Tag Archives: music of remembrance

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Jake Heggie Tackles the Burden of Memory in Another Sunrise

Soprano Caitlin Lynch, right, rehearses Another Sunrise with the MOR Ensemble.

“I love coming back to Seattle and Music of Remembrance,” declares composer Jake
Heggie, his words endorsed by librettist Gene Scheer. These two men, up to their eyebrows in prestigious commissions (an opera each, one for Dallas, one for San Francisco, a symphony and chamber music for Heggie, plus more), can’t say enough in praise of Music of Remembrance, its founding director Mina Miller, and its musicians.

They are here for the premiere at MOR of their latest work, Another Sunrise, on Monday May 14 at Benaroya Hall.

“It’s so important for us that the work that we do is meaningful. Every program with Mina and MOR teaches me something informative, educational, and enriching before I even put pen to paper. Every time I come to Music of Remembrance, I come away a better person,” he says.

The mission of Music of Remembrance, now in its 14th season, is to remember Holocaust musicians, poets, and artists through musical performances, educational programs, musical recordings, and commissions of new works, in two concerts a year held at times meaningful to Holocaust survivors, plus a series of smaller, free performances, and a lot of educational outreach.

“It starts with Mina,” says Scheer. (The two men, who have worked closely together on a number of works, the most recent for MOR being the 2007 music drama For a Look or a Touch, speak in tune with one another, their thoughts in parallel.) “She has a visionary, passionate intelligence which yields incredible results. She’s one of the most articulate people I know. She has enthusiasm, generosity, and a conviction that these stories must be told.

“She looks for an unusual angle with which to approach the material,” says Heggie. “She wants a fresh perspective, how the past lives in present memory.”

“It begins with what happened and how does one remember,” says Scheer. ”How do we tell this narrative and makes sense of those lives?”

The process for Another Sunrise began when Miller asked the two men what they would like to write about for MOR. As they hashed out ideas, what came to the fore was the question of what survivors feel, the burden of their memories.

“Who knows what we are capable of when there is a gun to our heads?” queries Scheer, “so, we came up with the nature of survival.”

At this point Miller found, and gave them to read, two books written by one of those Holocaust survivors, Krystyna Zywulska. As they learned more about this woman, her story seemed to fill the bill. “She had to do things to survive which haunted her the rest of her life,” says Heggie. (Miller was able to find Zywulska’s son, Tadeusz Andrzejewski, and he has come from Paris for the premiere Monday and will speak about his mother.)

And then, Scheer found an interview Zywulska gave in Poland to a political science professor for a book on survival memories.

“I sensed that her responses could be the fulcrum for this piece,” says Scheer. “Her frustration with what she could not put into words, that she couldn’t describe,” an ironic situation, as Zywulska had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau through writing satirical lyrics set to popular tunes, and later made a careeer writing lyrics for pop songs.

She had no answers that she found truly satisfactory to how she survived in Auschwitz. Heggie and Scheer came up with an approach to Zywulska’s story which is fictional in format but true to the story Zywulska tells in her autobiographies.

“We thought, What if the professor had given her a tape recorder, to tell that what she could when the words came to her, and that became the dramatic device we created,” says Scheer. “She wakes in the middle of the night and can’t sleep. This is years later, and she’s haunted by things she couldn’t say, a melody she hums and can’t find the words to. She turns on the machine—and turns it off. What does she want to leave for posterity? As she talks she defines herself, only she can’t find the words.”

“So what can’t be described in words, can be described in music,” says Heggie. “My job is to empathize deeply with the character, only she’s not just a character, she’s a real person. I needed to get into her heart, to the very purest part, and just feel and respond, as a musical soul. She’s on an emotional rollercoaster. It’s a dark night of the soul. She’s trying to make sure others don’t go through what she went through.”

Says Gene, “We are both after the same thing, the storytelling. If I’m doing my job right, I’m building the scaffolding for the musical landscape being depicted on stage. It’s not that the words would fade away, we want people to take away the emotional experience.” One singer, a chamber ensemble, and minimal staging make up the dramatic scene for Another Sunrise.

For the solo role, Heggie and Scheer chose soprano Caitlin Lynch, a graduate of Seattle Opera Young Artist program who sang Micaela in Seattle Opera’s most recent Carmen, an intelligent, sensitive artist with the technique and voice to match. “She even looks like Krystyna,” comments Heggie.

Lastly, he says, “This is a work of art, it’s not a documentary. What we are after is her emotional life, something that resonates as true.”

