DR. RACHEL ADELSTEIN | To Honor Forbidden Lives: Art Song after the Holocaust

Dr. Rachel Adelstein analyzes two art songs, Lori Laitman’s “The Butterfly,” and David Botwinik “Far undz iz doz lebn farbotn,” to reveal the strengths of art song as a genre in sharing individual experiences and deeply-felt human emotion.

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The idea that composers and performers could use the genre of art song, which explores personal, intimate moments with grace and lyricism, to address the Holocaust, a spectacle of mechanized, industrial mass murder, might seem difficult, at best. Art song and the Holocaust exist at such disparate points in the human experience that one could doubt that the art and the historical reality could come together and still preserve their conceptual integrity. However, contemporary composers have created a growing repertoire of art songs that bring the Holocaust into the recital hall. The impersonal cruelty of the Holocaust coexists with the intimate lyricism of the song, and both the memory of the event and the art form change through the encounter.

Here, I examine the role of art and performance in mediating the industrialized brutality of the Holocaust, focusing on how art song, with its intensely personal orientation, can help the listener to comprehend such an event. I analyze two contemporary art songs, both by Jewish composers, that address the problem of personalizing the Holocaust through careful use of voice, language, lyricism, and instrumental accompaniment. Lori Laitman’s “The Butterfly,” the first song in her 1996 cycle I Never Saw Another Butterfly, sets an English translation of a poem written in 1942 by a young man who did not survive the Holocaust. Survivor David Botwinik used his own Yiddish poetry for his 2009 song “Far undz iz dos lebn farbotn” [For us, life is forbidden], revealing the emotional life of a Jew in hiding. Taken together, these songs demonstrate how, in setting difficult texts with thoughtful sensitivity, art song composers can use the genre’s strengths both to help the listener comprehend the horror of the Holocaust and to honor the lives, the individuality, and the humanity of its victims and survivors.

Understanding Industrialized Murder

The Holocaust — the mass persecution, confinement, and murder of six million European Jews — stands out in history and in Jewish memory as a singular episode of cruelty. The bureaucratic efficiency and brutality with which the Nazis eliminated their victims, as well as the scale of the crime, can overwhelm the human imagination. Indeed, the brutality of the Nazi regime was so broad that the prosecutors of the Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946) concentrated on Nazi offenses against peace and humanity in general. As legal scholars Michael Bazyler and Julia Scheppach observe, it was not until the state of Israel tried Adolf Eichmann in 1961 that the world could focus on the specific crimes of the Nazis against Jews. Bazyler and Scheppach write that this trial “was the first to tell the story of those who were lost and those who survived the Holocaust, giving the victims a voice.”¹ In practice, Eichmann’s trial was as much a performance of the importance of Jewish lives as it was legal proceeding. Historian Deborah Lipstadt notes that prosecutor Gideon Hauser’s choice to include as witnesses Holocaust survivors who did not encounter Eichmann personally “would transform the trial from an important war-crimes trial into an event that would have enduring significance,” and states that giving voice to the victims in this manner “would compel the world to listen to the story of the Final Solution in a way that it never had before.”² Even after the legal performance of the Eichmann trial, people have struggled to understand the Holocaust, and have sought new ways to explain and express the events and their meaning.

Much of this effort has emphasized individual stories, witnesses, and testimonies. Oral history archives at Yale University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the University of Southern California, the British Library, and many other institutions house thousands of individual video interviews with survivors, and teams of researchers and artists create scholarly and artistic work based on these testimonies. Many of the best-known pieces of Holocaust-related art and memoir focus on the individual experience. Władysław Szpilman’s The Pianist (1946), Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (1947), Elie Wiesel’s Night (1956), and Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980–1991) all tell the stories of individuals affected by the Holocaust. The bureaucracy and administrative energy aimed at exterminating the Jews helps to explain the focus on documenting individual stories. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman connects bureaucracy directly to dehumanization, which, he states, “starts at the point when . . . the objects at which the bureaucratic operation is aimed can, and are, reduced to a set of quantitative measures.”³ In the face of such extreme dehumanization, focusing on individual experiences of cruelty, using what literary scholar Richard Exner calls “reducing glasses,” makes it possible for the mind to approach the Holocaust.⁴ We must domesticate the horror in order to live with it.

