Then a wail for their sins

It's probably just me, but if I'm told that a piece of music is "uplifting" or "touches the core of what it is to be human", I run as fast as I can from it - comments Henry Holland on The composer without a shadow? Henry was writing in praise of Richard Strauss, and I wonder what he makes of the music of a contemporary and friend of Strauss', Edward Elgar?

This morning I attended a performance of Elgar's Piano Quintet led by pianist Ashley Wass, and, sorry Henry, but this is a work that is both uplifting and deeply human. Given the over-exposure of the Cello Concerto it is difficult to understand why Elgar's String Quartet and Piano Quintet aren't better known as all three works are from the same period.

They were written when the composer was living in a cottage called Brinkwells at Fittleworth in Sussex between 1917 and 1919. Near Elgar's cottage was a clump of dead trees that had been struck by lightning. Their branches were distorted into strange and almost human forms. Local legend said that impious Spanish monks had held black masses there, and as punishment had been struck down by lightning and turned into the withered trees. The ghostly shapes provided inspiration for both Elgar's Piano Quintet and String Quartet, and also his Violin Sonata. Elgar's wife Alice wrote of the Quintet in her diary:

'Wonderful weird beginning ... evidently reminiscent of sinister trees ... sad 'dispossesed' trees and their fate - or rather curse - which brought it on ... then a wail for their sins - wonderful.'

My header image of the trees at Fittleworth comes from the EMI recording of Elgar's chamber music by the Vellinger Quartet and Piers Lane. If you love the Cello Concerto but don't know these works you have a gap in your CD collection that needs filling.

In today's concert the Elgar was coupled with Frank Bridge's Piano Trio No. 2 from 1929. It is unfortunate that today Bridge is remembered mainly as Benjamin Britten's teacher. This late Piano Trio is a a tough, sinewy work that hovers tantalisingly between tonality and the chromaticism of Schoenberg. Forget the baggage associated with Bridge, this is one of several great works by him that should be recognised for their own merits.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, and Elgar's music from his Brinkwells period is a painfull reminder of the carnage of war, as is Strauss' Metamorphosen. But some victims of the Holocaust are still forgotten, read about them here.
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Stranger music from Leonard Cohen

I'm a big fan of Leonard Cohen's words and music. There is an interesting article in today's Independent by Philip Glass about his settings of Cohen's poetry in his new work Book of Longing. And here is some inimitable Leonard Cohen prose:

ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT ADOLPH EICHMANN



EYES:......................Medium
HAIR:......................Medium
WEIGHT:....................Medium
HEIGHT:....................Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES....None
NUMBER OF FINGERS:.........Ten
NUMBER OF TOES.............Ten
INTELLIGENCE...............Medium

What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green Saliva?

Madness?

By Leonard Cohen, from his Stranger Music, Selected Poems and Songs (McCelland& Stewart ISBN 077102231).Now read about a Holocaust opera's rare performance.
Biography of Eichmann here. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Holocaust opera as university assignment

Nice, and topical, to see my January 2006 article on Viktor Ullman's (right) holocaust opera The Emperor of Atlantis being set as an assignment by Louisiana State University's music department. Also good to see that nothing changes with students. They are all arriving On An Overgrown Path just a few days before the assignment deadline.

Now here is an opera for study at Columbia University.
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Whosoever rescues a single soul ...

Refugee Week is a UK-wide programme of arts, cultural and educational events that celebrate the contribution of refugees to the UK, and encourages a better understanding between communities; it starts on 18th June. The Kindertransport sculpture is by Flor Kent, and stands in front of Liverpool Street Station. This is the London station that the Jewish children arrived at after the ferry crossing from mainland Europe in 1938 and 1939. Now read more about Kindertransport.
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For I propose to tell you of Buchenwald …

Much coverage elsewhere of Tim O'Reilly's proposed blogging code of conduct, although thankfully it is not needed here as the readers On An Overgrown Path are a very civilised bunch. But the dire quality of much of today's 'user generated' content was brought home to me recently when I read Norman Finkelstein’s life of the pioneer of broadcaster journalism, Edward Murrow. Where today can you find the equivalent of this economic but powerful prose describing London in 1939 weeks before the outbreak of war, when the city’s children had been evacuated to the safety of the country?

‘It’s dull in London now that the children are gone. For six days I’ve not heard a child’s voice. And that’s a strange feeling. No youngsters shouting their way home from school. And that’s the way it is in most of Europe’s big cities now. One needs the eloquence of the ancients to convey the full meaning of it. There just aren’t any more children.’

Everyone in the media, from newscasters to bloggers, should study Edward R. Murrow’s style. His mentor was Ida Lou Anderson, at Washington State University, and she taught him to use pauses and intonations to best advantage, and to use as few words as possible to make a point. “She demanded not excellence so much as integrity,” Murrow later said, and he told his staff, “You are supposed to describe things in terms that make sense to the truck driver without insulting the intelligence of the professor.” Broadcast historian Erik Barnouw described Murrow’s prose as having “a quiet dignity. It avoided stuffiness and also the condescension of folkiness. It abhorred the frenzied – it favored short, concise statements.”