“Everything described here is true,” says Scheer, “but in language I created, though there are two or three quotes I took from her interview.”

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Music of Remembrance’s “Astounding” What a Life!, a British Detention Camp Revue

Erich Parce and Ross Hauck, with the Music of Remembrance ensemble

We are now starting the fourteenth season since Music of Remembrance began its odyssey, of telling the tale of the Holocaust from the aspect of the creative art nurtured within its horrors.

Its indefatigable founder and artistic director, Mina Miller, has every year unearthed more highlights, sidelights, spotlights, and gems of music and poetry pertaining to life in the concentration camps, ones that most of us would never have known about were it not for her work.

Each year Music of Remembrance offers two concerts at Benaroya Hall’s Nordstrom Recital Hall, one around the time of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, which took place November 9, 1938, when Nazi thugs roamed Germany destroying anything and everything Jewish they could find. The other concert takes place in May and next year commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day with a new opera by Jake Heggie.

Hans Gál

Monday’s concert, like so many others in this series, brought a largely unknown aspect of the Holocaust to our attention, with a satiric revue, What a Life! by composer Hans Gál, composed and performed when he was in an internment camp on the Isle of Man off the coast of Wales in the United Kingdom.

Like many others, I never knew until recently that the British interned anyone they thought might be supporting German aspirations, and since they couldn’t tell who was bona fide and who was an infiltrator among the thousands of Jewish refugees pouring into the country, they interned them all until they had checked them out. Families were broken up, communication was poor. Families already refugees were subjected to even more stress.

Like the Japanese internment camps in this country and opened for the same reason, they are a blot on the country’s history. (I am English. Yes, England was on her knees in 1940, and many of my family died along with so many others, but it still seems shameful to me that we should have interned any Jews.)

Hans Gál, however, bore the British no lasting ill will, and unlike so many of his countrymen, lived a long and fruitful life in that country until his death in 1987.

His cabaret revue comprises a series of songs of camp life sung here by baritone Erich Parce and tenor Ross Hauck to words by Schubert scholar and fellow-internee Otto Erich Deutsch, with a small orchestra of piano, four strings, and two winds. Originally there was a theatrical script between numbers written by another internee, film director Georg Hoellering. This has been lost, and a new narrative taken from Gál’s diary which he kept meticulously.

What’s astounding is Gál’s and Deutsch’s upbeat attitude. The songs are irreverent, ironic, rueful, and funny as they skewer camp life. As well as singing, Parce gave it a light staging, so that a six-foot stretch of wire with barbs appears for the “Barbed Wire Song” (“Why are human beings behind wire?”), and a folding single bed arrives for the two singers in “Song of the Double Bed” with humorous consequences on stage (though they probably weren’t at the time). From the diary excerpts, read by actor Kurt Beattie, we find that the row of beachside hotels commandeered for the camp housed 72 inmates per house.

Gál was only in the camp about 19 weeks, but this clever, amusing, and truthful revue with its charming music hits home. In addition to the two singers, Jesse Parce acts as a battlebloused camp guard, with an unnerving toothbrush moustache.

Earlier in the program flutist Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby, and violinists Elisa Barston and Mikhail Shmidt performed Gál’s four-movement Huyton Suite, written while he was in transit camp near Liverpool in 1940. His own words say it best: “Here I am, writing…ridiculous, fantastic music…while the world…is coming to an end.”

True. The Suite, written for the only instruments available to him, is perky, and amusing, optimistic, lively, with the flute mimicking the camp bugle, a well-written piece we might easily hear on Seattle Chamber Music Society’s programming.

The program began with Vilem Tausky’s beautiful 13-minute Coventry: Meditation for String Quartet from 1941. Better known as a conductor, Tausky wrote this quartet while a member of the Czech Army in Exile and helping to search for survivors after the big Nazi air raid on Coventry. The first impression is that it conjures up the same mood as Barber’s Adagio for Strings. There is a sadness which pervades it, and part which seems a protest. The viola, played by Susan Gulkis Assadi, leads the melody, and the whole ends with a chord resolving into the major, perhaps an acceptance.

The fourth work on the program, Marcel Tyberg’s Piano Trio in F major, is a comedown musically from the quality of the other works. It’s a palm-court, salon-style piece, lush, a bit pretentious, schmaltzy, well-constructed but old-fashioned for its date, 1936.

Other musicians for the program included violinist Leonid Keylin, cellists Mara Finkelstein and Walter Gray, and pianists Craig Sheppard and Mina Miller.