Listening for the Holocaust in Polish/Jewish Musical Culture
Chair(s): Lisa C Vest (University of Southern California)
Discussant(s): Daniel Elphick (Royal Holloway University)
This panel explores the sonic resonances of the Holocaust in Poland and in Polish/Jewish musical culture, from the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940 through the 1960s. We respond to two major trends in recent musicological and historical inquiry. Within musicology, there has been a groundswell of interest in music’s ability to bear witness to, and comment upon, the atrocities of the Nazi era, as demonstrated by scholars such as Amy Wlodarski and Joy Calico, among many others. Traditionally, this research has focused on musicians whose significance is well-established in the musicological canon and, especially on German-speaking modernist icons, many of whom fled Europe prior to World War II. On the other hand, historians have increasingly highlighted Eastern Europe as the geographic center of the Holocaust—where most of its victims lived and died—and thus they have directed attention to the large, diverse communities of Jews who inhabited this region. While these historical studies have reconstructed the multitudinous responses to persecution among Jewish communities in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and the Baltic states, they have had less to say about the central role that music played in Jewish cultural life, in favor of a focus on language, literature, film, and political culture.
What is entailed in reorienting musicological studies of the Holocaust to focus on Eastern Europe? In what ways did the prewar musical culture of the region shape responses to the Holocaust? How do we make sense of survivor biographies that unfolded against the backdrop not only of anti-Jewish persecution, but also overlapped with the establishment of communist rule in Eastern Europe? We consider these and related questions by focusing on three moments in which concert music solidified paradigms of response to atrocity in Poland: Performances by Jews of (Germanic) classical repertoire in the Warsaw Ghetto, the presence and absence of Roman Palester’s Jewish background in his life writings, and Mieczysław Weinberg’s compositional recollections of the Polish Jewish past from the Soviet Union during the 1960s. Together, these papers demonstrate that concert music was a central, public forum for Jews in Eastern Europe during and after the Holocaust.
Presentations of the Symposium
“Mozart was Never More Beautiful”: The Politics of the Classical Canon in the Warsaw Ghetto
Jules Riegel
Harvard University
This paper examines classical music in the Warsaw Ghetto, focusing on the ghetto’s Jewish Symphony Orchestra. This ensemble, which provided employment and a lifeline to many impoverished Jewish musicians, performed numerous concerts in the ghetto between November 1940 and April 1942. While no recordings and hardly any sheet music survived the ghetto’s destruction, a wide range of mostly textual sources offer insight into the ghetto’s musical worlds, including concert reviews in Gazeta Żydowska, occupied Poland’s only legal Jewish newspaper; ghetto residents’ diaries and memoirs; and oral histories with survivors. Close reading of these sources reveals how music took on serious political purpose within the ghetto’s walls. In her book The Music Libel against the Jews, Ruth HaCohen traces the genealogy of the antisemitic accusation that Jews are mere producers of noise and are incapable of creating true aesthetic beauty in music. Building on her work, this paper demonstrates how Eastern European Jews sought to refute this accusation, even amidst the Holocaust, through strenuous efforts to promote what they considered to be sophisticated and aesthetically beautiful programming.
A small but significant coterie of ghetto residents, facing hunger, disease, and material privation, dedicated extraordinary effort to ensuring the ghetto had not just mere musical entertainment, but (in their eyes) “serious” and “morally uplifting” music. Their definition of “good” music encompassed both the choice of repertoire—with Beethoven as the most frequently performed composer—and the quality of performances. These activists’ work reveals a previously unexamined facet of musical life during the Holocaust. While music in the ghettos and camps has been understood as a way to maintain humanity in the face of Nazi violence, or a form of spiritual resistance, for some advocates of classical music in the Warsaw Ghetto, it was an intensified form of a long-term struggle in the European Jewish world to use artistic expression in the service of social, moral, and spiritual improvement. Examining the ghetto’s Jewish Symphony Orchestra reveals how music and its aesthetics became part of this broader decades-long struggle to assert Jewish belonging in the European cultural canon.
