elegy for the jewish villages - Vladimir Stoupel

Where have the old Jewish villages in Poland gone?
Only their names survive today in memory.
Antoni Słonimski
Nostalgia, humor, sorrow, the major themes of
the diaspora, the poetry of everyday occurances
– reflected in the predominantly anonymous Yiddish
songs is the lost world of Jewish life in the
shtetl, the Jewish settlements of eastern Europe
that were ravaged repeatedly through the centuries
by pogroms and finally obliterated entirely
by the Holocaust. Composers have again and
again let themselves be inspired by the spiritual
and emotional cosmos of these often simple and
yet powerful lyrics. Transported by the universal
language of music, a part of the culture from
which they originated could at least be saved for
posterity.
Jewish destiny in the twentieth century is poignantly
reflected in the arrangements presented on
this CD. The pieces that form the framework delineate,
as it were, the beginning and end points
of the catastrophe. For Ravel, the “Hebrew”
melodies represented a stimulus to explore a
new, “exotic,” and living culture that was a component
part of European civilization – no different
than the Greek, Italian, and Spanish folk poetry
that, along with a further arrangement of a Yiddish
song (Meirke, mein zun), he brought together
in 1910 in his cycle of Chants populaires. In 1914,
however, on the eve of the First World War, the
first “twilight of mankind,” precisely the melodies
selected by him attain a special significance: the
Kaddish – the prayer of mourning from the Jewish
liturgy, written in Aramaic, set by Ravel in magical,
quasi-oriental sounds – enters into a profound
dialogue with the Yiddish Alte Kashe, the eternal
question, for which there is no answer.
In the late 1920s and 1930s, the works of Polish
composer Simon Laks were performed together
with Ravel’s in Paris. When he composed his Eight
Jewish Folk Songs – in 1947, a year before the
declaration of Israel’s independence – this was
done in remembrance of an irretrievably annihilated
culture. The Kaddish becomes here an Elegy
for the Jewish Villages, a secular lament. Laks
survived the Auschwitz II–Birkenau extermination
camp, initially as a member, then as the director
of the men’s orchestra. His book “Music of Another
World” (Musique d’un autre Monde), which has
been published in numerous languages, numbers
among the most important literary documents of
the Holocaust. After decades of neglect, Simon
Laks’ musical oeuvre is finally being rediscovered
today.
Along with Pavel Haas, Hans Krása and Gideon
Klein, Viktor Ullmann, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg,
numbered among the outstanding representatives
of the Czech avant-garde in the generation
after Janácek. He composed his Three Yiddish
Songs in Theresienstadt in 1944, shortly before
his deportation in the autumn of that year to the
Auschwitz extermination camp, where he, like
Pavel Haas and Hans Krása, died in the German
gas chambers. The songs are an anthroposophist’s
declaration of belief in the Jewish culture that
was facing its destruction. Music as an assertion
of spiritual dignity in the face of humiliation and
dehumanization.
Hugo Weisgall, an American composer of Jewish-
Czech extraction, composed his Seven Popular
Songs from the Yiddish in 1967, the year of the
Six Day War that was so decisive for the history
of Israel and the Near East. Weisgall’s cycle was
written from the completely different perspective
of a successful, second-generation Jewish-American
composer. In this cycle, Weisgall succeeded
in fusing the melodic and linguistic simplicity of
the Yiddish melodies with a complex, avantgarde
tonal language.
Some of the songs presented here are parallel
settings of the same melodies and texts. What
the composers have in common is that out of
great respect for the songs’ consummate beauty
and characteristics, they quote them without
adulteration. We become witnesses to a dialogue
between the very personal compositional styles
– which are stylistically obliged to diverse currents
of the twentieth century, and also nationally
colored – with the “archaic,” quasi-ageless
language of the respective songs.
NB: We would like to thank Irina and Klaus Mössle as
well as Kristina and Marc Herzog for their generous
2 3
support.
Special thanks also to Antoni Buchner for all his con-
tributions including the translation of the Yiddish and
Polish texts into German and to Lia Martyn (Moscow/
Berlin) and Gila Flam (Jerusalem), who helped him
resolve ambiguous issues.