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Two outsiders. Two victims of persecution whose lots in life became entwined for the long term. A Gentile and a Jew who shared inspirations in a much greater degree than one would suppose on the basis of their complicated lots in life. This month marks a 20th anniversary of the death of an outstanding Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg, who was a fast friend of Dmitri Shostakovich. The newest album released by Stowarzyszenie Muzyki Polskiej (Association of Polish Music) features soprano Elżbieta Szmytka and pianist Grzegorz Biegas performing Weinberg’s Jewish Songs op. 13 and 17, as well as Shostakovich’s Piano Sonata in B minor. Here is my text originally published in the programme book accompanying the aforementioned CD.

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Elżbieta Szmytka and Grzegorz Biegas during the recording session at NOSPR, Katowice. Photo: Paweł Orski.

When the Axis army struck the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Dmitri Shostakovich had been working at Leningrad Conservatory for four years already, trying to regain his position after a period of great terror and dramatic conflicts with Stalinist censorship which had ended in, among other things, the withdrawal of his Symphony no. 4. In a surge of patriotic feelings, he had volunteered to take part in the Great Patriotic War, but was not accepted on account of a vision defect. Building of fortifications around Leningrad was begun, evacuations of the privileged were launched. Shostakovich remained in the city. He joined the fire brigade and took shifts standing watch on the roof of the Conservatory. In September, the Germans crossed the Moscow-Leningrad train line. Over 2.5 million civilians were stuck in the Siege of Leningrad. A month later, the composer decided to evacuate. He managed to get to Moscow, from whence he was transferred by train to Kuibyshev, where he finished work on the Leningrad Symphony. In the spring of 1943, he returned to Moscow.
In September 1939, the 20-year-old Mieczysław Weinberg escaped Warsaw to the East, as did many other Polish Jews. His father, mother and sister died in 1943 at the Trawniki concentration camp during Operation Harvest Festival, carried out at Himmler’s command. That same year, Weinberg ended his nomadic life. After two years in Minsk, Belarus, as well as evacuation to Tashkent, he settled for the rest of his life in Moscow – at the urging and thanks to the support of Shostakovich, who had been enchanted with the young composer’s Symphony no. 1. They took up residence in the same neighborhood. They became friends. They were bound by a commonality of spirit, morality and aesthetic principles.
Shostakovich wrote his Sonata in B minor just before moving from Kuibyshev to Moscow, in the first few months of 1943. After a lengthy pause in composition for piano, he was clearly struggling with the material: he created a heterogeneous work, in the first movement dramatic, revealing his mastery in use of counterpoint; in the second, restrained and clearly tending towards Neoclassicism; in the third, full of emotion, bringing to mind associations with the finale of Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat minor. It is a music of conflict, considerably closer in language to the Leningrad Symphony (or the ‘wartime’ sonatas of Prokofiev) than to the Sonata op. 12, written 17 years earlier. That one had been written in a spirit of Russian Modernism; this one fits rather into a continuation of German Romanticism’s legacy. His contemporaries were disappointed by it. Today, it is striking as a testimony of those days when ‘it was difficult to live’ for Shostakovich; but at the same time, it is intriguing as a herald of the mature works of the middle period of his œuvre.
Weinberg’s two song cycles, the so-called Children’s Songs op. 13 and the Jewish Songs op. 17, are linked by a very peculiar bridge. The first were written while he was still in Tashkent, in 1943, to texts by Isaac Leib Peretz, a classic of Jewish literature who came from a Sephardic family that had settled in Zamość. The background for the second cycle is a set of poems by Shmuel Halkin, one of the leading figures in Yiddish literature in the Soviet Union, an author basically unknown in Poland. For the most part, the Children’s Songs convey an impression of simplicity and cheerfulness of mood. The subject of the songs from op. 17 is the drama of the Patriotic War. More careful analysis, however, reveals an intense connection between them: both cycles are basically a protest against war – the one perceived naïvely through a child’s eyes, and the one experienced deeply by an adult. The culminating points of the two opuses are the penultimate songs: ‘Der yesoymes brivele’, the letter of an orphan to his dead mother; and ‘Tife griber, royte leym’ – the story of the mass executions of Jews in Babi Yar, in which at least 30 000 people died.
Much has been written lately about Shostakovich’s influence on Weinberg. Less about inspirations flowing in the other direction. But it is difficult to imagine that the cycle Jewish Folk From Poetry, and especially the last symphonies of Shostakovich, were written without knowledge of the experiences of the refugee from Warsaw. For both of them, those ‘tife griber, royte leym’ – deep graves and red clay – became a metaphor for despised outcasts whose œuvre threatened the unity of an oppressive world order.
Translated by Karol Thornton-Remiszewski

