Survive

It takes but a few minutes, a blink of the eye in the history of music. And yet, Arnold Schönberg’s melodrama »A Survivor from Warsaw« is a central work within 20th-century music. The composer Luigi Nono even went so far as to call it »the aesthetic musical manifesto of our period.« The work for narrator, men’s chorus and orchestra conjures up a horrifying scene in the Warsaw Ghetto: The selection and dismissal of prisoners who are sentenced to death. Schönberg reconverted to Judaism in 1933, shortly before emigrating to the USA. Two years after the war had ended, he dealt with the Holocaust on a musical and literary level and formulated a warning addressed to all people of Jewish faith, »never to forget what has been done to us.« In the final chorus, the prisoners – in the face of death – break into sung prayer, the Shema Yisrael. Together with the designated Gürzenich-Kapellmeister Andrés Orozco-Estrada, the Gürzenich Orchestra welcomes the renowned French singer and actor Dominique Horwitz who will take on the role of the narrator.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifth symphony was put to paper during times that were similarly marked by misanthropic terror. The Russian composer’s relationship with the Soviet regime was ever-changing, oscillating between proximity and dissociation. Shostakovich was forced to withdraw his fourth symphony which he kept in a drawer until after Stalin’s death. At first sight, the following fifth symphony presents itself as musical gesture of reconciliation between the artist and Russian cultural policy which accepted nothing but Soviet classicism. But the overboardingly jubilant finale is so far outside the compositional structure that you can clearly see Shostakovich’s ambiguous sense of humour: This ending can be seen as a parody of the triumphant attitude autocracies are prone to, well disguised within symphonic opulence. Subtlety was often vital for Shostakovich.