Sound Representations of Memory

I.

The problem of representing memory in art holds an important place in the historical and social discourse; historians, sociologists, philosophers and psychologists all strive to cope with this difficult subject. The problem of how memory is represented does not come to an end with the deaths of the last witnesses to particular events. Artists working in various fields take up certain themes, seeking to convey tensions and build up multi-level narratives that invoke “the trauma so deeply embedded in our consciousness”².

The subject of how memory is represented has given rise to many works of art, be they works of architecture, sculpture, film, literature, poetry, the theatre, the visual arts or music. The multitude of forms of expression they take on stems from particular artists’ individual experience, cultural context and language, and the materials in which they work. Thus, the reality of the Holocaust and how it is commemorated in art constitute two separate orders.

27 January 2015, the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, provided an occasion for organising exhibitions in Germany and Poland. These proved that the young generation remains keenly interested in representations of memory. The first exhibition, which featured works created in ghettos, camps and hiding places, as well as profiles of artists from Poland, Israel and Germany, was entitled Death Doesn’t Have the Last Word³. It is worth mentioning that the subject of extermination and the dramatic events of the war are now being taken up by the second and third generations after Auschwitz:

“… they have new ways of presenting the tragic experiences of the camps, of events, and their relationship to them, thus conveying the drama of the Holocaust in a way that is still relevant. Despite the differences between Poles, Israelis and Germans, it is remembrance that connects these nations of victims and perpetrators that constitute part of our identity. Artists are conscious of their obligation to remember the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, spoke of that responsibility this way: “Anyone who listens to a witness today becomes a witness”⁴.

The presence of the problem of the Holocaust at the turn of the 20^th and 21^st centuries led to academic research on memory, representations of memory, and new forms of remembrance. There are more and more compositions on remembrance and the Holocaust, written by artists spanning several generations. In many countries, this type of work is given greater impetus as the generation of first-hand witnesses disappears. This book looks at works by composers active in the second half of the 20^th century and the beginning of the present one. Of course, a selection of works had to be made, and so the scope of the book is limited to musical representations of the Holocaust and, more broadly, World War II – an era of violence, persecution and genocide – as well as to the history of how those works were received. The compositions touch on extreme experiences: being in a concentration camp or P.O.W. camp, working in a Sonderkommando, taking part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprisng, or in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust in Europe, almost half were murdered in the death camps, and at least two million were executed by Einsatzgruppen, individual Nazis or their collaborators; about one million died in the ghettos, in slave labour camps, during death marches or under other circumstances. These grim statistics did not prevent a resurgence of anti-Semitism after the war, to which Shostakovitch’s response was his Symphony No. 13 in B-flat minor, which refers to the massacre at Babi Yar. Such musical works are deliberately embedded in their historical, musicological and cultural context.

Jacques Derrida said that, when in New York, it is impossible not to talk about the tragedy of 9/11, “for you feel, or you’re forced to feel, that you can’t – you haven’t got the right – to talk about any subject, especially in public, without fulfilling that duty, without referring – even willy-nilly – to that date”⁵. The same applies to the Second World War: you can’t talk about it without talking about the Holocaust, about Auschwitz.

Maria Orwid has claimed that the trauma of the 20^th and 21^st centuries has affected individuals, societies and whole nations so deeply, in so many ways, and so pervasively, that the pain it has left behind cannot be quickly externalised and verbalised⁶. As a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and co-author of the first studies on the psychic effects of wartime experiences in the camps, Orwid also initiated a therapeutic project for Children of the Holocaust and the Second Generation, and introduced Polish academics and psychologists to the problem of trauma and the feelings of guilt experienced by Holocaust survivors:

What humanity went through during the Second World War, what the world – and mainly Europe – became, went beyond anything anyone had imagined, even the worst, the most pessimistic visions; it went beyond all previous experience, every ethical framework, all human sensibility, and essentially every ideology that had functioned up to that point. But that experience was not fully accepted or worked through. Yes, there were the great Nuremberg trials, crimes were formally judged, and particular authors of the programme of genocide perpetrated to varying degrees on Jews, Romas, Poles and other conquered nations were identified. Yet in the world there was a hope now, after humanity had fallen so low and had endured such a terrible moment, that now things could only get better… Later, subsequent generations come into the world who take part in the battles, brutality and wars that began after 1945, and all those experiences spring up again, live on and permeate society… traumas fill up the reservoir of the collective unconscious. People may not think about them every day, but unconsciously they file away all those facts and wounds and the scars they’ve left, which are constantly aggravated by new traumatic experiences⁷.

II.

In the musical works discussed in this book, their composers employed a variety of texts as specific responses to the traumatic experiences of the war. They are texts written by victims, witnesses, grieving family members, and include reports by Holocaust victims or survivors – verses written in the ghetto or artistic interpretations of those events. The composers selected drew mainly on texts concerning the experiences of Jewish victims. The choice of works was dictated to some extent by the subject, but also by the experiences of the composers themselves.