Singing in the Face of Modernity

This need to domesticate a horrifying event of modern, industrial brutality speaks directly to the strength of art song. Art song is an intensely domestic genre, featuring a solo singer and minimal instrumental accompaniment; that accompaniment is often, but not always, a piano, an instrument that can offer the singer full harmonic support with only one player. It is an art form that fits well into a small space; in discussing art song’s relationship to modernity, Joys Cheung and Alison Tokita emphasize its descent from the nineteenth-century German Lied, a style intended for amateur performance in the confines of the home.⁵ Although art song has moved through varying degrees of public performance, from home performance to semi-public salon to the concert stage, and back into private homes through the medium of recording, the intimacy of the form remains. The intimacy of art song does not depend on the number of people listening to a performance; rather, it depends on the public performance of private emotion, what Jennifer Ronyak describes as “the musico-poetic portrayal of interiority.”⁶ Leon Botstein emphasizes this performative aspect, positioning it as a subjective and inward-focused form that “bridged, albeit gingerly, the domestic and the public sphere.”⁷ Its intimacy does not preclude violent emotions; Schubert’s Winterreise tells the story of anger, depression and madness stemming from rejected love. Although the emotions of art song may be violent and chaotic, the musical composition and the controlled act of performance contain and focus those emotions, giving the listener a cathartic experience without the risks of uncontrolled expression of powerful emotion. As Lori Laitman has suggested, music “both amplifies the emotions but also helps to cushion the effect of the horror.”⁸ The intimacy of art song performance blunts the edges of those emotions just enough to admit them into the listener’s conception of the world.

Some posit that art song inherits an apolitical appearance from its German origins. As Botstein observes, the Lied’s intimacy appears to render it “immune from external events, notably mechanization, industrialization, urban growth, and the harsh hand of the autocratic state.”⁹ However, Lorraine Gorrell argues that both Lieder and art song are inescapably shaped by politics. In the early nineteenth century, Lied composers set poetry created in a wave of German nationalism that arose in reaction to Napoleon’s attempt to bring all of Europe under French control. Texts from the 1808 collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn proved especially popular, perhaps because as Gorrell notes, the collection “raised German morale and fed nationalistic aspirations in the face of the conquering Napoleon.” ¹⁰ As artistic and political revolutions came and went during the nineteenth century, poets and composers alike worked to capture the spirit of the times in their works. Although the illusion of intimacy and isolation from the events of the outside world surrounds both Lieder and art song, the artists who created them participated in those events, and their responses to political change echo in their words and music.

By the twentieth century, the remaining illusory fragments of isolation faded, as composers began to use the medium of art song to address specific events and conditions of the world as well as express the emotions that came with those situations. Kate Kennedy describes British poet and composer Ivor Gurney’s choice to set the verse of the “war poets” into art song as he struggled to recover from his own experience of the First World War.¹¹ And Willis Patterson observes that Margaret Bonds’s 1959 song cycle, Three Dream Portraits, uses the poetry of Langston Hughes to “provide a very special and detailed view of the musical atmosphere and political temperament of the Harlem Renaissance during the period 1920–1950.”¹² While most early Lieder may have avoided the appearance of politics, later art song can, and does, acknowledge the impact of the outside world on human emotion.

Art song’s ability to domesticate powerful emotions through performative intimacy allows composers to address world events indirectly. Gorrell notes that this has been a feature of art song since its inception in the nineteenth century, remarking that art song “was not isolated from the world, but it did make the world more bearable.”¹³ Art song does not need to preach; rather, by showing the emotion of the text, framed and highlighted with music, the listener may come to understand the composer’s perspective without feeling that a lesson has been taught. Botstein further observes that the dramatic power of the art song stems from a particular type of illusion, “the way the listener is lulled into thinking he or she is overhearing a personal secret, or feeling, that one might share and adapt to one’s own life.”¹⁴ The intimacy of the form leads the listener into a personal relationship with the text.

