“and all of a sudden, in the middle of it, they began singing …”: Languages and Commemoration in Arnold Schoenberg’s Cantata A Survivor from Warsaw (Op. 46)

Summary

Arnold Schoenberg’S A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46, is a twelve-tone cantata for male narrator, male chorus, and orchestra, written in August 1947. The narrator recounts, in Sprechgesang, how, one day during an early morning reveille in an unnamed camp, the Nazi guards started viciously beating the Jews, killing many of them. Those surviving are ordered to repeat the roll call, and suddenly start singing the Jewish prayer Shema Yisroel. One of the most striking elements of the cantata is the fact that its libretto uses three languages: English, German, and Hebrew. The narrator tells his tale in English, citing Nazi commands in German, and the prayer is sung in Hebrew by the chorus; this tripartite linguistic organization is mirrored by the music, which is characterized by tripartite parallelisms. The push and shove between English and German in the narrative section of the cantata and the use of Hebrew in the Shema raise questions about the relationship between languages: how is German (the language of the composer, an émigré German-speaking Jew living in Los Angeles) positioned as the perpetrator language in the figure of the Feldwebel? How is English (the then-emerging language of Holocaust memorialization, the dominant language of prosecution during the Nuremberg Trials, and subsequently the leading language of Holocaust Studies as a discipline) framed as the language of witnessing in the cantata? And finally, how is Hebrew (the language of liturgy, but also the language of political Zionism) enacted here and to what effect? These three languages, we will suggest, stage a range of subject positions and, in particular, invite the audience to make specific ideological and ethical (or unethical) associations with the communities represented by the three languages.

The libretto of Survivor, as an early example of Holocaust-themed art music, encourages reflection on memory, the representation of trauma, and the role of languages in that work of memory. The three languages used, whilst each serving different functions when taken on their own, also form a network in which each language unfolds its meaning in relation to the other two. Their main significance lies in destructions and constructions of community.