A Survivor from Warsaw

As a narrator’s voice begins to overpower the orchestra’s eerie bursts of cacophony, I feel myself sucked out of my comfortable living room to the inhuman filth and violence of a Nazi concentration camp. I am listening to “A Survivor from Warsaw.”
“A Survivor from Warsaw” is a twelve-tone composition for narrator, men’s chorus, and orchestra, written in 1947. In addition to singing in a performance of the piece last year, I listened to it recorded by the Boston Symphony with Sherrill Milnes narrating. “A Survivor” is not performed very often, presumably because its twelve-tone writing makes it difficulty to sing and because it lacks the prestige of being part of the standard canon.
It is a shame to hear this piece so rarely, however, because the piece is both a beautiful response to the memory of the Holocaust and an opportunity to learn about the man that was Schoenberg. In fact, Michael Strasser calls this piece Schönberg’s “personal parable,” because it metaphorically illustrates his struggle to assert his Jewish identity in the face of persecution. Schönberg, who had planned to raise support from Americans for the Jews in anti-Semitic Germany, seems to have found his worst fears more than met in the Holocaust, a reality driven home by the loss of his brother and cousin (Strasser 58). Despite the importance he saw in his role as an artist, Schönberg wrote that he was willing to sacrifice his art to the Jewish cause, which suggests that this piece, an explicit tribute to those who died for their Jewish identity, might have held particular significance for him (57).
When I first performed “A Survivor,” I was unaware of most of this background information, but the combination of my knowledge of the Holocaust and Schönberg’s musical choices nonetheless had a powerful impact on me. For the most part, I prefer tonal to atonal (or, as Schönberg would say, pantonal) music, and I suspect it is Schoenberg’s treatment of the text that most draws me in, particularly his use of Sprechstimme and the chaotic melody of his ‘Shema Yisroel.’ Even before the narrator enters, however, Schönberg’s use of silence and cacophonous interjections of winds or percussion begin to set me on edge. The music lacks any sense of order, harmonically or rhythmically, so listeners do not know what to expect, just as the Holocaust victims, at the mercy of their captors, hardly knew to what further brutality they would be subjected. What I perceive to be chaotic, almost unnatural music, very vividly conveys the chaotic and unnatural realities of being in a Nazi concentration camp. When the narrator enters, Schönberg augments the text with duration and pitch cues, but refrains from using specific pitches, as he did when writing the Sprechstimme of Pierrot Lunaire. This manner of spoken performance caught my attention. It turns out that the notation in “A Survivor” is actually a later development of Schönberg’s concept of Sprechstimme. Through the rise of recording technology, performances of Pierrot Lunaire could be analyzed, and it was found that one of Schönberg’s favored Sprechstimme performers did not stay in pitch. According to Byron and Pasdzierny, “reproduction of pitch in Sprechstimme was not the main issue for Schoenberg,” and this accounts for Schönberg’s subsequent decision to notate Sprechstimme without actual pitches, but rather with note-heads a relative distance from a single staff line. For “A Survivor” in particular, Schönberg gave special instructions that the narrator’s part be less musical than any of his other compositions, specifying that “There must never be any singing, no real pitch must be recognizable.” I find I much prefer this type of Sprechstimme; although it does not mimic actual speech patterns, I find it heightens the emotional impact of the spoken text, while the sound of Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire distracts me from the text and sends chills down my spine. Sprechstimme only accounts for one section of “A Survivor,” though, and it is balanced by my favorite part of the work. When a male chorus singing the Hebrew prayer “Shema Yisroel replaces the narrator, Schönberg drastically shifts the structure of his piece; the last nineteen bars are dominated by a melody that (except for two repeated pitches) exactly follows a transposition of the tone row. The melody strongly contrasts with the first eighty bars of the piece, which are athematic, much like some of Schönberg’s pre-serialism atonal compositions. Despite the technical rigidity behind this melody, I feel its unpredictable leaps and driving rhythm to powerfully convey the drama of the prisoners’ situation. This forceful declamation may be the prisoners’ last words prior to execution, and it is this exact assertion of Jewish identity that Schönberg found so noble.
I suspect “A Survivor” is typically omitted from the canon for two reasons. One of these is it doesn’t seem to stand out as representative of his work in a particular way. It is a short work, and many of its interesting qualities – Sprechstimme, an athematic serialist section, and a serial melody – are explored more fully in others of Schönberg’s works. Its real value seems to come extramusically, from the deep way that Schönberg’s own life and the emotions spawned by a tragic war come together in this little piece. The other reason is that Schönberg, who initially gained attention for doing something avant-garde , had not been at the edge of avant-garde for a decade or so by the time that this piece was written. Thus, “A Survivor” was not groundbreaking in its time, nor groundbreaking in the output of its composer. I like “A Survivor from Warsaw” a lot, and I consider that a surprising and significant achievement for a twelve-tone piece, but I know this cannot be grounds for its inclusion in the canon. For that matter, there is plenty of music in the canon that, aesthetically, I care little about. With or without the designation of “standard canon music,” I will encourage others to listen to and think about this piece.