Maurice Ravel, Viktor Ullmann, Hugo Weisgall, Simon Laks

Elegy for the Jewish Villages

Nostalgia, humor, mourning, the shoemaker's wisdom and the rabbi's mysticism - Yiddish poetry captures the spirit of the sunken world of Jewish life in the shtetls. These settlements in Eastern Europe were repeatedly devastated by pogroms and ultimately completely eradicated during the Shoah. Time and again, composers have drawn inspiration from the spiritual and emotional cosmos of this simple - and yet so haunting - lyricism. The universal language of music has thus transported a part of the culture that gave birth to it and saved it from being forgotten.When Maurice Ravel composed his songs with Yiddish and Aramaic lyrics in 1910 and 1914, this poetry inspired him to explore an 'exotic' foreign culture - yet one which was very much alive and part of European culture as well. In this respect, it was no different than the Greek, Italian, and Spanish folk poetry that he covered along with Yiddish verse in his cycle of Chants populaires. Viktor Ullmann, a student of Arnold Schoenberg's, and with Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, and Gideon Klein, prominent representatives of the Czech avant-garde in the generation following Janácek, composed his Three Yiddish Songs in 1944 in Theresienstadt, shortly before being deported to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chambers. They are an anthroposophist's commitment to Jewish culture in the face of its destruction. Simon Laks, perhaps the most important Polish song composer of his generation, survived Auschwitz as a member and later director of the men's orchestra in Birkenau. His Eight Jewish Folk Songs as well as the Elegy for the Jewish Villages were composed after the war in remembrance of a devastated culture. Hugo Weisgall, American composer of Czech-Jewish descent, composed his Seven Popular Songs from the Yiddish from a completely different perspective: that of the successful second-generation Jewish composer in the US with the identity of an American artist. In this cycle, Weisgall succeeded in amalgamating the melodic and linguistic simplicity of the Yiddish melodies with a complex, avant-garde tonal language.