When the emotion of the music and experience of the text relate directly to a politically significant event, art song can convey understanding and empathy while avoiding an outwardly political stance. Gorrell connects the wave of political repression in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire that followed the 1848 uprisings across Europe to a fashion for realism in poetry and art song. She offers as an example Hugo Wolf’s 1890 setting of Swiss poet Gottfried Keller’s (1819 – 1890) 1851 poem “Das Köhlerweib ist trunken” [The Charcoal Woman is Drunk] as an example of this turn toward realism taking place beside the Romantic nationalism of German poets such as Goethe and Schiller.¹⁵ Compositional choices can also add layers of meaning to those already present in a poem’s use of language. Tsitsi Jaji eloquently describes the layers of meaning that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s choices of a steady meter and alternation between E major verses and C major refrains add to his setting of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “A Corn Song.” Dunbar’s poem paints a picture of the antebellum South, in which a plantation master watches his enslaved workers returning from the field. The enslaved workers’ refrain is in dialect, setting this section of the song apart from the pastoral imagery of the verses. Jaji interprets Dunbar’s text as a critique of “the quickly faded promises of Reconstruction.” She contrasts this critique with Coleridge-Taylor’s optimism, observing that his setting “turn[s] the final refrain into a kind of harmonic victory chant for C major and those who sing their corn song in its key.”¹⁶ Finally, she observes that the song’s final plagal cadence, reminiscent of an “amen,” offers “an air of millenarian hope” for the triumph of “the oppressed black vernacular voice.”¹⁷ Both of these songs carry significant political meaning and resonance, although neither one states an explicit opinion or comments directly on any given political issue of its time. This ability to be political without appearing to be political makes art song a powerful medium for an encounter with the depredation of the Holocaust.

Translating the Voice of the Dead

American composer Lori Laitman (b. 1955) has written many works on the theme of the Holocaust. Perhaps best-known of these is her 1996 song cycle I Never Saw Another Butterfly, in which she sets six poems written in the Terezín transit camp by young Jewish prisoners, all of whom were subsequently deported to other concentration camps and murdered. The first song in the cycle, “The Butterfly,” (See Example 1) uses a 1942 text by the Czech poet Pavel Friedmann (1921–1944). Friedmann describes a butterfly he saw while imprisoned in Terezín, admiring its yellow wings and its freedom to fly. He contrasts the butterfly with his own circumstances, observing that, unlike Jews, butterflies do not live in the ghetto.

Example 1: “The Butterfly,” composed by Lori Laitman (1996). Soprano: Katharina Konradi. Clarinet: Andreas Lipp. 2018.

Laitman sets Friedmann’s text, and indeed the entire cycle, for soprano and solo reed instrument.¹⁸ Her choice of solo reed rather than piano heightens both the emotion and the intimacy of the song. Sheena Ramirez notes that the reed hovers between the role of soloist and accompaniment, writing that “the distinctions are blurred” as the reed “moves from principal theme to countermelody to accompaniment.”¹⁹ In exchange for the harmonic support of a traditional piano accompaniment, “The Butterfly” becomes an intimate duet between the human voice of the prisoner and the instrumental butterfly. As Botstein suggests, the listener is lured into the illusion of eavesdropping on a personal, secret moment. The two lines intertwine and circle around each other, creating the effect of a private world as the poet watches the butterfly blithely fluttering. At times, they come together to create moments of harmony. But, as Ramirez notes, the voice and the instrument clash in a striking moment of dissonance when the poet reminds the listener of the true circumstances of the poem: on the line, “For seven weeks I’ve lived in here, penned up inside this ghetto,” the voice lands on an F sharp, while the instrument shifts from G to F natural.²⁰ As pastoral and intimate as the scene of a poet watching a butterfly may be, the listener must not forget the circumstances under which it occurs.

Two other aspects of the song remind the listener that, far from being included in a personal, intimate moment, they are hearing it through the barrier of violence. The first aspect is Laitman’s choice of vocal register. “The Butterfly” is scored for soprano voice, a tessitura that might evoke the innocence of childhood. However, Pavel Friedmann was twenty-one when he wrote his poem. He was young, but not a child, and would not have spoken in a child’s treble register. Laitman’s choice of a soprano to present his words reminds the listener that the voice that is singing is not, and cannot be, Friedmann’s voice. The second aspect betraying this barrier of violence is Laitman’s choice of language. “The Butterfly” uses an English translation of Friedmann’s original Czech text ²¹ by Jeanne Němcová, which was collected and published by art historian Hana Volavková in 1971.²² The translation allows the listener into Botstein’s illusion of overhearing a personal moment, but it also reminds the listener of the distance from the poet’s actual self. Laitman’s song does not make Friedmann immortal; it brings the listener into Friedmann’s world, emphasizing that this beautiful moment of poet and butterfly is doomed, just as Friedmann was brutally and industrially murdered by the Nazis not long after writing this poem.

