Über Leben

It only takes a few minutes—a blink of an eye in the history of music.
And yet Arnold Schoenberg’s melodrama A Survivor from Warsaw is a central, seminal work of 20th-century music. Composer Luigi Nono even called it “the aesthetic musical manifesto of our era.” Narrator, male choir, and orchestra conjure a harrowing scene from the Warsaw Ghetto: the selection and sorting of prisoners condemned to death. Schoenberg, who reconverted to Judaism in 1933 shortly before his emigration to the United States, composed his literary and musical confrontation with the Holocaust two years after the war’s end—as a warning to all people of Jewish faith: “never to forget what has been done to us – niemals vergessen, was uns angetan wurde.”
In the final chorus, the Jewish declaration of faith Shema Yisrael is heard, sung by the prisoners even in the face of death.
The designated new Gürzenich Kapellmeister Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the Gürzenich Orchestra welcome the renowned French actor and singer Dominique Horwitz, who takes on the part of the narrator.

Also written in a time of inhumane terror is Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.
The relationship between the Russian composer and the Soviet regime constantly oscillated between closeness and distance. Shostakovich had to withdraw his Symphony No. 4, hiding it away in a drawer until after Stalin’s death. The subsequent Symphony No. 5 presents itself at first glance as a fully composed offer of reconciliation between artist and Russian cultural policy, which emphatically demanded Soviet classicism.
But at the latest, the finale of the symphony—with its exaggerated jubilation that breaks the compositional framework—reveals Shostakovich’s double-edged humor: this ending is a parody of the autocratic tendency toward triumphalism, well hidden within opulent symphonic writing.
Subtlety was, at times, a matter of survival for Shostakovich.