Roman Palester, Jewish Aid, and the Aporias of the Holocaust
Mackenzie Pierce
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
This paper analyzes the historiographical omissions surrounding the composer Roman Palester’s Jewish background and the survival of his family during the Holocaust. The dominant narrative of Palester’s music and career, one based in his own life-writings and endorsed by musicologists, describes the period of WWII as one of aesthetic and musical transformation: Not only was he among the most productive composers at this time in Poland, but he also spearheaded a major shift in Polish musical aesthetics, away from neoclassicism and toward an expressive, monumental romanticism that would dominate Polish concert music for the next decade.
Drawing on rarely considered sources such as oral history interviews, unpublished letters, and memoirs, I create a second, contrasting narrative of his life, one that has yet to receive scholarly attention. Placing Palester within the context of his familial relations, I uncover how his family sought to mask their Jewish background and hid less fortunate Jews in their apartment throughout the war. As conditions worsened, they joined Żegota, an underground resistance movement that sought to save Jewish escapees of the ghetto, and the Palesters were particularly active in hiding Jewish children. I thereby reconstruct Palester’s relations with networks of Jewish survival and activism that have usually been treated as a world apart from that inhabited by Polish-speaking composers.
By juxtaposing these two narratives, I consider how absences within the historical record were constructed by composers themselves, in ways that obscured their own entanglements with Jewish identities and strategies of survival. Such avoidances, I suggest, were particularly common in early postwar Poland, during a period of continued anti-Jewish violence and nationalist reconstruction, in which ideas of Polish nationhood were used to legitimize communist rule and to underscore the significance of concert music to the state. Thus, I argue that accounting for the sonic aftermaths of the Holocaust in Poland requires scholars to broaden their conceptualization of what such responses might entail. Instead of focusing primarily on works whose commemorative function is clearly announced, scholars must also bring to light Polish-Jewish entanglements shrouded in the margins of official musical culture.
Musical Recollections of the Polish Past in Mieczysław Weinberg’s Symphony No. 8, Polish Flowers
Nicolette van den Bogerd
Indiana University, Bloomington
In 1964 the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg composed his Symphony No. 8, which he gave the subtitle Kwiaty polskie (Polish Flowers). Writing from exile in Moscow, Weinberg employed this composition to remember the past in his native Poland. Weinberg had not been to Poland since 1939, when he escaped the country on foot during Hitler’s invasion, but he remained connected to the land where almost his entire family was murdered during the Holocaust. In this composition, Weinberg extracted, arranged, and then reconstructed texts from the Polish-Jewish poet and fellow exile Julian Tuwim (1894-1953) to create a chronological rendition of events that occurred in prewar, wartime, and postwar Poland. The poet’s Kwiaty polskie (1940-1944) provided the lion share of the text as well as the subtitle. To frame the tale, Weinberg developed a score that relies on musical topics and quotations from both Polish and Jewish sources, as well as a sophisticated web of recurring leitmotivs.
Drawing on Weinberg’s published interviews and newly discovered archival material, this paper situates Symphony No. 8 within its biographical context to reveal an intimate musical construction of memory. Musicologists have studied this composition from a Soviet perspective, but they have paid limited attention to the significance of the Polish text and the influence of Weinberg’s cultural ties to his homeland. Polish literature scholars have demonstrated that the fragmentary texts of Tuwim’s Kwiaty polskie represent a form of enacted poetic remembering. Building on this work, I analyze the texts that Weinberg adapted from Tuwim, showing how he transformed them into individual musical snapshots of memory that traverse temporal spaces, moving from an idyllic primordial past to more recent moments reflecting Polish and Jewish suffering. I demonstrate that Weinberg chose poetry that reflected several decades of Tuwim’s evolving aesthetics to construct this narrative. I argue that Weinberg’s composition is driven by recollection rather than storytelling. Unlike Tuwim’s original work, Weinberg’s snapshots are held together by leitmotivs that offer listeners recognizable aural associations between the different temporal spaces and narrative unity. In doing so Weinberg’s musical memories fundamentally changed the goals and meanings of Tuwim’s original texts.
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