CULTURE & ARTS
New Jewish Music in Women's History Month
Honoring Rabbis and Women and Remembering the Holocaust
AUFBAU 65:7 April 2, 1999 p. 13
Copyright by Leonard Lehrman & AUFBAU
1425 words

The time between Purim and Pesach is traditionally known as Jewish Music Month, often coinciding, as this year, with the month of March, which has lately become known as Women's History Month.

[Temple Israel, the oldest Reform Synagogue in Miami, Florida]

In honor of both of these, Temple Israel, the oldest functioning Reform synagogue in Miami, Florida, presented "The Jewish Woman in Song," including short works in Yiddish, Ladino, Russian, and English, as part of its Friday evening service March 5.

For the occasion, which was broadcast on WTMI-FM, Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn gave a special sermon on the story of Zelophehad's Daughters, the first historical instance of a successful struggle for women's rights, documented in Numbers and Deuteronomy, and highlighted in one of the pieces sung on the program by soprano Helene Williams.

The service also included liturgical selections by Cantor Kenneth Jaffe (who performed as soloist together with Ms. Williams) and this writer, composed and premiered originally in honor of Rabbi Daniel Fogel of North Shore Synagogue in Syosset, NY, commissioned by Cantor Renee Coleson. The Hashkivenu, receiving its first performance in Hebrew, and the Mee Shebeyrakh, in its first performance in a synagogue, elicited an exceptionally warm response.

[L.I. Temple Choral Festival]

The latter's first choral performance in a synagogue took place 9 days later, in Oceanside, Long Island, at Temple Avodah's Long Island Temple Choral Festival. Here too, music written originally in honor of a rabbi was featured: Stuart Rauch's moving "Eloheinu... Retsei" in honor of Rabbi Philmore Berger.

Six cantors, four composers-in-residence, and five synagogue choirs were represented, with Lynbrook's Temple Emanu-El featuring three attractively accessible works in Hebrew and English by their composer-in-residence Linda Tsuruoka. [With Cantor Ronald Broden's departure from Avodah for Westchester next year, one hopes that the almost annual festival he founded nearly a decade ago will continue.

29th Scholars' Conference]

An even older tradition, in the form of the 29th Annual Scholars' Conference on The Holocaust and the Churches, took place in Uniondale [hosted by Nassau Community College at the Uniondale Marriott March 6-9. As your Music Critic, I was drawn to cover this from four distinct but inter-related angles].

The Hawthorne String Quartet, all members of the Boston Symphony, were brought to the conference by composer/impresario (and Westchester American Jewish Congress board member) Michael Shapiro, for a reflective concert together with slides presented by violist researcher Mark Ludwig. The inspiring porgram of chamber music by Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krasa, and Viktor Ullmann, all of whom worked at Theresienstadt and perished in the Holocaust, will be repeated Sunday evening April 25 at 7:30 at North Shore Synagogue. v Inge Auerbacher, one of the few child survivors of Theresienstadt, presented her ZDF-produced German-language film with English subtitles, Alle Juden Raus (All Jews Out), about her experiences growing up and revisiting Kippenheim, Jebenhausen, and Theresienstadt. The film has been shown widely in Germany, but deserves wider distribution in the United States.

[I Am A Star]

Four poems from her prize-winning memoir, I Am A Star (Simon & Schuster and now Puffin Books), have been musicalized as a cantata in Canada, and Tovah Feldshuh has recorded the entire work as a Talking book. Now the author would like to see the story made into a full-fledged musical for children.

A well-known Jewish composer in California expressed interest, but only if she would raise $25,000 for him. So she is seeking a composer on the East coast, who will perhaps want to work directly with the German translation of the book.

[The Lost Childhood]

Auerbacher had been referred to me by Dr. Yehuda Nir, who also spoke at the conference. Nir's searing memoir, The Lost Childhood (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), has been translated into several languages, but has yet to appear in German, for an audience that despite resistance is the one most in need of reading it. It is an incredible but true, objective account of his survival by the thinnest of threads, among the Russians, the Germans, and the Poles.

