An emotional echo from the Holocaust
The sounds are emotionally intense, openly melodic and urgently expressive.
They were penned by young musicians who would not survive the Holocaust.
But even if you didn’t know the histories behind “Silenced Voices” — a startling new album from Chicago’s Black Oak Ensemble — it would be difficult to miss the poetry and eloquence of these scores. The knowledge that these Jewish composers were silenced for their identities only adds to their works’ import.
Though each composition on “Silenced Voices” (Cedille Records) has something worthy to say, one stands as a masterpiece: Czech composer Gideon Klein’s Trio for Violin, Viola and Cello (producer James Ginsburg on Wednesday was nominated for a Grammy Award for his work on this album and others).
In December 1941, the Nazis sent Klein to Terezin (“Theresienstadt” in German) in Czechoslovakia, a concentration camp created for propaganda purposes as a “model ghetto” – meaning imprisoned artists were allowed to pursue their gifts before their deaths. Thus Klein could find a kind of temporary refuge in music.
He’s believed to have penned his Trio shortly before a mass deportation of sick and starving Terezin inmates to Auschwitz in October 1944. There Klein faced the inevitable “selections,” in which new arrivals were separated into two groups: those who would be executed immediately and those who might subsist awhile longer. Klein lived and was sent to a labor camp at Furstengrube, Poland, where he died in January, 1945, shortly before its liberation.
The Trio, Klein’s final composition, stands as a masterfully constructed work of astonishing profundity. Its perpetual motion opening movement revels in Eastern European folkloric elements, and its rhythmically buoyant finale proves rhetorically dramatic.
But it’s the expansive and contemplative Lento middle movement that represents the heart of this score and its primary purpose for being. Its opening pages can be likened to some of the most serene musical works in the repertoire, most notably Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Edward Elgar’s “Nimrod” from his “Enigma” Variations. Like those pieces, the opening of Klein’s Lento articulates eternal truths via seemingly simple gestures.
The elegiac passages eventually give way to rhythmic turbulence and increasing harmonic complexity. With each phrase, the movement becomes more deeply, darkly communicative, more personal in its utterances.
Everyone is free to choose how to interpret the Lento’s somber ending, either in light of the terrors that engulfed Klein and the others in Terezin, or as absolute music wholly apart from them.
Either way, Klein’s Trio, played with as much conviction as musical grace by the Black Oak Ensemble, stands as a testament to what humanity somehow can achieve under dire circumstances.
Like Klein, Czech composer Hans Krasa was taken to Terezin, but unlike Klein, he was an already noted artist in his 40s. He suffered two years in Terezin, like the others creating art amid deprivation and forced labor. In October 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz and executed.
As its name implies, Krasa’s Passacaglia & Fuga – written in the last year of his life – is predicated on baroque musical forms, but the composer imbues them with ardently romantic phrase-making. The lushness of Krasa’s chord structures, the oft-ecstatic nature of the works’ climaxes and the exultant, sheer exclamatory joy of its finale utterly defy the circumstances of Terezin. How is it possible for such beauty to blossom in such a place?
You can hear the sounds of youth and innocence in Dick Kattenburg’s Trio a cordes, the single-movement work written in 1938, when he was 19, and reviewed by a newspaper in December of that year – just a month after the violence of Kristallnacht in Germany foreshadowed worse things to come. The work’s flowering lyricism, radiant chords and unabashed emotionalism encapsulate optimism and hope. Yet the score, according to the “Silenced Voices” liner notes, is signed with a pseudonym, and its back cover carries a small portrait of Hitler, plus a soldier offering a salute.
Kattenburg eluded Hitler’s occupying forces in the Netherlands until 1944, when the composer was sent to the Westerbork concentration camp and then to Auschwitz, where he is believed to have died.
Other works on “Silenced Voices” similarly contrast high art with tragic outcomes. Sandor Kuti was a promising composer in Budapest when he wrote his Serenade for String Trio in 1934. Its singing character disarms the listener, its haunting last movement trailing off into the ether.
During the war, the composer was imprisoned in a labor camp, where he wrote his music on shards of paper. Before his death he penned these words, “My artistic credo: to serve truth, freedom and human dignity.” He “would have become one of Hungary’s greatest composers,” conductor Georg Solti, his classmate, once observed. Kuti died in late 1944 or ’45.
And Paul Hermann, a Hungarian cellist, wrote his Strijktrio in the 1920s, the work alternating between melodic writing and rhythmic agitation, the two sometimes intertwined. He eventually left Budapest for the Netherlands, and escaped the occupying Germans for France. In 1944 he was captured and taken to the Drancy camp near Paris. He later disappeared.
Perhaps as a gesture of hope, the album concludes with the world-premiere recording of Trio a cordes, Op. 1, a work rich in Hungarian folkloric elements. It was composed by Geza Frid, who fled Budapest for the Netherlands and lived there until his death in 1989.
Unlike Frid, however, the recording’s other composers — and so many others — perished, leaving decades of music unwritten.
Thanks to “Silenced Voices” and projects like it, they are silent no more.