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Sh'ma

PROGRAM NOTE
When The Brookline Chorus first asked me to write a new work for them I didn't yet know that I would be composing a piece about the Holocaust. Ideas and influences converged until the subject became inevitable: I always like my commissioned works to have a resonance with the first performers. Brookline has a large Jewish population and this directed my thoughts toward Jewish themes, but perhaps the decisive factor was my turning again to a poem I had wanted to set for some time. Primo Levi's The Black Stars is a work of such compelling, terrifying emptiness and despair that I had never found a satisfactory context in which to place it. Now it became the center of, and itself created the context for, an entire work. The Black Stars is taken from a collection of poems entitled Sh'ma. 'Sh'ma' means listen, or hear, in Hebrew. More than that, however, it is the opening word of the Sh'ma Israel, one of the central prayers of Judaism. The title thus speaks to the Jewish experience of exile, to the centrality of Primo Levi's poetry in this work, and as an admonishment to us all to listen, not only to pieces of music, but to history and to the experiences of witnesses and survivors of its darkest times.

I have to say that, some years later, I feel less comfortable about having written this work, largely because I am not Jewish and so don't want to be seen as trying to usurp another culture's history for my own musical purposes. That was not the intention at the time of composing and I hope that the depiction of horrific experiences of real people isn't now compromised by any sense of opportunism. The work meant a lot to the participants and was a genuine response to the 50th anniversary of the second World War.

REVIEW
The Brookline Chorus and its excellent director, William Cutter, have done an admirable thing. They commissioned a new work by Boston composer Andy Vores, and premiered it with great passion and commitment at Temple Ohabei Shalom Thursday night.

Vores set them a hard task. The music is simple enough for amateurs to do, and so stunningly inventive and searlngly dramatic that it commands anyone's serious attention. But the texts of his cantata Sh'ma, ("Hear"), bom of the Holocaust, are wrenching to sing and to hear. Cutter had prepared his chorus and small orchestra with great care. After a somber prelude grounded by the haunting sound of a tuba, the chorus spoke out strong and sure.

In the shattering How can I sing? William Hite's stunned utterance of the poet's question is answered by the chorus' invocational hymn to the dead of the camps, commanding them to rise up from the ashes. Their singing burned its way to a place beyond grief. Hite's response, "Yes, hand me my harp—I wll play" led into the spoken naming of the death camps by the male chorus, over a polyphonic, wordless keening by the women.

Vores plunged us into the void left by the death of God in Primo Levi’s poem The Black Star. He created a shining vision of the sea as a final haven in At the Rim of Heaven. But the end of this magnificent piece offers no consolation, only an agitated choral outburst "Sh'ma, Yisra'el," God's command to listen, remember and speak. Vores, Cutter and the Brookllne Chorus have fulfilled this command with great courage and truth. 
Susan Larson • The Boston Globe 

TEXTS
Darkness


Oh, Before Doom Overtakes Us
Chorus
. . . “Do not sleep! Drink old wine,
amidst myrrh and lilies, henna and
aloes, in an orchard of pomegranates,
palms, and vines, full of pleasant plants
and tamarisks, to the hum of fountains 
and the throb of lutes, to the sound of
singers, flutes and lyres. There every
tree is tall, branches are fair with fruit,
and winged birds of every kind sing
among the leaves. The doves moan
melodiously, and the turtle-doves reply,
cooing like reed pipes. There we shall
drink among flower-beds fenced in
by lilies, putting sorrow to rout with 
songs of praise. . . . . . 

We shall anoint
ourselves with fragrant oil and burn
aloe incense. Oh, before doom overtakes us, let us enjoy 
ourselves in peace!” 
Dunash ben Labrat (d.990) trans. T. Carmi from The Poet Refuses an Invitation to Drink 


Singing
Tenor and Male Voices
. . . But when we started singing
Those good foolish songs of ours,
Then everything was again
As it had always been. 

A day was just a day,
And seven make a week.
Killing seemed an evil thing to us;
Dying—something remote. 

The months pass rather quickly,
But there are still so many left!
Once more we were just young men:
Not martyrs, not infamous, not saints. 

This and other things came into our minds
While we kept singing. 
But they were cloudlike things,
Hard to explain. 
Primo Levi (1919–1987) trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann 


How Can I Sing?
Tenor and Chorus
How can I sing? How can I open my lips?
I that am left alone in the wilderness– 
My wife, my two children, alas!
I shudder–Someone's crying! I hear it from afar. . . 

. . . How can I sing? How can I lift my head?
My wife, my Benzionke and Yomele—a baby—deported
They are not with me, yet they never leave me.
O dark shadows of my brightest lights, O cold, blind shadows! . . . 

. . . Where are my dead? O God, I seek them
In every heap of ashes–O tell me where you are.
Scream from every sand dune, from under every stone,
Scream from the dust and fire and smoke . . . 

. . . Scream from furnaces. Scream young and old . . . 

Show yourself, my people. Emerge, reach out
From the miles-long, dense, deep ditches,
Covered in lime and burned, layer upon layer,
Rise up! up! from the deepest, bottommost layer! 

