Heartfelt music of the condemned
BEAUTY CAN come in strange packages, but who would have thought that the imposing-looking CD with a Star of David made out of barbed wire on the cover - "Terezin / Theresienstadt" - would contain some of the most heart-rending classical music of the 20th century?
Spearheaded by the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, the Deutsche Grammophon CD is a compilation of music by composers who had been herded into the Czechoslovakian concentration camp in order to show how well the Nazis were treating Jews. This ruse fooled some, notably the International Red Cross, but only about 19,000 of the 150,000 or so survived. Most were deported to Auschwitz once they had survived their propaganda purpose.
The composers - among them Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, and Hans Krasa - had been banned by the Germans, not only for being Jews, but in some cases for avant-garde and left-leaning tendencies, though there's little of the avant-garde in the music here.
Take the opening "I Wander Through Theresienstadt" by Ilse Weber. If you didn't know better you'd think it was a simple yearning for, perhaps, a lost love. And indeed there is a yearning: "I stand there on the bridge / and look down into the valley: / I'd like so much to go farther, / I'd like so much to go home."
Von Otter doesn't try to overpower these songs; she knows that some reserve makes them simultaneously heartbreaking and terrifying. You don't need to know that Weber went to the gas chamber singing "Lullaby" to children to be overwhelmed by her spirit and her art.
Ullmann's melodic "Birch Tree" would be moving under any circumstances: "Quietly, quietly my pale little birch tree / shakes its curly green head and endlessly prays; / each and every leaf murmurs a quiet prayer / Please, little birch, pray for me too."
Others, like Karel Svenk, look for humor, irony, and love in their cabaret songs, knowing full well what their captors have in store for them.
There are certainly hints of dissonance, particularly in the "Three Songs" by Krasa (of "Brundibar" fame) and Haas's "Four Songs on Chinese Poetry." For the most part, though, this music lives in a different sphere from the harshness of 20th-century classical music. And the songs here don't avoid what's happening around them. As Ullmann's narrator sings in another song, "I needs must cry aloud in pain the whole night through."
Still, most of the music here eschews the iciness and abstraction of atonality for a more emotional and concrete musical language. All of which raises several questions, beginning with what the course of 20th-century music would have been if these composers had survived. As Alex Ross points out in his comprehensive "The Rest Is Noise," "Hitler wiped out entire schools of composition along with the millions of individual deaths."
Atonality arose as an assault on bourgeois sensibilities, but listening to "Terezin / Theresienstadt," (the former is the Czech name, the latter is German) you can't help but wonder if, in the long run, atonality wasn't the language of middle-class intellectuals and existential despair while the supposedly more conservative tonal composers were the ones more directly addressing the horrors of the century.
Years ago the South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim told me that when he was living in New York in the '60s he and his colleagues were able to play music of great complexity - which nobody wanted to hear. It wasn't really until his music intersected with the antiapartheid movement back home that he began writing the gorgeous melodies he's famous for today. And that doesn't mean that the music is all joyful. "The Wedding," though beautiful, is about a South African couple separated for years before eventually reconciling.
There would, of course, be few such reconciliations for the walking wounded in "Terezin / Therseienstadt." But listening to von Otter and her fellow musicians - Christian Gerhaher, Bengt Forsberg, and Daniel Hope - the heart breaks at what you know was to come for these composers. But at least the heart is open.
Ed Siegel, former theater and television critic for the Globe, is a freelance writer. 