Editor's Note: Part of Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music. Taking a different theme for each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces followed by one more substantial work. Occasionally, playlist choices are not on YouTube, so alternatives are provided here.
To listen to the playlist for this post, follow these links to Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube.
On 27th January 1945, the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. Nobody could have had any illusions about Nazi anti-semitism because its policies had been explicit about it long before attaining power in 1933. But few could ever have conceived of the extent of the Nazis' determination, sophistication, and savagery until the reality began to be laid bare. This date was therefore designated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day at a meeting of 46 governments in Stockholm in 2000.
In 1933, roughly nine million Jewish people living in Europe and Eurasia, of whom the largest populations were:
1 million in Romania
1 million in central Europe
2.5 million in the USSR
3 million in Poland.
By 1945, two out of every three were dead. By 1950, Poland’s Jewish community numbered just 45,000.
What sometimes gets forgotten amid the myriad horrors of the Shoah (Hebrew for Holocaust) is the systematic obliteration of entire cultures. Shtetls (Yiddish for 'small towns') with predominantly, or entirely, Jewish populations were scattered across the east. In a world in which pogroms might flare up and result in massacres, these communities provided relative security out of which all kinds of cultural expression might flourish. Core to them was often a rich musical life, with the violin at its core. This playlist seeks to commemorate that heritage.
1. Ukrainian Dances (arr. by Kosmos)
Anon (trad. folk)
Kosmos Ensemble
Nothing evokes shtetl life quite like a klezmer band. These were made up of folk musicians on various stringed instruments plus an accordion or two, as well as some percussion or whatever else was to hand. They fulfilled a vital social function as well as obviously providing fun and entertainment. So they might take part in weddings and other festivities, but also (as this track brilliantly illustrates) lead the community in exuberant and even riotous dancing.
You can hear the call to the floor in the early bars with some gathering chords, followed by a lilting rhythm (for the first minute or so) that lulls everyone into a false sense of security! And then everything takes off, going at quite the lick. This track is a lot shorter than it would have been in real life, so it can only give a flavor. But the sense of fun is infectious.
[Full disclosure, Kosmos Ensemble’s violist and sometime violinist is my 2nd cousin, Meg Hamilton!]
2. Kol Nidrei (Adagio for Cello, Op. 47, 1880)
Max Bruch (1838-1920, German)
Alisa Weilerstein (cello), Staatskapelle Berlin, Daniel Barenboim (cond.)
Max Bruch was a brilliant all-rounder: a celebrated violinist and conductor as well as composer (he started writing music at only age nine!). A contemporary of the great Johannes Brahms (in fact only 5 years his junior), he shares some musical similarities with him. His 1st Violin Concerto (from 1866) is one of his most beloved works and is still regularly performed: it’s definitely worth your time.
Kol Nidrei is another masterpiece. In Aramaic, the title means ‘All vows’, and is taken from the evening liturgy for the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement (the Jewish ‘day’ starts at sunset). As an instrumental composition, we obviously hear no words. But Bruch’s choice of cello as soloist is deliberate; it’s often regarded as the instrument closest in tone and heart to the human voice. Kol Nidrei has two sections, each constructed around what would have been a familiar Hebrew melody. In the first, the cello is like the synagogue cantor leading the service with the accompaniment following its lead in response. The second develops the melody from a popular setting of one of Lord Byron’s Hebrew melodies.
It is a deeply affecting piece, successfully evoking so many different, even conflicting emotions. Yet there is a grim irony to its subsequent history. Bruch was a Protestant and not Jewish. But because of this piece in particular, which seemed to evoke the Jewish soul so effectively, Bruch was written off by Nazis and other anti-semitic extremists as ‘obviously’ Jewish. As a result, Bruch’s work was largely forgotten in German-speaking regions in the twentieth century, just like that of his Jewish contemporaries.
3. To Life (L’Chaim): from Fiddler on the Roof (1964)
Jerry Bock, music (1928-2010, US); Sheldon Harnick, book (1924-2023, US)
Chaim Topol (as Tevye), Motion Picture Orchestra, John Williams (cond.)
Now for a very different mood! The 60s musical Fiddler on the Roof is a classic of shtetl life (set in the fictitious Anatevka) amid great poverty and hardship. Tevye is a milkman trying to be faithful to God while eking out a living and ensuring his five daughters marry well. But his personal struggles are set against the backdrop of Tsarist Russia in around 1900. The threat of eviction or pogroms is all too real; in fact, the show ends with Anatevka’s Jewish residents given three days to evacuate. The family will be split up, with some leaving for Poland, some for the USA, while others have been exiled to Siberia.
This number comes early in the 1st Act. Tevye has agreed that Lazar, a wealthy butcher recently widowed, may take his oldest daughter’s hand. They have met in the local bar and everyone is soon joining in the celebration with this exuberant toast L’Chaim - To Life! The mood is so contagious that some Russians who happen also to be drinking even join in the fun. At that point, the music reflects their Slavic cultural background with balalaikas and cossack dances. The track concludes with a glorious convergence of the two cultures.
Some criticized this element, and indeed the whole musical, as rather rosy-tinted. The novelist Joseph Roth even described it all as ‘shtetl kitsch’. Only others more qualified than I can evaluate that. What is clear, though, is that this music captures something wonderful about the human, and particularly Jewish, ability to find joy and flourishing even in the darkest of circumstances.
