Hollow Victory: Jews in Soviet Russia After the World War LEON BOTSTEIN, Conductor
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Sunday Afternoon, January 28, 2018, at 2:00 Isaac Stern Auditorium / Ronald O. Perelman Stage Conductor’s Notes Q&A with Leon Botstein at 1:00 presents Hollow Victory: Jews in Soviet Russia after the World War LEON BOTSTEIN, Conductor MIECZYSŁAW WEINBERG Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes MIECZYSŁAW WEINBERG Symphony No. 5 in F minor, Op. 76 Allegro moderato Adagio sostenuto Allegro Andantino Intermission VENIAMIN FLEISHMAN Rothschild’s Violin Yakov (Bronze): MIKHAIL SVETLOV, Bass Rothschild: AARON BLAKE, Tenor Shahkes: MARC HELLER, Tenor Marfa: JENNIFER RODERER, Mezzo-soprano members of the BARD FESTIVAL CHORALE JAMES BAGWELL, Director This afternoon’s concert will run approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes including one 20-minute intermission. American Symphony Orchestra welcomes the many organizations who participate in our Community Access Program, which provides free and low-cost tickets to underserved groups in New York’s five boroughs. For information on how you can support this program, please call (212) 868-9276. PLEASE SWITCH OFF YOUR CELL PHONES AND OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES. FROM THE Music Director The Courage of Friendship: The story “Rothschild’s Violin.” He com- Composer as Jew in the Soviet Union pleted and orchestrated the work in by Leon Botstein 1944. It was a labor of love and admi- ration. But the persistence if not The historical thread running through increase in anti-Semitism after the war this concert program is the presence made any performance of the work and persecution of the Jews of Poland impossible despite Shostakovich’s advo- and Soviet Russia in the mid-20th cen- cacy. Only four years after the 1956 tury. The nearly total annihilation of start of de-Stalinization and the “thaw” the Jews that began in 1939 with the in communist Russia, a concert perfor- Nazi invasion of Poland and proceeded mance was arranged in 1960. The first with increased intensity after Hitler’s staged performance occurred in 1968 at invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 the Leningrad Conservatory, the place had an unexpected and grim epilogue. where Fleishman had been a student In 1948 Stalin launched his post-war and Shostakovich his teacher. campaign against the surviving Jewish population in the Soviet Union. Each of Shostakovich’s relationship to the the three composers on this program Soviet regime, both under Stalin and struggled to come to terms with this after, until his death, has remained a extended period of unparalleled brutal- subject of intense scrutiny and debate. ity in the history of anti-Semitism. To what extent was he an “official” voice of the regime? Is there a subtext Veniamin Fleishman, at age 23, began of dissent beneath the frequently affir- to study with Dmitri Shostakovich. mative aesthetic surface of his works? Fleishman was both Jewish and a Soviet Amidst the controversy, one salient fact patriot. He volunteered to join in the remains beyond dispute. Shostakovich defense of Leningrad in 1941 and was was free of anti-Semitism. And that was killed early on in the siege of the city. apparent in his devotion to Fleishman’s The protracted and savage Nazi attempt memory, and in his steadfast friendship to eradicate Leningrad deeply affected with Mieczysław Weinberg, the Warsaw- Shostakovich. He was evacuated to born Jewish composer who fled east safety in the East but wrote what into the Soviet Union after the Nazi quickly became internationally his most occupation of Poland. famous symphony, the Seventh. Its pop- ularity inspired Bartók to quote it sar- Shostakovich met Weinberg during the donically in the 1945 Concerto for war. He persuaded Weinberg to move Orchestra. Shostakovich’s Seventh was to Moscow and remain in the Soviet written in response to the siege, the suf- Union. Weinberg became Shostakovich’s fering of its inhabitants and the heroism closest musical colleague and a dear of the city’s defenders. friend for the rest of his life. When Weinberg was arrested in 1953 during While in exile during the war, the height of Stalin’s anti-Jewish cam- Shostakovich also went to great paign, Shostakovich showed extraordi- lengths to get hold of Fleishman’s nary courage. He intervened with incomplete manuscript of a one-act Lavrenti Beria, the head of the KGB, to opera based on Anton Chekhov’s short seek Weinberg’s release, but to no avail. He pledged to place Weinberg’s daugh- Zionism to overcome anti-Semitism in ter under his personal protection, Europe. The solution lay not in the cre- thereby putting himself at risk. Only ation of a Jewish state in Palestine, but Stalin’s death in March 1953 secured in a socialist revolution at home after Weinberg’s release and restoration to which neither religion nor national professional life. From then on, through- identity would remain a cause of dis- out the subsequent two