Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation by Amy Lynn Wlodarski (review)

Amy Lynn Wlodarski’s slim volume is a welcome addition to the relatively small number of books devoted exclusively to music related to the Holocaust. The book comprises an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. The chapters discuss Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1948) and Theodor Adorno’s writings concerning it; Hanns Eisler’s score for the film Nuit et Brouillard (1956); Judische Chronik (1961), composed jointly by Boris Blacher, Paul Dessau, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Hans Werner Henze, and Rudolf Wagner-Régeny; and Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988). While the epilogue presents itself initially as a summation it is, in fact, primarily concerned with discussion of the relatively new opera Pnima … ins Innere (2000) by Chaya Czernowin, an Israeli composer and Harvard professor who has become highly regarded by intellectuals in the north-eastern United States.

Essentially, Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation is Wlodarski’s attempt to establish criteria—or, at least, to present options—for judging Holocaust-related music by exploring ‘aesthetics … interpretive contexts of history … and ethical and political intents’ inherent in Adorno’s famous comment that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (p. 5). To this end she enlists the aid of a large number of distinguished scholars and philosophers (including Adorno), and utilizes comments or writings of the composers as well. Her own musical analyses are articulate and often penetrating.

The emphasis placed on discussion of the critical reception of each work clearly indicates that the author views reaction by audiences and, especially, professional critics, philosophers, and musicologists as indicative of the appropriateness of a composition to its subject matter. An underlying issue for Wlodarski, in fact, is the idea of appropriateness and how to define it. But, the Holocaust aside, appropriateness is often an elusive element in Art. Perception is arguably more important than intent; in any event, it is difficult—if not impossible—for critics, philosophers, and musicologists to get inside a composer’s head. It is easy to understand Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s use in Jüdische Chronik of a preexisting work because the explanation is obvious: his own statements reveal that the earlier work was composed as a reaction to his first sighting of concentration-camp survivors in 1945 (pp. 104–5). But, as Wlodarski points out, it is not so easy to explain—in critical, philosophical, or musicological terms—why Hanns Eisler quoted an earlier, unrelated composition in Nuit et Brouillard since the composer never commented on it (p. 168). And the cynical view of many musicians and composers, especially theatrical composers, that there are only two kinds of music (ballade and up-tempo), neither having any moral dimension, has been an issue throughout history: Hassler’s ‘My Peace of Mind is Shattered by a Tender Maiden’s Charms’ became the Passion Chorale; Handel adapted one of his early Marian motets for use as a seduction aria in Agrippina; Haydn quoted just enough of Die Schöpfung’s third-act love duet in his next-to-last mass to raise the ire of Empress MariaTheresa; during the 1970s congregations in California sang the Doxology to the tune of ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ from Damn Yankees; and so on. There are such examples from the Holocaust, too: the music of Goldfadn’s famous lullaby ‘Raisins and Almonds’ was fitted out with new text describing the Nazis’ liquidation of a Yeshiva in Kovno; Herman Kruk, in Vilna, wrote that he ‘rebelled against the idea of theater [and music] in the ghetto’ (in Benjamin Harshav (ed.), The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania (New Haven, 2003)); while Tamara Lazerson, in Kovno, confided in her diary that ‘although some people angrily object to what we are doing, they are wrong. A lot of people are composing something in the ghetto’ (Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto (Washington, DC, 1997), 172).

Even when a composer’s intent is clear, musicologists can be baffled, often because...