Included are harrowing scenes depicting the threat of exposure of one's Jewishness because of the irreversibility of circumcision, which put one in mind of Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy or Agnieszka Holland's film Europa, Europa. There is also humor in it, mostly \of a sexual nature, more bitter and less childlike than, for example, the film Life Is Beautiful, which tends to universalize and forgive. Nir is totally unforgiving.

The work is being turned into both a screenplay and an opera libretto-- composer Janice Hamer is collaborating with her cousin, the poet Mary Azrael, on the latter. An idea of what their collaboration might be like could be heard at St. Peter's Church March 13 in a concert of eight New York premieres performed by the chorus I Cantori di New York, conducted by Mark Shapiro.

[The mellow, witty "Mother Goose Rhymes" of David Vayo and Bruce Stark's "Wind Song" and "Rain Song" were most lovingly presented; Scott Robinson's "The Stolen Child" and two settings by Jan Krzywicki came across as fussy in their complexity; Richard Busch's humorous "Dangerous Trains, or Cantata Peligrosa," in Spanish, provided a delightful slam-bang ending.]

The Hamer-Azrael piece, "On Paper Bridges," mixing Yiddish (of Moishe Leyb Halpern and Kodya Molodowska) and Engliksh, would have been more effective had the two spoken interludes between the three song movements not been omitted. Technically the singers' reach seemed to have exceeded their grasp of this folklore-inspired but difficult a cappella piece, but the aleatoric birdlike ending (reminiscent of Stockhausen's "Gesang der Juenglinge") was effective nonetheless.

[Gottfried Wagner

The fourth and final reason for my covering the conference was] Gottfried Wagner, Richard Wagner's 51-year-old great-grandson now living in self-imposed Italian exile, who intends to stage the Nir-Azrael-Hamer opera, [and who] gave the conference's keynote speech.

[I had heard so much about him on our 1996 and 1998 visits to Bayreuth, not so much from his father Wolfgang, whom I interviewed for Aufbau, as from archivists and scholars who disputed his well-known accusation of continued anti-Semitism there.]

His visit to New York gave me the chance to meet him and to question him [alone for a solid hour] on what hecalls "the philosemitic pose" and "the kosherring of [Richard] Wagner." Most of the answers [to my inquiries, he assured me,] can be found in his book, Wer nicht mit den Woelfen heult, scheduled to appear in English under the title The Twilight of the Wagners (St. Martin's Press) later this spring. [Until then, however, we may ponder at least abstractly some of the important points he made:

The films he discovered in his father's car in 1963 of Hitler at Bayreuth he is now "convinced" have been at least partially "destroyed," as part of what he calls "a family tradition of falsification": his grandmother Cosima, for example, burned 78 letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, and many from Mathilde Wesendonk (Richard Wagner's earlier lover and muse).]

Had he, Gottfried, only "shut up" about questions of the personal responsibility of the Wagner family re the Holocaust and its victims, then today he would probably be his father's second-in-command and successor. [Because he did not, especially in his January 1990 trip to Israel right after the Wende, his father has cut him off, even having his secretary send back a photo of Gottfried's adopted son.]

In Gottfried's place, the conductor Daniel Barenboim appears ready to assume command at Bayreuth when Wolfgang retires or dies. Does this make him, or James Levine, who has also conducted at Bayreuth, an "alibi Jew"? To the extent that Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism and anti-feminism are not confronted but swept under the rug, yes, in Gottfried's estimation.

Gottfried's own staging of Lohengrin at Passau, as a portrait of a society acceding unquestioningly to a disastrous dictatorship, was loudly booed. So how should Wagner be staged today, in his opinion? "We have to discuss out the future.... I think I'd like to take an interval of about ten years and do only contemporary operas," beginning with the Brecht-Weill Mahagonny in Portugal next season. And would he ever consider going back to the land of his birth? "When I'm in my eighties, one day, the Germans might invite me...." Maybe even back to Bayreuth...?

To quote Gottfried himself, as he works diligently with Holocaust survivors at coming to terms with the past and the future: "Even the longest road through darkness eventually leads to light."



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