Student’s music mirrors life
In the small hours after midnight, when the Emerson Auditorium stage on the Union College campus in Schenectady was silent and ringed by darkness, Max Stwertka would close his eyes and hear a violin’s plaintive vibrato in his mind.
It was a powerful, quavering sound that seemed to suggest the full range of the human condition, from ecstasy to agony, humanity to inhumanity.
Tears filled his eyes as he took a pencil and tried to render into notes on music composition paper the heartbreaking story of his grandfather’s uncle, Julius
Stwertka, a worldrenowned violin soloist and concertmaster with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Vienna Philharmonic. Known as “The Maestro,” he was recruited to Vienna from his home in Hamburg, Germany, by Gustav Mahler in 1902 and given the prestigious position without an audition.
In 1907, Stwertka was invited to Boston to play first violin with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During his 32 years with the Vienna Philharmonic, he taught at the Imperial Music Academy and the Conservatory of the Society of Friends of Music, both in Vienna. He joined his friend Arnold Rose in the renowned Rose Quartet and was honored with a Gold Medal for Service to the Republic of Austria.
Everything changed on March 12, 1938, with the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany and the anti-semitic laws that discriminated against, isolated and harassed the Jewish population
in a prelude to the Holocaust.
The Maestro had been stripped of the cherished Stradivarius violin he had played for years, along with all other possessions. He and his wife, Rosa, were rounded up and transported to Theresienstadt, a walled ghetto and transit camp for western Jews later sent to be exterminated at concentration camps.
“A train brought The Maestro and his violin into the city of music full of hope,” Stwertka wrote in a narrative filled with photographs and historic documents that accompanies his composition. “And a train would take him broken, violin-less, to a concentration camp.”
Julius and Rosa Stwertka arrived at Theresienstadt in what is now the Czech Republic on Aug. 27, 1942. The Maestro died less than four months later, on Dec. 17, 1942. He was 70. His cause of death was not listed, but 33,000 of the 140,000 people sent there died due to exposure, starvation and disease amid deplorable conditions in the severely overcrowded camp.
His widow was transferred by train to Auschwitz on May 16, 1944. She was exterminated in the gas chambers there, although the precise date is unknown.
These were the tangled emotions — from the idyll of the Stwertkas’ joyous life in the cultural capital of Vienna to the brutal conclusion of the Holocaust — that swirled in Stwertka’s head as he tried to set the story to music.
“When a certain phrase came into my head, there was no going to bed. I had to keep working on the idea until I had just the right notes,” said Stwertka, 22, a senior from Rochester. “As I was working, I felt more and more connected to the Maestro and to my Jewish heritage.”
Stwertka, a physics major who later added a second major in music, turned his attention seriously to musical composition a year ago. He began researching his great-granduncle in order to write a musical composition as a senior thesis project to complete his bachelor of arts degree.
On Monday, Swertka’s musical composition, “Julius,” a tone poem in seven movements featuring violin, alto saxophone, cello and double bass, was performed on stage in Union’s Emerson Auditorium where he spent many hours drafting the 27-minute piece.
The interconnected movements form a narrative arc that combines upbeat jazzy sections on alto saxophone and double bass with somber classical portions performed on violin and cello.
“Max said early on that he wanted both jazz and classical elements,” said his professor and adviser, Hilary Tann. “I don’t know of any other piece that has that combination of instruments and styles. Max has created something quite unique.”
Stwertka struggled to merge the uplifting mood of the couple’s life in Vienna before the German occupation with the grim progression of the Nazis’ Final Solution.
“I didn’t want the piece to feel only sad and tragic,” Stwertka said. “It is also a celebration of a musician who achieved what he had always dreamed of becoming.”
Stwertka met each week with Tann, an accomplished composer and chair of Union’s Department of Music, to discuss his composition-in-progress.
“If he was moving forward on the piece, he didn’t need much help that week and it was a short session,” Tann said. “But if he came in discouraged and all slumped in his chair, I talked about the process of composing and how you sometimes have to take a break and back off to see the thing as a whole.”
Stwertka was Tann’s student in all three levels of musical theory classes. She was impressed with his keen intellect and broad musical tastes. They also bonded over the fact that both are cellists.
“Max is a deep thinker,” she said. “He came with a strong knowledge and appreciation for classical music, which is becoming rarer. He also was interested in all kinds of contemporary music and genres I didn’t know. His background in physics gave him a strong analytical mind, as well.”
Stwertka grew up in a family infused with music and science. His father, Peter Stwertka, is a physicist who plays violin and Spanish guitar. His mother, Barbara Stwertka, is a chemist who plays piano. Both are Kodak retirees.
There were times when Stwertka’s dedication to the project wavered. Tann’s strong entreaties steered him back on track.
“Time is running out,” his professor wrote Stwertka in an email Feb. 4. “You have a wonderful story to tell and you’d better tell it wonderfully.”
Stwertka’s family members attended the performance of “Julius,” an experience that altered his career path. After commencement June 16, he intends to apply to graduate schools for musical composition.
“I know it’s not an easy path, but I feel like I owe it to myself to at least try after what I accomplished,” he said.
Tann said Stwertka earned an “A” on his senior thesis.
But it was never about the grade. He wanted to honor The Maestro and to use music to tell the story of a most extraordinary life.