This year marks the 10th season of Music of Remembrance, the Seattle-based organization dedicated to music from and about the Holocaust.
For its Tenth Season Gala concert on November 4, MOR will present the world premiere of a new commissioned work by Seattle Symphony Music Director Gerard Schwarz. Opera superstar Jane Eaglen will be reprising her role in one of the crown jewels of MOR’s previous commissions, and renowned double bass soloist Gary Karr will perform a piece that many would agree evokes the quintessence of the Jewish soul.
Gerard Schwarz talked with JTNews about composing, and about his new piece.
While in high school, Schwarz studied with the American composer Paul Creston, but he soon found composing too solitary a pursuit, and eventually stopped. In 2005, however, when his son Julian won MOR’s David Tonkonogui Memorial Award, Schwarz composed “In Memoriam” for him to play in honor of Tonkonogui, his late teacher.
Schwarz’s new piece also has a family connection, one that goes back two generations.
Schwarz comes from a family of Viennese Jews. His parents were medical students in 1938 Vienna, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria. As Jews, they were soon barred from attending school. With the help of a relative who held a dual passport, they fled Austria via Yugoslavia, and made their way to the safety of Basel, Switzerland, where they finished their studies. They later emigrated to America.
Schwarz grew up steeped in the culture and music of his parents’ former city. He first saw Vienna for himself on a concert tour in 1967, when he was 19 years old. His parents joined him. They showed him their old school, and places they had frequented around the city. It was a very pleasant visit, Schwarz said, and his parents seemed nostalgic.
Then they went to Mödling, the suburb where his father grew up.
“We would pass a shop,” recalls Schwarz, “and my father would point to it and say, “˜So-and-so owned that shop. He was a Nazi’….There were about 30 shops, and 25 Nazis, and he remembered them all. It was frightening.” Schwarz also remembers seeing an old synagogue, left in its burned out state, with the Stars of David “bashed through.”
These incidents hinted at a darker chapter in the family history — one that was generally not discussed, nor asked about.
“My mother never spoke about her parents,” says Schwarz. Only recently did he learn their ultimate fate, piecing together information from several sources, including a Holocaust archive in Austria.
In 1942, Schwarz’ maternal grandparents, Rudolf and Jeanette Weiss, were deported to the ghetto of Riga, Latvia. Then, says Schwarz, “they were killed — no, I don’t like to use the word “˜killed’ — they were murdered, shot in an open grave.”
Riga was one of several places in Eastern Europe to which the Nazis deported Austria’s Jewish population in 1941 and 1942. Jews sent there were subject to forced labor, deportation to concentration camps, carbon monoxide gassing in vans, and mass shooting operations such as Schwarz describes. Of 20,000 Austrian Jews deported to Riga, only 800 survived.
The knowledge of what had happened to his grandparents had a powerful effect on Schwarz. Turning to “my Austrian musical heritage,” he composed the tone poem “Rudolf and Jeanette,” for chamber orchestra. He wrote the music during his summer break and worked on the orchestration in the fall. This is the same method that Gustav Mahler — a composer and conductor Schwarz admires greatly — used a century ago.
Rudolf and Jeanette begins with what Schwarz calls “music of disbelief…surreal music.” A march follows, representing the Germans. The next section contains several Viennese-style waltzes, deliberately simple “like Johann Strauss,” and evocative of memories of the old Vienna his grandparents so loved. “But the waltzes sound like they are very far away,” Schwarz says, and they are overlaid with “harsh, dissonant music” that tells us that this evoked memory is no longer real. The work concludes with a funeral march.
Schwarz says that he hopes the work serves to convey the depth of sadness he feels for his grandparents, and also a sense of nostalgia for their world.
“It’s a little sentimental,” he adds.
MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller believes that Schwarz’ music honors the memory of “all the family we never knew” because of the Holocaust.
Thomas Pasatieri’s “Letter to Warsaw” is based on the writings of Pola Braun, a Polish-Jewish poet and cabaret artist whose Holocaust journey took her from the Warsaw ghetto to the Majdanek concentration camp. She managed to write and perform in both places, accompanying herself on the piano.
Braun’s words survived, but both she and her music perished. Her poems evoke the inner life of a sensitive woman experiencing the loss of home and freedom. The point of view is clearly female, and she touches on several aspects of her Jewish identity. Miller says that after she showed Pasatieri some of Braun’s work, he felt “a calling, as a musician,” to have Braun’s words “sing anew though his voice.”
“Letter to Warsaw” was written especially for soprano Jane Eaglen, who will perform it with Schwarz as he conducts a 12-member chamber orchestra. It was first heard at an MOR concert in 2004, and is available on a Naxos CD (8.559219). The work has since been performed in the U.S., Europe, and at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Pasatieri’s intimate music is in marked contrast to the powerhouse Wagnerian roles for which Eaglen is best known in Seattle. The musical style is present-day neo-romantic, often gentle and wistful. Settings of Braun’s words are interspersed with instrumental interludes that expand and comment upon the emotions expressed in the texts. Common themes thread through both vocal and instrumental sections.
Renowned double bass soloist Gary Karr is officially retired from public performing, but for MOR, has made an exception. Karr will perform Ernest Bloch’s “Prayer,” part of a larger 1924 piece for cello called “From Jewish Life.”
“It is the Jewish soul that interests me, the complex, glowing, agitated soul which I feel vibrating throughout the Bible,” the Swiss-born Bloch said of his music. “This is in me, and is the better part of me.”
Bloch also had a Northwest connection — he spent his last years on the Oregon coast.
As of the upcoming concert, Music of Remembrance will have presented a dozen world premieres and commissioned seven new works. MOR’s roster of composers, performers and advisors reads like a Who’s Who of classical music.
“I feel deeply honored that so many of the world’s greatest artists have chosen to work with us,” MOR’s Miller said. “Their support reflects not just their confidence in the superior quality of our performances, but also their belief in the importance of our unique mission.”
The ten-year premiere