decades, crimination and oppression. Shostakovich encouraged and pro- moted Weinberg’s work as a composer. The sympathies of Weinberg’s parents also represented the view of most Jews It would be hard to imagine a biogra- in interwar Poland in the years in which phy that reveals the complexities and the young Weinberg grew up. In the contradictions associated with being Polish Census of 1931—completed Jewish and an artist in interwar Poland when Weinberg was 14 years old—out and in Soviet Russia before, during, and of nearly 32 million Poles, roughly ten after the Nazi defeat in 1945 more percent were Jews. Out of these 3.1 mil- vividly and subtly than that of Weinberg. lion Jews, 2.5 million identified their Weinberg’s parents were professionals primary language as Yiddish; only in the Yiddish theatre: his father was a 250,000 claimed Hebrew as their main musician and his mother an actress. They language. The large Jewish community fled to Warsaw from Kishinev (in the in Warsaw, where Weinberg came of province of Bessarabia) in response to age, represented 30 percent of the city’s the massacre of Jews in 1903 and 1905. population. Weinberg’s parents chose The Kishinev pogrom became notori- to settle in Warsaw (then part of the ous throughout the world. It was marked Russian Empire) because it was the sin- both by its startling violence and the gle largest Jewish urban center in Europe, thinly veiled, tacit consent of the Czarist and second in size only to New York. regime. It spurred mass emigration on On the eve of World War II, in 1939, the part of Jews and was easily exploited the year Weinberg graduated from the on behalf of the Zionist cause. The Warsaw Conservatory (where he dis- pogrom helped justify the idea that a played brilliance as both pianist and Jewish state in Palestine was the only composer), there were 350,000 Jews in solution to the precarious position of Warsaw. The Warsaw Jewish commu- Jews in Europe; it also lent credence to nity was exceptionally diverse, and con- those Zionists who argued that Jews in tained everything from fully assimilated the meantime should form paramilitary and well-to-do, Polish-speaking, Jewish organizations to defend themselves. inhabitants to a large Yiddish-speaking, poor, working-class population, a vocal But Weinberg’s parents were not Zion- group of Zionists and devout orthodox ists. They mirrored the views of the adherents to religion. majority of Russian Jews. They did not dream of a Jewish state in Palestine and The sheer size of the Warsaw commu- their daily language was not a rapidly nity made it possible for it to support a evolving Hebrew. They were Yiddish thriving Yiddish theater world, Yiddish speakers and ardent defenders of Yid- newspapers and journals, and publish- dish as the national language of the ing houses. Weinberg began to work as Jewish people. They were determined a musician in the Yiddish theater at age to remain in Eastern Europe and were ten. But this vital Jewish community sympathetic to socialist organizations met its tragic end at the hands of the that saw a different path from that of Nazis. Weinberg’s parents and sister perished. But Weinberg, as a vigorous as a subversive “bourgeois Jewish 20-year-old, understood that staying nationalist” who supposedly supported behind was not a promising option. the creation of a Jewish state within the Furthermore, like many non-Zionist, Soviet Union. Yiddish-oriented Jews, he admired socialism and the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, after his release Weinberg remained optimistic, prolific, and Indeed for many Jews the Soviet Union courageous. A large part of his compo- during the 1920s and even the 1930s sitional output dealt directly with Jew- seemed a potential paradise, a place— ish themes, particularly its folk her- whatever its faults—that was built on itage, its Yiddish culture, and, of course, an ideology that promised a better the suffering Jews endured. His last future, a world of equality, free of symphony, his No. 26, was a memorial superstitious religion prejudice. The to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. Soviet Union after 1921 offered a con- And he wrote an opera based on a trast to a Catholic and conservative, Sholom Aleichem story. Yet Weinberg’s authoritarian, independent Poland, range was astonishing. He wrote for the where anti-Semitism flourished. Fleeing movies, the radio, the circus, the the- Poland was not merely a concession ater, and the concert stage. He set texts born out of necessity. Weinberg sur- by the Polish poet Julian Tuwim (also a vived the war in Soviet Russia, and no Jew), Nikolai Gogol, G.B Shaw, and matter how poor the treatment he Mikhail Lermontov. The ASO has per- received in the post-war years was, or formed several of his works, including how extreme the danger from anti- the trumpet and cello concertos, and Semitism he lived under, he remained the 1963 Sixth Symphony that calls for loyal to the ideals of the regime and the a children’s chorus singing Yiddish promise of socialism.