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FIRST PERSON
Arnold
Schoënberg
Playing the Survivor Normand
" Icannot remember everything," writes Arnold Schoënberg
at the opening of A Survivor from Warsaw and I, for the
first time, see what he meant. Last week, at a few days'
notice, I gave a public performance of the terrifying sevenminute
work – my speaking voice pitted against an orchestra
of 60 musicians playing atonally, in micro-intervals and
climactically as loud as they possibly could.
Schoënberg's Survivor is an unequal contest at the best
of times, but when the narrator (me) has never appeared
before with a full orchestra and the experienced conductor
(Diego Masson) admits he has never heard a convincing
performance, the odds turn ominous and the legs to jelly.
The text, at first sight, looks unrecitable. English is
Schoënberg's second language, halting and stilted. The
German orders barked by an SS sergeant in the piece
sound more First World War than Second. The lines are
staggered and unconnected. It is not clear whether the
narrator is in Warsaw or Auschwitz, whether he is alive or
speaking from the dead.
I quickly researched the work's origins. Schoënberg
wrote Survivor in August 1947, based on
accounts he had "received directly or indirectly"
from individuals who had escaped
the 1943 liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
It describes how rounded-up Jews began
singing, moments before their annihilation,
the eternal affirmation of faith: "Shema
Yisrael – Hear O Israel, the Lord our God,
the Lord is One!"
To find a credible cadence, I listened to
a radio interview that Schoënberg gave in
California for his 75th birthday in 1949,
precise and self-aware. "I never was very
capable of expressing my feelings or emotions
in words," he confessed — an admission that filled
me with relief. The truth of the piece had to lie in the music.
The Vienna website of the Arnold Schoënberg Institute
demonstrates how he used half of a twelve-note row in each
part of the work, reversing the order of the six notes to create
a mirror effect. So far so clear, but once I got past 48
transpositions of four compositional modes to the
“hermeneutically meaningful elements of the narrative discourse”
my tolerance for technical analysis reached its limits.
I listened to recordings by Pierre Boulez (Sony) and
Claudio Abbado (DG), both employing operatic bass-baritones
who observe the correct rhythms and surmount the
swelling orchestra, albeit at the expense of narrative naturalism.
In Schoënberg's Letters (Faber, 1964), there is a
clear instruction that Survivor should not be done by a professional
singer: "this must never be made so musical as
other strict compositions of mine – this never has to be
sung". Diego Masson strongly concurs. So does the
Dartington festival director, Gavin Henderson. Which is
where I, as broadcaster and public speaker, come in.
Fresh off First Western, I meet Diego in the bar and go
into studio with Clement, one of his students, who plays a
note-perfect piano accompaniment to my stumbling declamation.
Finding a rhythm is hardest. The score is barred in
such a way that you have to count in 16s to locate the
rests. However, Diego, a contemporary-music pioneer for
40 years, knows how to bend bar-lines without breaking
78 septembre 2005 september
Lebrecht
structure. We stop, start and stop again, pencilling in the
places where Diego will give me an extra cue, or where I
need to pick up a notch into the next tempo.
After an hour or so we are swaying in unison and the
conductor is satisfied that I can manage without a microphone.
I beg him to have one in reserve.
Next afternoon, I have half an hour with a festival
orchestra comprised of tough London freelancers and graduating
conservatory students on a country break — no
place for the faint-hearted. Under a low studio ceiling, I
recite the piece three times, striving to preserve vocal
colours while battling orchestral fortissimi.
The ultimate test is the general rehearsal beneath the
high arches of the Great Hall, where my voice proves equal
to the massed noise. The longer I spend in the thick of the
orchestra, the more I grow intoxicated with Schoënberg's
instrumental writing. I hear tiny effects of ravishing beauty
that never reached me as a listener in the hall, inserted as
a secret gift to working musicians.
At the ultimate moment, the male voice choir bursts
into “Shema Yisrael” and we are transported back into the
horror of holocaust, where survivors of the Ghetto uprising
were shot on the spot or shipped to Auschwitz. A handful
survived. Some feigned death and fled with nightfall.
Others, like the resourceful pianist Wladislaw Szpilman in
Roman Polanski's chilling film, were hidden by Poles.
Schoënberg, in an unpublished letter, admits that things
might have happened "not in the manner in which I
describe." The important thing, he insists, "is that I saw it
in my imagination."
And there lies the power of the work, not as documentary
testimony but in the mind of a great composer who,
exiled in Californian penury, fuses common words and complex
music, neither fathomable without the other, into an
overwhelming impression of tragedy and transcendence.
To study an orchestral masterpiece of this magnitude is
pure pleasure, physical as much as intellectual. To perform
it in a public concert hall is a privilege that beggars
description, a moment where we are humbled by the materials
we handle.
I cannot remember everything. The seven minutes of
Survivor pass like a flash and the reward of applause seems
undeserved. I want to do it again, to do it better, to do it
justice. Diego embraces me: "we made it work!" He swears
we will do it again.
If I cannot remember everything it is because, as
Schoënberg so brilliantly understood, life's most intense
experiences survive in two forms of memory – as general
impression and as sliver-sharp fragments, like shattered
glass. Art is not history. It does not aim to make a meticulous
reconstruction of past events. Its process is to make
sense of whatever testimony comes to hand and to find in
it a message that surpasses the particular circumstances
and enters the general human consciousness.
Great works of art often appear inscrutable at first sight
and intractable for practical purposes. What everyone at
Dartington learned from our immersion in A Survivor from
Warsaw is that persistence in performing a difficult work can
yield a collective understanding that binds people together
and makes them aware of dimensions that run beyond history
and politics, into the primal sources of pain and joy. p