Voices from the Shadow

 

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Liner Notes

The question arises: Is it possible to write songs about Auschwitz, or, even more important, is it permitted to do so? The answer may be unavoidably dialectical. No, nothing can be written about Auschwitz. Still, one can write about the silence that surrounds the Holocaust: the silence of guilt, the silence of shame, the silence of horror, and the futility of it all.

One can unlock that silence.
One CANNOT write about Auschwitz.
One MUST write—write and write—about
Auschwitz and the Holocaust.
It seems that when we are forced to walk that
corridor between Life and Death, sources of creativity
become readily available, and Life is compelled to
express itself.

Those spontaneous personal and conflicted sentiments were incorporated by Kingsley into his dramatic narration for Voices from the Shadow, a musical-theatrical work. Behind its artistic concept and the impetus to compose it lie a series of coincidental event-related circumstances, to which I am pleased to have had the opportunity to be a party in some minuscule peripheral way.

Long before the genesis of this work, its composer’s name and some of his liturgical pieces were naturally familiar to me—especially from the late 1960s throughout the 1970s, when my own involvement in Judaically related music was taking form and rapidly expanding. In those days, Kingsley and his accomplishments were mentioned frequently among circles interested in contemporary synagogue music. I was present, in fact, at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York for the world premiere of his Shiru Ladonai, and I recall having to sit among an overflow crowd in another room, since the sanctuary was completely filled.

But it was not until 1988 that I first met Gershon Kingsley, in Oakland, California, at an annual convention of the American Conference of Cantors, the professional cantorial association of the Reform movement. I was there to present a lecture on 19th- and early-20th-century German synagogue music, and we suddenly found ourselves without an accompanist for its live cantorial-choral illustrations, which, in the context of the German Liberale tradition, are heavily dependent on the organ parts. In the frantic search for a substitute accompanist, someone observed that Kingsley was at the convention too and that we might ask him—since obviously he could easily sight-read those parts. I was doubtful that a composer and conductor of his stature would indulge us, especially at the last moment. Then too, this was a very conservative traditional repertoire, mostly Lewandowski and his 19th-century circle—hardly the style that Kingsley championed or in which one could have expected him to take much interest. To the contrary, however, he found the proposition intriguing, remarking afterward with nostalgic sighs how vividly it evoked memories of his youthful synagogue experiences in Berlin. So the basis for a musical dialogue between us was established.

A few years later we began a series of frequent discussions about recording Kingsley’s music for the Milken Archive; and to that end I began studying his Jewish works in earnest. Just around the same time, it happened that the Jewish Theological Seminary, in partnership with its cosponsor, Hebrew Union College, was preparing for an international Jewish music conference in New York, devoted to the musical culture of German Jewry. That conference was originally scheduled for 1994, to commemorate the 100th yortsayt (anniversary of a death) of the most famous and influential of all German—and perhaps all Ashkenazi—synagogue composers, Louis Lewandowski. As artistic director of that conference, I had designed one of the several constituent concert programs to feature contemporary postwar works by German Jewish refugee composers from the Nazi era, as well as new pieces based on musical or literary elements connected to the German Jewish cultural legacy. In the course of our recording discussions, I invited Kingsley to write a new work to be premiered at that concert and later recorded for the Milken Archive. We began exploring possible media, subjects, and texts. At that stage we did not, however, even consider any Holocaust-related themes. In fact, our original policy was to avoid focusing on the Holocaust in this conference, since our real purpose was to highlight and deliberate on the extraordinary artistic creativity of German Jewry—which included Jewish-German cooperation—during the centuries prior to the aberration of the 1930s and 1940s. That changed, however, when the conference was postponed until 1997, with new dates that encompassed the anniversary of Kristallnacht, on the ninth of November—which also turned out to coincide with the date of our contemporary composers’ concert. In that case, we felt that it would be inappropriate to ignore this anniversary in the context of any consideration of German Jewry, and that we would even be remiss were we not to give it artistic attention—even though I share (and shared then) Kingsley’s conflicts and concerns about exploiting the Holocaust, even unintentionally, in the name of artistic expression. In that spirit, our discussions turned to poetry that had been written in the concentration camps, or, following liberation, by inmates who had survived. Neither of us knew how much suitable poetic material there might be, apart from the well-known literature relating to the Jewish resistance and Partisan fighters—which was not our primary concern in this project. Nor did we know whether the quality of such poetry would justify a serious musical work. Still, I had suspected for some time that this was one area composers had not yet explored properly.