Come from Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz.
Come from Belzec, Ponari, from all the other camps.
With wide open eyes, frozen cries and soundless screams.
Come from marshes, deep sunken swamps, foul moss— 

Come, you dried, ground, crushed Jewish bones.
Come, form a big circle around me, one great ring—
Grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, mothers carrying babies.
Come, Jewish bones, out of powder and soap. 

Emerge, reveal yourselves to me. Come, all of you, come.
I want to see you. I want to look at you. I want
Silently and mutely to behold my murdered people—
And I will sing–Yes—Hand me the harp—I will play! 
Yitzhak Katzenelson (1886–1943) trans. Noah H. Rosenbloom from The Song of the 
Murdered Jewish People 


Death Camps and Transit Camps
Chorus
Minsk
Riga
Ravensbruck
Terezin
Drancy
Krychow
Klooga
Lvov
Bielsk
Böhlen
Flossenbürg
Auschwitz
Chelmno
Starodubsk
Lachwa
Gurs
Bedzin
Cracow
Salonika
Dachau
Lichtenburg
Brabag
Gross-Rosen
Mir 
Lublin
Tarnow
Bozen
Cremona
Grini
Westerbork
Treblinka
Vilna
Sobibor
Shavli
Bolzano 
Vught 
Majdanek
Dabrowa
Haselhorst
Nordhausen
Amersfoort
Buchenwald
Bergen-Belsen
Lodz
Sosnowiec
Mittelbau
Neuengamme
Papenburg
Birkenau
Tatarsk
Orenienburg
Holysov
Belzec
Kovno
Mauthausen
Krements
Babi Yar
Jasenovac
Natzweiler
Landsberg 
Warsaw
Stutthof
Sokolka
Nisko
Poniatowa
Trawniki
Sachsenhausen
Plaszow
Zamosz
Vittel 


Arrival at the Ramp


The Black Stars
Chorus
Let no one sing again of love or war. 

The order from which the cosmos took its name has been dissolved;
The heavenly legions are a tangle of monsters,
The universe—blind, violent and strange—assails us.
The sky is strewn with horrible dead suns,
Dense sediments of mangled atoms.
Only desperate heaviness emanates from them,
Not energy, not messages, not particles, not light.
Light itself falls back down, broken by its own weight,
And all of us human seed, we live and die for nothing,
The skies perpetually revolve in vain. 
Primo Levi (1919–1987) trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann 


At the Rim of Heaven
Tenor
Like Abraham and Sarah by the
terebinths of Mamre before the 
precious tidings, and like David and
Bathsheba, in the king´s palace, in the
tenderness of their first night—my
martyred father and mother rise in the
West over the sea with all the aureoles
of God upon them. Weighed down by
their beauty they sink, slowly. Above
their heads flows the mighty ocean,
beneath it is their deep home. 

This home has no walls on any side, it
is built of water within water. The 
drowned of Israel come swimming
from all the corners of the sea, each
with a star in his mouth . . . 

. . . And I, their good son, am like a lyre
whose radiant melody has been stopped,
as I stand, towering with Time, on the seashore. 

And at times the evening and the sea
run into my heart, and I run to the sea.
I am summoned, as if to the rim of the
heavens, to behold: on either side of
the sinking globe of the sun, he is seen, 
she is seen: my father to the right and
my mother to the left; and beneath
their bare feet flows the burning sea. 
Uri Zvi Greenberg (b.1896) trans. T. Carmi 


The Cry from Warsaw
Tenor and Chorus
. . . My brothers speak to me each night.
From far away I hear their cry.
The cry from Warsaw.
Across my memories,
Their shadows appear,
Their eyes are watching me. 

I see them in my beating heart,
They live there:
The children who never became men,
The women who never became mothers,
Men, hounded beings, 
Who whispered:
"We do not want to die."
And I remember men
Who did not whisper at all,
Heroes without words. . .
My brothers in Warsaw
Loved life as I do.
They died
Because no one was listening 
to their cry. . . 

. . . I walk through the streets of New York. . .
. . . I look at windows full of light. . .
And in the middle of all the lights
I see the darkness of Mila Street
And I hear Chopin,
From far away. . . 

. . . The cry from Warsaw follows me, 

In Venice, in Calgary,
In Los Angeles, in Geneva. . .
. . . In San Francisco,
On the Golden Gate Bridge,
I ask myself:
Will I find my own bridge one day, 
The bridge between my past
And my present? 

There were dark rivers of tears 
and dark streets of death; 
There were dark alleys of despair 
and dark roads of suffering;
and in this darkness was lost 
the conscience of the world. 
Lena Allen-Shore 

shema yisra'el: . . .
shema olam . . .
. . . vehayu hadevarim ha'eleh 
asher anokhi 
metsavkha hayom al-levavekha.
veshinantam levanekha vedibarta 
bam beshivtekha 
bevetekha uvelekhtekha vaderekh 
uveshokhbekha uvekumekha. Hear, O Israel . . .

Hear, mankind . . .
. . . And these words which I command you
today shall be in your heart
You shall teach them diligently to your children, 
And you shall speak of them when you sit 
in your house, 
and when you walk on the road, 
and when you lie down, and when you arise.