Visiting a Survivor’s World

The work of Lithuanian-born Canadian composer David Botwinik (1920–2022) reveals another approach to returning humanity to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust through art song. Born in Vilna, Botwinik began singing in synagogues as a child, and studied Western classical music.²³ He survived the Vilna ghetto and several camps, and after the war, he assisted Yiddish poet Shmerke Kazcerginski in transcribing survivors’ songs for the 1948 publication Lider Fun di Getos un Lagern [Songs from the Ghettos and Camps].²⁴ Botwinik’s song “Far undz iz dos lebn farbotn” [For us, life is forbidden] premiered in 2009 and was published in 2010 as part of his collection Fun khurbn tsum lebn: naye yidishe lider [From Holocaust to Life: New Yiddish Songs]. Like “The Butterfly,” “Far undz” brings the listener into a private, almost forbidden world whose violence and terror are framed with intimacy and beauty. (See Example 2) However, several important differences between the two songs reveal deviations in their private worlds and the distinctive paths each composer follows in the process.

Example 2: “Far undz iz dos lebn farbotn,” composed by David Botwinik (premiere 2009). Tenor: Richard Lenatsky, Piano: Vladimir Ivanov.

In “Far undz,” Botwinik uses his own text to bring the listener into the world he inhabited. Set for piano and high voice,²⁵ the song reveals the dark, narrow experience of a Jew in hiding from the Nazis. Walled away from the world, cut off from the sun, the poet wonders whether anyone considers Jews to be people, and why the Jews must suffer with no one to defend them. He observes that life is forbidden to the Jews, for whom leaving their dark hiding places would mean death.

The piano accompaniment largely follows the vocal line in parallel, adding decorations to held notes at the ends of phrases. If Laitman’s intertwining lines suggest a duet between poet and butterfly, Botwinik’s parallel composition evokes the claustrophobia brought on by hiding in a small, dark space. Notably, the moments when the piano line gains the most freedom are those lines that speak of the sun illuminating the world, and of how lucky those people are who are allowed to see its light. Botstein’s notion of the illusion that Lieder creates of overhearing a secret gains new importance here. The Jew in hiding is necessarily isolated: in real life, being overheard would have fatal consequences. The intimacy between singer, pianist, and listener is heightened, taking on a new edge with the pervasive threat of capture hanging over even the idea of song.

Where Laitman invites an Anglophone listener into Friedmann’s world through an English translation, Botwinik uses Yiddish to give the listener a more accurate impression of the world his song describes. Many of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, and the language, like the people, was nearly extinguished by this mass murder. Though Yiddish may not be as familiar to most art song audiences as German or English, its fluid, emotional blend of Hebrew, Middle High German, and elements of several Slavic languages reveals an important aspect of the pre-war Jewish world. This was the language that millions of people spoke; this was how their world sounded. Although the poet is clearly alone and isolated, he speaks in the plural first person: for “us,” life is forbidden. This structure ties “Far undz” even more closely to the German Lied; as Cheung and Tokita note, “the lyrical subjectivity of the Lied is characterized by the coupling of the collective (the folk) and the personal.” ²⁶ Here, a single voice represents the fate of an entire people hanging in the balance. By enticing the listener to care about that one voice, Botwinik brings the plight of millions to the listener’s attention.

Honoring Their Memory

The intimacy of art song performance is rooted in its aesthetic opposition to industrialism and mechanization. It elevates the individual, highlights emotion over narrative, and invites the listener into an intimate relationship with the singer and the song. Above all else, it celebrates the humanity of its subject, its singer, and its listener. It is this humanity that the Nazis tried to strip from the Jews by imprisoning them, reducing their individuality to numbers, and murdering them in bureaucratic, mechanized institutions. For the Jews, song was often a tool of spiritual resistance to the Nazis. Historian Shirli Gilbert suggests that such song can “serve as a reminder that acknowledging the richness and diversity of victims’ lives under Nazism — replete with optimism and defiance as well as anger, antagonism, grief, despair and uncertainty — is perhaps a more truthful way of honouring their memory.” ²⁷ This act of remembering humanity continues with work composed after the Holocaust as well. In calling attention to the human beings caught in the mechanized murder of the Holocaust, art song makes room for the horror in our lives and confronts us with the humanity that the Nazis worked to destroy.