Kingsley almost instantly seized on that course, seeing its dramatic possibilities and the challenge of subtly and tastefully shaping a work that—from both musical and theatrical perspectives—would provoke and disturb rather than entertain or please its audience. “I am, after all, a theatrical composer,” he confirmed, envisioning from the outset a musical-theater piece. The first task was to assemble a pool of such poetry to study and from which to select, and that same day in New York he telephoned a Jewish bookseller he knew in Munich. It happened that she had quite a number of volumes containing the type of poetry he described, and they were largely unknown or unavailable in the United States. The books were shipped to New York the following day, and Kingsley began mining them for the new project. Once he had selected the poems and had begun to set them (all but one came from those books), I was occasionally shown sketches and treated to his own keyboard demonstrations of individual songs in their working stages along the road to completion of the work as a unified piece.

It was in Munich, however, where at that time he was living and working roughly half of each year, that Kingsley actually began sketching out some of the music, composing in the basement of his home there. He later recalled that he tried to identify with the poets and to feel some sense of what they must have been experiencing as they wrote those words inside the confines of the concentration camps. He became so overcome with emotion and preoccupied with grief that it became increasingly difficult to acquit himself of his artistic task—and at one point he nearly abandoned it. He came to feel some spiritual connection to each poet as he set his or her words to music.

Voices from the Shadow ultimately emerged as much more than a series of connected songs, and its unveiling revealed a truly dramatic stage presentation. Its full live production includes a spoken narration (not included in this recording) that links the songs by their historical, spiritual, and emotional contexts, into which Kingsley also ingeniously interwove summary meanings of those songs that are sung in their original languages. It is thus possible for an English-speaking audience to have at least some understanding of what those texts convey, even without recourse to the complete translations that normally would be found in the concert program booklet. But the spoken parts also create by themselves an important dramatic element, further propelled by calling for the singers to function dually as actors, each of whom assumes the persona of one of the poets—in some cases even offering biographical background in the first person. Live performances therefore require four singer-actors, albeit with classical vocal timbres, as well as a director and theatrical lighting.

There are some composers who—though drawn initially to artistic confrontation with the paradox contained in the mass murder and attempted annihilation of the Jewish people by the most highly educated and cultured nation on earth—eventually succumbed to philosopher Theodor Adorno’s initial reaction in 1949 that no poetry [i.e., art] can be written after the Holocaust (Auschwitz). Perhaps they found it impossible to grapple with the question of whether or not art, in its classical sense of beauty, truth, and imagination, is inherently incompatible with the ultimately repugnant, obscene, and unimaginable. Yet others have been unable to resist the power of art as a vehicle to express the incomprehensible. In this work, Kingsley too has found a way out of that seemingly irresolvable conundrum, and he has created a valid artistic expression in which the very mystery of unalloyed evil appears to have evoked a legitimate musical response. And the listener is in a sense forced to confront that which, ideally, he might rather not.

Any initial misgivings or fears about the dangers of inadvertently trivializing the Holocaust by writing any music about it (“Is it even permitted to do so?”) surely evaporated at the conclusion of the world premiere performance on 9 November 1997 at Merkin Concert Hall in New York, when the entire audience rose to its feet in a unanimous ovation. Indeed, this standing audience included a significant number of Holocaust refugees, survivors, and former camp inmates—some of whom had lost entire families to that bestial orgy of hatred.

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Lyrics

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Credits

Composer: Gershon Kingsley

Performers: Jorge Avila, Violin;  Derek Bermel, Clarinet;  Mary George, Soprano;  Amy Goldstein, Soprano;  Milton Granger, Piano;  Sara Hewitt-Roth, Cello;  Gershon Kingsley, Conductor;  Larry Picard, Baritone;  Liuh-Wen Ting, Viola;  Matthew Walley, Tenor;  Robin Zeh, Violin

Additional Credits:

Publisher: Kingsley Sound
Based on poems from the German concentration camps of Germany, east central, and eastern Europe, 1939–45