Holzmair and Godin perform songs from Theresienstadt to honor the memory of Holocaust victims; the creative spirit survives in words and music
Baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and pianist Olivier Godin performed a collage of works composed in the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt this past Monday night at the Austrian Embassy presented by the Austrian Cultural Forum. The general atmosphere of the audience was somber and reverent, while the music expressed the gamut of emotions from despair, to nostalgic joy, to sarcastic celebration. The concert was structured like a lecture recital, with Holzmair giving relevant historical context between sets. I really appreciated how much research and care went into the presentation of this program, however I would have loved to hear more about Holzmair and Godin’s personal connection to the music. Classical musicians spend so much time internalizing and polishing a performance, but often forget to bring the audience along on that journey.
The first set of songs was composed by Ilse Weber, a Czech composer and author who served as a children’s nurse at Theresienstadt where she lived from 1942-1944 with her husband and son before they were deported to Auschwitz. Weber often set her own original texts to music and accompanied herself on guitar. Godin took full advantage of the venue’s Bösendorfer piano, maintaining a singing tone throughout and a pearlescent quality in Weber’s guitar-like arpeggiated accompanimental textures. Holzmair brought tasteful amounts of variation in phrasing to highlight Weber’s strophic nod to Schubert and Brahms in “Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt” (I wander through Theresienstadt). Godin’s sensitivity to shifting harmonic color palettes thrived in the next set by Pavel Haas, a Czech composer who studied with Leoš Janáček before he was deported to Theresienstadt in 1941. The musical language of Haas in excerpts from the Four Songs on Chinese Poems was most compelling, a post-serialist return to the folk idiom with modality more akin to Debussy than Bartók. Later in the program, we heard “Lullaby” from composer Gideon Klein, who had befriended Haas in Terezín and was instrumental in pulling him out of deep depression and encouraging him to continue writing.
The cast of Brundibár at Theresienstadt.
The selections from Five Songs, op. 4 by Hans Krása were my favorite new musical discovery on this program. The influence of the Second Viennese School was immediately apparent, yet Krása was successful in creating space for his own artistic voice whilst honoring that musical lineage. After these songs, the tone of the concert began to shift from more serious works to jazz-influenced cabaret. Cabaret music was extremely on trend at the time and was popular at Theresienstadt as an approved form of entertainment for the Jewish detainees. In fact, Krása‘s opera Brundibár was the final creative project supported by Nazi propagandists, performed 55 times at Theresienstadt before 18,000 Jewish prisoners were transported to be murdered at Auschwitz. It seems as though the historical importance of Brundibár overshadows Krása‘s smaller-scale works like the three songs we had the rare opportunity to hear on Monday night. Godin drew attention to Krása‘s orchestral treatment of the keyboard, using the full range of the instrument and accentuating mercurial changes in tonality with a variety of pedaling techniques. This created an exquisite bed of sonority for Holzmair’s experimentation with transparent vocal timbres. Holzmair’s incorporation of Sprechstimme, or “speech-voice” style, was both appropriate and enabled the audience to imagine the intimacy of the private and sometimes clandestine musical salons in the corners of Theresienstadt.
It’s possible that I missed Holzmair’s full exposition to the song “Sie suchen einander” (They seek one another), on text by Theresienstadt detainee Kopper (first name unknown). The music is curiously pulled from the final song “Die alten, bösen Lieder” from Robert Schumann’s 1840 song cycle Dichterliebe. The music, not copied verbatim from the original, sounded as though an extremely competent musician had sat down at the piano and tried to play the famous Schumann Lied from memory. Unlike the original Heinrich Heine (a Jewish poet) setting, this text by Kopper describes a church in the town square in Terezín where prisoners were tortured and interrogated. The final selection, a setting of text by Jewish political scholar Leo Strauss, was a painfully wistful cabaret number in which the narrator describes the deceptive means by which he was lured to Theresienstadt (like many others were) and separated from his romantic partner. Holzmair transported the audience to the Viennese countryside with his otherworldly floating high notes. As I write this review and struggle to uncover much detail about some of these rarely-performed works, I am reminded of the gift Holzmair and Godin have given us with such an expert rendering of this beautiful music born from the most unfathomable of human circumstances. I’d urge anyone interested to catch one of their concerts in the coming months, as they’ll be touring this program through many major US cities.
