Music of Remembrance, the Seattle-based chamber music organization dedicated to remembering Holocaust musicians and their art, always seems to bring Seattle audiences something new and unexpected. This time, it’s a dance work. MOR’s upcoming spring concert features its first dance commission, choreographed by Spectrum Dance Theater’s artistic director Donald Byrd. It is set to the music of Franz Schreker, a once-famous composer whose legacy was almost obliterated by the Nazis. Three of Spectrum’s dancers will perform.
The concert, titled “Mirror of Memory,” takes place Mon., May 11 at Benaroya Hall.
There’s another commission as well — a song cycle by Canadian-born Israeli composer Aharon Harlap. The always-popular Northwest Boychoir returns to the MOR stage with a reprise performance of two Yiddish songs arranged by Israeli composer Betty Olivero: “Stiller, Stiller (Still Still, Let Us be Still)” and “Mode’ Ani’ (I give thanks before You).” Rounding out the concert is music by Osvaldo Golijov and Edwin Geist.
Choreographer Byrd, who is African-American, likes to joke that his grandfather was a Jewish baker (he worked in a kosher bakery). Byrd himself spent many childhood hours among the bakery’s Jewish staff and customers. Then, as a teenager, he saw a documentary film about the liberation of one of the death camps.
“I was stunned and angry,” says Byrd. “Nobody had ever said anything to me about it. Since then, I felt a connection.”
He sees many parallels between the Jewish experience, the black experience, and the lot of minority peoples all over the world, noting that “African-Americans used the Jewish struggle as a model for their own aspirations for freedom,” he says.
“The Holocaust is not just a Jewish tragedy, it’s a human tragedy, and extensions of it are still with us today,” says Byrd. “We need to examine it if [the victims’] deaths are to have meaning.”
Byrd also lamented the lost potential of artists who perished in the Holocaust.
At an MOR concert some years ago, Byrd heard the music of Erwin Schulhoff for the first time, and was deeply moved. This led to a “Schulhoff obsession,” and he created a work for Spectrum Dance based on Schulhoff’s music. In MOR artistic director Mina Miller’s pre-concert commentary, Byrd heard the thoughts of a kindred spirit. So when Miller asked him to create a work for MOR, he was happy to accept.
Franz Schreker was known primarily as an opera composer, first in Vienna, later in Berlin. His music is awash with sensuous harmonies and exotic instrumental color, with elements of Strauss, Mahler, and Debussy. One reviewer called him “a new Wagner.”
Schreker’s style was more evolutionary than revolutionary. He used many of the emerging techniques of early 20th-century music, but never broke with tonality as did his friend Arnold Schoenberg. On the other hand, his opera libretti (which he usually wrote himself) contained daring sexual and erotic themes, and concepts drawn from the Symbolist movement and Sigmund Freud.
During the Weimar Republic, Schreker was a leading musical figure. But by the late 1920s, the avant-garde considered him old-fashioned, and the rising Nazi movement considered him Jewish and decadent. His last opera was the target of hostile Nazi demonstrations, and closed after only five performances. He lost his academic posts. Shortly after the Nazis came to power, Schreker suffered a stroke and died three months later at the age of 56. His music was banned, and was included in the notorious exhibition of “decadent” art the Nazis mounted in 1938. After the war, he was virtually forgotten.
The Wind was one of six pieces Schreker composed around 1909 for dancers Grete and Elsa Wiesenthal, two Jewish sisters who left the Vienna Court Opera’s ballet to devote themselves to more modern interpretive dance. Byrd’s choreography includes elements from both the original period and the present, in tune with the music’s “Romantic and Expressionist” elements.
“Pictures from the Private Collection of God” is a setting of poetry by Hungarian-born Yaakov Barzilai, who survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as a boy, and now lives in Israel. The poems are filled with images of the camp’s horrors, juxtaposed with Jewish religious references and remembered scenes from ordinary life. One poem speaks of a mass grave, “with lovelorn corpses/forever entwined…twisted/like Sabbath loaves.” Another remembers a golden-haired little girl, torn from her mother’s grasp by “a pair of boots, a couple of gloves, and a lash”:
And afterwards
it seemed her curls
blended with the corn
whose ears had ripened
And the harvester
gleaned his yield.
Harlap’s “Letters Weeping in Fire,” also inspired by Barzilai’s poetry, was heard here in 2006. The Jerusalem Post describes Harlap’s work as “evocative, original and beautiful, synthesizing American Neo-Romanticism, Yiddish music and Israeli styles in an atmosphere all its own.”
Harlap originally composed “Pictures from the Private Collection of God” for voice, flute, and piano. For MOR, he reworked the music for two voices, oboe and string quintet. The Seattle Symphony’s newly appointed principal oboist, Ben Hausmann, will perform the oboe part.
The cycle will be sung in Hebrew. ACT Theater’s Kurt Beattie will introduce each song with a dramatic reading of the English translation. Baritone Erich Parce and mezzo-soprano Angela Niederloh will sing the work. Parce is a veteran of many MOR concerts and directed the opera Brundibar. Niederloh was first heard here last season, in Paul Schoenfield’s Ghetto Songs.
Mina Miller will take the piano part in a piece with special personal meaning for her: “Cosmic Spring for Piano Trio,” by Edwin Geist. In 1942, the composer was shot to death in Kovno, the same town where relatives of Miller’s father were also murdered.
Geist, who like Schreker was half-Jewish, left Germany for Lithuania after the Nazis came to power. When Germany occupied Lithuania, he and his wife Lyda were imprisoned in the Kovno ghetto. The Nazis offered to release him if he would compose music for them. Geist agreed to do so only after Lyda was also freed. Eventually the bargain broke down, and the Gestapo murdered him. Unable to live without him, Lyda committed suicide. Friends broke into their boarded-up apartment and rescued a suitcase full of his scores, which ended up at the Soviet Ministry of Culture.
The concert opens with Osvaldo Golijov’s “Tenebrai,” a meditation on the single word “Jerusalem” for voice, clarinet and string quartet. Soprano Emily Hendrichs will perform. She is an alumna of Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program, and recently debuted with the English National Opera as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.