On April 15 1945 Ed Murrow described the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald outside Weimar for CBS listeners. When the dedication ceremony of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC took place in April 1993 it included a reading from Murrow’s account. I wonder how many blog posts, newscasts and YouTube videos will receive similar treatment in fifty years from now? Here is what they will be measured against:

Permit me to tell you what you would have seen, and heard, had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio, for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald …. There surged around me an evil-smelling horde. Men and boys reached out to touch me; they were in rags and the remnants of uniform. Death had already marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes … When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building once stabled eighty horses. There were twelve hundred men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description …

In another part they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeve. D-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers; they will carry them till they die … There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seems to be little flesh to bruise … Murder had been done at Buchenwald … I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words … If I’ve offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.

With Heroic Truth, the Life of Edward R. Murrow by Norman H. Finkelstein is printed on demand by Authors Guild Backinprint.com ISBN0595348068. Now read how few words can tell a huge story in Childhood Luggage.

With thanks to the US 2nd Air Division Memorial Library in Norwich for their invaluable collection of American titles, which includes With Heroic Truth. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Dresden February 13th 2007

Nazi numbers were down to 1,600 – among them extremists from Hungary, the UK, Austria and France – for the 2007 annual fascist commemoration of the Allied air raids on Dresden in February 1945. For several years the event has been a key date in the German and international nazi calendar. Two years ago more than 7,000 fascists attended.

As usual the nazis marched with the slogan “No bombing Holocaust ever again”, ridiculing the victims of the real Holocaust, Hitler’s industrialised mass murder of Jews, Roma and Sinti. This year the demonstration was accompanied by an “action week” organised by an alliance of all Dresden’s rightwing extremists outside the National Democratic Party (NPD) under the leadership of “Free Nationalist”. The NPD’s leaders attended the march.

The nazis were faced with a strong protest from 1,000 mostly young anti-fascists who repeatedly blocked their path, delaying them and finally forcing them to shorten their demonstration. Some of the more militant nazis tried violently to break out of their own demonstration but ran into conflict with the police and anti-fascists. To some extent they succeeded but ended up fighting with police and anti-fascists.

Scandalously, however, the police this time allowed those nazis who had not already gone home in frustration at the anti-fascist blockade to demonstrate directly opposite the New Synagogue. Nevertheless, anti-fascists, encouraged by their success in ruining the nazi’s evening, are optimistic about preventing next year’s demonstration.

Frank Buschmann reports from Dresden via Antifaschistisches Infoblatt, Antifa-Net , and International Searchlight.

Now read about, and see, Dresden, 13th February 1945.
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Germany’s new generation of gypsies

Gypsies are the forgotten victims of the Holocaust, and it is estimated that half a million perished under the Nazi regime. But in recent years the reshaping of political boundaries and new migrations have increased the number of Sinti and Roma living in Germany to around 70,000, though this number is only an estimate as the German government does not keep records of ethnicity. The situation is further complicated as many Roma who arrived in the 1990s from former Yugoslavia do not hold German citizenship, and hence are classified as immigrants or refugees. The powerful photograph above of a Roma family near Stuttgart comes from an excellent photo essay in Catalyst magazine, which is published by the UK Commission for Racial Equality.

Now join the Roma as they Celebrate with Saint Sarah
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Holocaust opera's rare performance

A rare performance of an opera written in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Terezin, Czechoslovakia during World War II takes place at the University of Hertfordshire on Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27th. The Emperor of Atlantis was composed by the Czech composer Viktor Ullman, and is based on the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Ullman was sent to Theresienstadt from his home in Prague in the autumn of 1942. He was later moved to Auschwitz where his fellow prisoners included the musicians Karel Ancerl, Rafael Schachter, Gideon Klein, and Hans Krasa.

While in Theresienstadt Viktor Ullman wrote: 'For me Theresienstadt has been, and remains, an education in form. Previously, when one did not feel the weight and pressure of material life, because modern conveniences - those wonders of civilization - had dispelled them, it was easy to create beautiful forms. Here where matter has to be overcome through form even in daily life, where everything of an artistic nature is the very antithesis of one's environment - here, true mastery lies in seeing, with Schiller, that the secret of the art-work lies in the eradication of matter through form: which is presumably, indeed, the mission of man altogether, not only of aesthetic man but also of ethical man.

I have written a fairly large amount of music in Theresienstadt, mainly to satisfy the needs and wishes of conductors, producers, pianists and singers and thus to make provision for the permitted leisure activities within the ghetto. To make a list of this music seems to me as idle as it does to emphasize, for instance, that in Theresienstadt it was impossible to play the piano since there were no instruments. The severe shortage of manuscript paper will surely also be of no interest to future generations. All that I would stress is that Theresienstadt has helped, not hindered, me in my musical work, that we certainly did not sit down by the waters of Babylon and weep, and that our desire for culture was matched by our desire for life; and I am convinced that all those who have striven, in life and in art, to wrest form from resistant matter will bear me out.' Viktor Ullmann, 26 Kritiken über musikalische Veranstaltungen in Theresienstadt.

+ Viktor Ullman died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz on October 14th 1944 +

The Emperor of Atlantis was first performed in 1975, and is recognised for its contribution to the understanding of the Nazi atrocities.

* The one-off student performance will be staged at the Weston Auditorium at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK on 27th January 2006 preceded by a talk by Holocaust survivor Stephen Frank about his experiences of Theresienstadt.
* Internet resources available at Viktor Ullman Foundation
* Thanks to SomethingJewish for the lead on this story.
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* Image credits - Auschwitz from Libertarian.nl. Viktor Ullman from Viktor Ullman Foundation
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For a related story take An Overgrown Path to Childhood luggage