A Survivor from Warsaw
46, is a work for narrator, chorus and orchestra by the Los Angeles–based Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, written in tribute to Holocaust victims.
The main narration is written in Sprechgesang style, between speaking and singing; "never should there be a pitch" to its solo vocal line, wrote the composer.
[1] Scored for narrator, men's chorus and orchestra, it resulted from a suggested collaboration between Jewish Russian émigrée dancer Corinne Chochem and Schoenberg, but the dancer's initiative gave way to a project independently developed by the composer after he received a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation for an orchestral work.
The work was premiered by the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Kurt Frederick on November 4, 1948.
Czech writer Milan Kundera dedicated an essay in his book Encounter (2010) to A Survivor from Warsaw.
"[3] The work narrates the story of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto in the Second World War, from his time in a concentration camp.
I must have been unconscious most of the time.I remember only the grandiose moment when they all started to sing, as if prearranged, the old prayer they had neglected for so many years – the forgotten creed!But I have no recollection how I got underground to live in the sewers of Warsaw for so long a time.The day began as usual: Reveille when it still was dark.
In 1925 Schoenberg was selected to lead a masterclass on composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts by the Minister of Culture Carl Heinrich Becker.
After his post was revoked on racist grounds in September 1933, he returned to the Jewish faith he had abandoned in his youth[5] and emigrated to the United States, where he became a professor of composition and, in 1941,[6] an American citizen.
She sent Schoenberg the melody and English translation of "Partizaner lid" ("Partisan Song")[7] in early 1947 and requested a composition following the Yiddish original or a Hebrew version.
Schoenberg requested fees from Chochem "for a 6- to 9-minute composition for small orchestra and choir", and he clarified: "I plan to make it this scene – which you described – in the Warsaw Ghetto, how the doomed Jews started singing, before gooing [sic] to die.
"[8] But Schoenberg and Chochem failed to reach a financial agreement, and so the plan to use "Partizaner lid" as the basis of the work had to be abandoned.
He was surprised when Schoenberg offered him the opportunity to undertake the premiere, stipulating that in lieu of their performance fee the New Mexico musicians should prepare a full set of choral and orchestral parts and send those to him.
The premiere was followed by a minute's silence, after which Frederick repeated the whole work; then began a frenzied applause.
Under it, whispers stirred in the orchestra, disjointed motifs fluttered from strings to woodwinds, like secret, anxious conversations.
The survivor began his tale, in the tense half-spoken, half-sung style called Sprechstimme.
[17] As noted in Pierre-Henri Salfati's [fr] 2004 documentary La neuvième, for one performance (the date is not mentioned), "In a tremendous symbolic gesture, the Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn plays Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw and without a pause goes straight into the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven.
"[This quote needs a citation] On October 30, 2010, the Berliner Philharmonic under Simon Rattle performed the piece in a similar way, leading into Mahler's Second Symphony.
[19] Richard S. Hill published a contemporary analysis of Schoenberg's use of twelve-tone rows in A Survivor from Warsaw,[20] and Jacques-Louis Monod prepared a definitive edition of the score, later, in 1979.
