleaguered peoples, and for all of us who need courage to face the day.  In the concentration camps, sometimes out front and sometimes hidden in a special block, Jews sang songs from their former homes and engendered hope under hopeless circumstances. 

The Collegiate Chorale under James Bagwell remembered, singing often the characteristic fourth interval of folk songs and also the seventh which yearns for better times, inviting people of all cultural backgrounds to appreciate the moment.

The need to remember needs no argument.  Historians know well that if we do not, we risk repeating ourselves, often to horrible consequence.

Cantor Buchdahl talked about Terezin, which had been built by Emperor Josef II as a fortress to keep out Germans invading from the north.  It became the signature Nazi concentration camp, where musical events were permitted. Less well known at the time was its function as a passage place from which Jews were distributed to their deaths at Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

At first, the Nazis tried to convince older people that they were at a hotel, asking them to pay for their stay. To the outside world,  SS officers pointed out how well this people were being treated.  Music began to be performed, at first against the rules, but later right out front, because the Nazis realized giving concerts was good public relations.  The film at first called, Terezin, a documentary from a Jewish Setllement, would later be titled The Fuhrer Gives a Town to the Jews.

Cultural life, at first forbidden, was then tolerated, encouraged and finally exploited to give the impression that conditions were good.  Poems and songs sung by the Chorale at the Synagogue remind us what the final outcome of this exploitation really was.   

Survivors remembered the musical evenings:  “I carried the music stands for concerts conducted by Karl Ancerl.  This enabled me to enter the hall…there was a good jazz orchestra called ‘The Ghetto Swingers.’  I was surprised that Viktor Ullmann could write such heavenly music in such a hell.”

Composer Viktor Ullmann is perhaps the best known of the musicians at Terezin, where he continued his work in defiance of the circumstances.  Even his piano sonata quote from Hebrew folk songs referring to suppressed texts, the way Beethoven did. ”You are God's Warriors” for instance, was a song sung to rally the troops during the Hussite wars. 

Some of the music sung this evening was written by musicians in the ghettos, in hiding places and in the concentration camps.  Performed also were poems written during this period and set to music later. 

Composer Paul Epstein was present and discussed his two arrangements of partisan songs, commissioned for this occasion by the Chorale.  Inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto rose up against their oppressors with these vigorous calls to arms.

Last summer, James Bagwell conducted the Bard Festival Chorus in Franz Schmidt’s Das Buch mit sieben Siegehn.  Schmidt is not a household name, in part because he was a favorite of Hitler’s.  Leon Botstein chose to perform Schmidt  again because he composed important music and said at the time that without “whitewashing the past, we can again appreciate the inspiration, power and relevance of Schmidt, one of the greatest choral works of the 20^th century.”

Being selective about memory is a dangerous thing, no matter which side of the fence you sit on.  In the Schmidt, a chorus of warriors extols death and plunders and demands that children be torn from their mother’s love.  In horror the chorus sings about the stars falling to earth, the overflowing sea and the sun going black.

Surely at the concentration camps the sun went black.  But in the shimmering setting of Central Synagogue, the will of a people to survive and its expression in music triumphed in the Collegiate Chorales sung memory.  Passover is a month away.  This concert was a hopeful herald. 

www.Collegiatechorale.org  for future programs.