Notes

1. Bazyler and Scheppach 2012: 439. ↩
   
2. Lipstadt 2011: 55. ↩
   
3. Bauman 1989: 102. ↩
   
4. Exner 1986: 405 ↩
   
5. Cheung and Tokita 2023: 4–5. ↩
   
6. Ronyak 2018: 1. ↩
   
7. Botstein 2013: 2. ↩
   
8. Laitman 2000 – 2012. ↩
   
9. Botstein 2013: 3. ↩
   
10. Gorrell 2005: 37. ↩
    
11. Kennedy 2021: 244. ↩
    
12. Patterson 1996: 306. ↩
    
13. Gorrell 2005: 55. ↩
    
14. Botstein 2013: 12. ↩
    
15. Gorrell 2005: 49. ↩
    
16. Jaji 2013: 203. ↩
    
17. Ibid.: 205. ↩
    
18. Versions exist for soprano/alto saxophone, soprano/clarinet, and soprano/bassoon. ↩
    
19. Ramirez 2021: 43. ↩
    
20. Ibid.: 44–45. ↩
    
21. Friedmann 1942. ↩
    
22. Volavková 1971; see also Ramirez 2021: 21. ↩
    
23. Botwinik 2000–2023. ↩
    
24. Werb 2014: 25. ↩
    
25. The song has been performed by both tenor and soprano soloists. ↩
    
26. Cheung and Tokita 2023: 4. ↩
    
27. Gilbert 2004: 304. ↩

References

• Bauman, Zygmunt. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

• Bazyler, Michael, and Julia Y. Scheppach. (2012). “The Strange and Curious History of the Law Used to Prosecute Adolf Eichmann.” Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review 34 (3): 417–461.

• Botstein, Leon. (2013). “Words and Music: The Legacy of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925–2012).” The Musical Quarterly 96 (1): 1–13.

• Botwinik, Alexander. (2000–2023). “David Botwinik.” Available at https://tinyurl.com/3smrd8kf. Accessed 10 April, 2023.

• Cheung, Joys H. Y., and Alison McQueen Tokita. (2023). “Art song as lyrical modernity in colonial and post-colonial contexts: Listening to each other’s songs.” In The Art Song in East Asia and Australia, 1900 to 1950, eds. Alison McQueen Tokita and Joys H. Y. Cheung. London: Routledge. 1–15.

• Exner, Richard. (1986). “Some Reflections on Holocaust and Post-Holocaust Writing.” World Literature Today 60 (3): 402–406.

• Friedmann, Pavel. (1942). “Pavel Friedmann: Quiet Saturday; Butterfly (3 poems).” Available at https://tinyurl.com/27r938k7. Accessed 10 April, 2023.

• Gilbert, Shirli. (2004). “Songs Confront the past: Music in KZ Sachsenhausen, 1936–1945.” Contemporary European History 13 (3): 281–304.

• Gorrell, Lorraine. (2005). The Nineteenth-Century German Lied. Portland, OR:  Amadeus Press.

• Jaji, Tsitsi. (2013). “Art Song Poetics: Performing Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Setting of Paul L. Dunbar’s ‘A Corn Song.’” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1 (1): 201 – 206.

• Kennedy, Kate. (2021). Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Laitman, Lori. (2000 – 2012). “Music About the Holocaust.” Available at https://tinyurl.com/4whajbyp. Accessed 19 July, 2023.

• Lipstadt, Deborah E. (2011). The Eichmann Trial. New York: Schocken Books.

• Patterson, Willis. (1996). “The African-American Art Song: A Musical Means for Special Teaching and Learning.” Black Music Research Journal 16 (2): 303–310.

• Ramirez, Sheena. (2021). “Words, Music, Memory: An exploration of four soprano song cycles by Lori Laitman based on poetry by victims of the Holocaust.” Ph.D dissertation. James Madison University.

• Ronyak, Jennifer. (2018). Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

• Volavková, Hana. (1971). . . . I never saw another butterfly . . . Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezín Concentration Camp 1942–1944. New York: McGraw-Hill.

• Werb, Bret. (2014). “Yiddish Songs of the Shoah: A Source Study Based on the Collections of Shmerke Kaczerginski.” Ph.D dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles.

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August 25, 2023