Almost all of the pieces analysed here are verbal-musical works; exceptions are Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. The use of texts both directly evokes the experiences of the past and depicts the human condition in a universal way. And the texts have yet another function – they are historical testimonies given by witnesses and victims against those who would doubt the crimes of the Nazis or deny the genocide, the gas chambers and the mass crimes against humanity; further, they open up a discussion on the difficult past that has political and ideological consequences in today’s world. Even though in Germany it is a crime to deny the Holocaust, there are those who persist in distorting the historical truth about those tragic, documented events.

Throughout the book, the text is an important component of how a particular musical work is to be understood. As Mieczysław Tomaszewski has pointed out, an analysis of a verbal-musical work should begin with the elements of which the work is constituted and the relations between them:

Relation one: the voice and accompanying instrument – if there is one, of course. Then, in that voice: the verbal text, and the melody to which it is set. Then, in the text: its content, together with its auditory shape. In that content: what is presented, together with what it symbolises, that is, what it presents, expresses, designates. And this is the only direction of differentiation, the one that leads us to capture the nature of what is conveyed [original emphasis]⁸.

Words exist that can transport their recipient to a symbolic reality, as shown explained by Ricoeur:

In times when our language becomes increasingly strict and unambiguous, in a word – technical, increasingly susceptible to those completely formalised procedures known as symbolic logic… we desire to fill up our speech once again with its own richness, to again rely on its fullness⁹.

Another important title is Związki muzyki ze słowem by Michał Bristiger, in which the author reflects on the place and role of the text in a musical composition: “Traditionally in musicology, ‘text’ is understood as the text of a poem or another verbal text that has its own existence apart from the music. Music is composed to the ‘words’ of the text, or the text is set below the music”¹⁰. Bristiger distinguishes “the verbal text – the text of a poem or anything literary text, or even in some cases a non-literary text – to which the composer writes music, but which exists independently of that music. For creative inspiration and for the process of composing, all the properties of the text are essential: both its content and its material side (plan of expression), and therefore its auditory qualities as well¹¹. If the text is an element of the score, then it is also an object of analysis¹².

Bristiger discussed the importance of words in music in conversation with Władysław Malinowski: “… a person can’t just sing vocalisations, for we created culture out of words, and vocal music with words, for without words he wouldn’t be human. And this human impossibility of entirely renouncing words is for me the key to the situation in music”¹³.

The theme of the 54^th Warsaw Autumn International Contemporary Music Festival in 2011 was ‘music and politics’. The festival director, Tadeusz Wielicki, said at the time that works of art that are critical and politically engaged are mainly made by artists working in literature and the visual arts, whereas music, being abstract and asemantic, is not so readily associated with this. He asked whether a composer can fully and seriously take part in the debate in society. How music becomes engaged in political affairs depends on the temperaments and ingenuity of its creators. In the festival programme, we read:

In engaged music, the essence of what is conveyed lies beyond the music itself: it is contained in words, in images, in the programme, in a campaign attached to the music. For music does not speak, and so cannot raise its voice in a debate in which it would have to confront a different approach to a problem… If, through a programme that has been added to it, music does say something, it does so indirectly. Just as all art operates in the realm of symbol, myth, metaphor, abstraction; if it begins to have more immediate purposes, it becomes journalism. In art, the concrete is used only as a kind of prop, as a means of interpreting reality. Whereas if we believe that art can and should open the door to Mystery, that Mystery is the opposite of what is concrete. The engagement of the artist – social, moral – has always existed¹⁴.

According to Wielicki, a composer speaks out by connecting abstract sounds with an amusical idea. The connections between meaning and music in a socially or politically engaged work are manifest in very different ways, and artists employ their own personal strategies to convince their listeners, in both the political and artistic senses. The composer’s message is disclosed in “the process of perception, with the involvement of our will, but also our intuition, sensibilities, and our ability to perceive, associate and judge”¹⁵.

III.

The Holocaust is generally understood as activities aimed at exterminating the Jewish people, organised and perpetrated by state institutions of the Third Reich during the Second World War both within its own territory and in the territories it occupied, using bureaucratic procedures and industrial methods of murdering people and utilising their remains. In academic reflections it is described as a borderline, traumatic event that cracked civilization and whose consequences continue to shape – in ways both visible and hidden – modern politics, life in society and culture. From this perspective, the Holocaust may be seen as a set of historical events, but also as a symbolic event having a supra-ethnic and supra-national dimension¹⁶.

We are again witnessing a discussion on the justifiability and appropriacy of speaking and writing on the Holocaust. In the opinion of Marion Janion, post-war art remains under the influence of what we imagine about the Holocaust: “Post-Holocaust works constitute testimony of the struggle between speaking and remaining silent, between a surplus of language and its radical reduction. Historical facts come up against fiction, ethics against aesthetics, the expressible against the inexpressible”¹⁷.