Menorah (Preview)

to highlight the disconnectedness and trauma of the victimized psyche. The
concluding statement may sound musically more agreeable to the listener,
but it is no less tragic. It represents a fictional and anachronistic musical
conversation between Richard Wagner, a documented anti-Semite and
Adolph Hitler’s favorite composer, and the Jewish musical pioneer Arnold
Schoenberg who had been demonized by the Nazis as the face of musical
decadence. Here, the music of the opening of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is
constantly interrupted by strict iterations of twelve-tone rows in unsettling
tempo and register displacements. (The longest such iteration is borrowed
from Through A Glass Darkly (PE102), an earlier composition of mine, in
which this row serves the same purpose as in Menorah.) After a couple
of arguments and counterarguments, the two musics rise ever higher in
frequency towards the starry sky of the first movement: a D-major chord in
which the ratios of the musical intervals and their projection in the realm of
rhythm are identical. The composition could have reached a peaceful ending
here, but that would have been construed as wishful thinking by a gentile
composer. Many years ago, when I was a graduate composition student
working on my Ph.D. with American composer Morton Feldman, Feldman
had mentioned something to the effect that “there can be no honest music
after the Holocaust.” That statement had a profound impact in me. While I
don’t entirely agree with it, I did pay heed to it in Kaddish Yatom. Suffice to
say that Menorah does not end in the starry sky.
— Christos Hatzis