4. Scenes from Jewish Life: I. Prayer (1925)
Ernst Bloch (1880-1959, Swiss/American)
Paul Marleyn (cello), John Lenehan (piano)
Once again, a cello stands in for the human voice, in this arrangement accompanied by the piano (although Bloch did write an orchestral version). Like Bruch, Ernst Bloch demonstrated remarkable musical talent at an early age, learning the violin and composing from the age of 9. But unlike Bruch, he actually was born to Jewish parents, in his case in Geneva. He emigrated to the USA during the First World War and naturalized in the 1920s. While many of his works followed the conventions of abstract music (such as string quartets, orchestral works and solo pieces), he often wrote music with explicitly Jewish themes.
His Scenes from Jewish Life is a set of three short pieces written while on holiday in New Mexico: Prayer, Supplication and Jewish Song. This, the first, uses the kinds of harmonies and musical structures common in both Jewish and some Arabic music (for music geeks, these are known as modes – variants of musical scales – such as the ‘phrygian dominant’ mode!). Even if you don’t know the technical jargon, though, these modes are instantly recognizable and immediately transport us into a different world. Prayer’s opening melody feels improvised at first, much like someone finding their way in prayer. The accompaniment then echoes the same lines. This is followed by a second theme (at around 1:30), again led by the cello. It initially feels a little less lyrical perhaps, more fragmented. But the combination of the two themes is a miniature masterpiece of concision. It is haunting, searching, probing; just as so many of our prayers can be.
5. Main theme from Schindler's List (1993)
John Williams (1932- , American)
Itzhak Perlman (violin), Boston Symphony Orchestra, John Williams (cond.)
The Oscar-winning score for Schindler’s List is arguably one of Williams’ greatest achievements. He is, of course, a brilliant melodist who has created some of the most iconic themes of late twentieth century cinema. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the greatest orchestral music ever written and has plundered the best of them to give his work color and atmosphere.
But there is something so uniquely affecting about this track (even if one hasn’t seen the film, I suspect). It seems to gather the agony of a whole people in the solo violin’s melody – it just had to be a violin; no other instrument could have had the same depths of cultural resonance – evoking prayers and tears, pain and fear, isolation and lostness all at the same time. It is a single voice of grief, not just for the six million slaughtered in the Shoah, but for an entire way of life and culture now gone forever.
[The eagle-eyed will have noticed this is not John Williams’ first appearance on the list: he orchestrated and conducted the score for the Fiddler on the Roof movie. Plus Itzhak Perlman will forever be associated with the score and was ideally suited to premiere it: he was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 to Polish Jewish parents who had thankfully emigrated there in the 1930s.]
Symphony No 13, 'Babi Yar' (Op. 113, 1962)
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906-1975, USSR) (1906-1975, USSR)
Alexey Tikhomirov (bass), Chicago Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Riccardo Muti (cond.)
Admittedly, Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony is a Leviathan. Apart from the 2nd (taking ‘only’ nine minutes), each movement lasts roughly a quarter of an hour. So many will not be able to manage the whole thing in one sitting (though the rewards for trying are great!). Written during the so-called ‘Khrushchev Thaw’ when criticisms of the former Stalinist era were actively, albeit briefly, encouraged, this symphony nevertheless demonstrates the composer’s considerable moral courage.
Babyn Yar (Babi Yar in Russian) is a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv in Ukraine. During the almost three, terrifying years of Ukraine’s Nazi occupation (between 1941 and 1944), it was drenched in blood, primarily of executed Jewish Ukrainians but of others as well (such as Romanies or resistance fighters). Thousands were rounded up and forced to march along one of the city’s grand boulevards to the ravine. On arrival, they were ordered to strip and then line up on the ridge, where they were slaughtered by machine gun fire. It is estimated that in the first two days alone, over 33,000 people died there, joined in the following months by another 70,000. It was the first mass killing of the Shoah. When the Soviets recaptured the city in 1943, they investigated the horrors of Babyn Yar, providing evidence that would be presented at the Nuremberg war trials of 1946.
But for years under communist rule, nothing identified the site of such an atrocity. This infuriated a young Russian man of letters, Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017), enough to spur him to write an extended poem (published in 1961) despite not being Jewish himself. It begins very simply:
No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.
I am afraid.
Today I am as old in years
as all the Jewish people.
Now I seem to be
a Jew.
Here I plod through ancient Egypt.
Here I perish crucified on the cross,
and to this day I bear the scars of nails.
Yevtushenko excoriates the Nazi regime for its crimes, but courageously, then criticizes the USSR for its own dark record of anti-semitism. Shostakovich was so moved by the poem on its publication that he immediately started to set it to music. He later surprised the young poet by phoning him out of the blue for permission to do so (even though he’d already finished one movement!). He had no idea that the great composer even knew about him. But poet and composer shared a deep humanity as well as a lifelong loathing of anti-semitism.
Each of the symphony’s five movements is a setting of a different poem by Yevtushnko. This essay gives more information about each movement. It is a stunning declaration of resistance to human evil and ignored injustices.
I have visited Babyn Yar a couple of times and looked along what remains of the ravine (a huge landslide completely changed the landscape in 1961). A memorial does stand there now. But there was something particularly obnoxious about the way it became one of the earliest targets (because of the adjacent TV tower) of Russia’s February 2022 invasion, supposedly to rid Ukraine of ‘Nazis’. The gruesome irony was not lost on Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as several of the friends I spoke to afterwards.
Mark Meynell is a writer, pastor and teacher based in the UK and he's been involved with the Rabbit Room since 2017. He has been involved in cross-cultural training for the last 25 years and is passionate about integrating life, theology and the arts. He blogs at markmeynell.net.
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