A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46

Program notes

About the Work

A Survivor from Warsaw lasts about seven minutes and is one of the most concentrated pieces Schoenberg ever wrote. He composed it in Los Angeles in August 1947, when he was seventy-two and in poor health, for a narrator, men’s chorus and orchestra. The words are his own.

The first push came from outside. Early in 1947 the dancer and choreographer Corinne Chochem sent him a partisan song from the ghettos and asked for a piece based on it. Schoenberg replied that he wanted to set a scene from the Warsaw Ghetto, of doomed Jews who began to sing before going to their deaths. The two could not agree on terms, but the idea stayed with him, and a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation gave him the occasion to write it as a work of his own. He drafted the text and the music in a matter of weeks.

The narrator is a man who has survived and cannot remember everything. He recalls a morning roll call: the reveille before dawn, the prisoners driven out, the old and the sick beaten to the ground by a sergeant, the order to count off faster and faster so that the sergeant will know how many he is sending to the gas chamber. At the moment when the counting becomes a stampede, the men begin to sing the Shema Yisroel, the Jewish declaration of faith. The narration is in English, the sergeant shouts in German, and the prayer is sung in Hebrew.

The account is not a historical record of the Warsaw Ghetto, and scholars have pointed out that it runs together different events. Schoenberg knew this and said that accuracy was not the point. The text, he wrote, was a warning to Jews never to forget what had been done to them, and ‘the main thing is, that I saw it in my imagination’.

The first performance was given on 4 November 1948, far from the great musical centres, by the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra under Kurt Frederick in New Mexico. The audience was so shaken that the piece was played a second time on the spot.

What to Listen For

The piece is written with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, but there is no need to follow the technique. The orchestra works in short, sharp gestures that illustrate the narrator’s words almost as a film score would.

It opens with a trumpet call, the reveille, which returns through the piece like a memory that will not go away. Listen for the fanfares that go with the sergeant, and for the weeping figures in the violins when the narrator speaks of the groans of the beaten.

The narrator’s part is neither sung nor simply spoken. Schoenberg wrote out its rhythm and its rise and fall, but asked that it should never settle into definite pitch.

When the prisoners count off, the music accelerates along with them, faster and louder, until the narrator compares the sound to a stampede of wild horses. At its peak the men’s chorus enters with the Shema Yisroel. After the fragmented music and broken speech that have gone before, it is the only sustained singing in the piece, and the work ends with it.