We are happy to announce that the second monographic CD of Rafał Augustyn’s music, entitled Sub Iove, and recorded by the Cantores Minores Wratislavienses directed by Piotr Karpeta, will be released in the middle of February by CD Accord Music Edition. Instead of a teaser, I post my text from the CD booklet, where I explain the whole story and give some information about the pieces included in this album. Enjoy!

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I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence’ – said Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus in the famous fragment referred to by historians of philosophy as a critique on writing (here translated by Benjamin Jowett). I also became lost in thought, when in an effort to broaden my knowledge on the subject of Rafał Augustyn’s newest contributions I turned for help to the invaluable Google search engine. First I was offered the biography of a certain race-walker, who after completing a five-year course at a technical college of gastronomy was awarded the title of a mass-catering technician. Despite all of Augustyn’s versatility I was not fooled and posed another question related to the Socrates letters. The reply came back as a mysterious 21-FP-S2-E1-TiMuz, which I initially acknowledged as a sign of solemn silence. However I persevered and after further searches discovered I was faced with a subject-cum-mode code, or more precisely the 'Text and Music’ seminar that Doctor Rafał Augustyn conducts at Wroclaw University’s Institute of Polish Philology. I was delighted by what his classes aim to achieve (’To acquire a practical ability of analyzing text-cum-musical relationships of a vocal and vocal-instrumental work in various styles, forms and circulatory systems found in musical culture’), and intrigued by the annotation in the 'Initial requirements’ column, where larger than life it reads: 'lack of formal requirements’.

Could it be that the lecturer, who discusses examples of his authorial approach to the textual-musical questions related to his own material, among others Three Roman Nocturnes and Vagor ergo sum featured on this recording, preferred to work on the mental tabula rasa of his 1st year postgraduate charges and fill it with a series of associations as loose as they are unexpected? This is somewhat if not entirely true. Augustyn values open minds. He continues to follow in the tracks of Socratic dialectics, which he considers the only source of accomplished speech – as well as accomplished composition, a characteristic ekphrasis that enters into discourse on art and our whole postmodernist world related to the principle of intertextuality. Rather than stylizing, Augustyn toys with tradition, wanders through semiotic space-time by throwing in a title here, an allusion there, and elsewhere confusing order and convention thus forcing written words and markings contained in the score to break their solemn silence and speak to the listener in a beautiful, meaningful and genuine phrase, which in effect leads to justifiable conclusions – regardless of a chosen thought process. Talking about his choral output, Augustyn descends into a somewhat schizophrenic string of free associations. In the same breath he mentions dozens of idiomatic expressions, beginning with angelic choruses, through to choirs of sirens and prisoners, ending with (if you’ll pardon the expression) 'Uncle Sam’ choruses. All in order to make us understand that hidden behind this immense inter-textual mixture of material is an attempt to impart new values to a multiple group of vocalists, associated by an average music-lover with a stringent and disciplined sense of community, whose aim is singing in praise – never mind to whom. Augustyn’s chorus has nothing in common with heavenly choirs, where as in the Book of Jeremiah – 'damned is he who badly performs the work of the Lord’. If anything it stems from ancient choreomania and is closer to poetry than composed music where melody and rhythm play an equal role dictated by the overall, over-riding 'musicality’ of the narrative. His chorus, rather than communal is usually an individual 'I’: sometimes an actor, sometimes a listener and sometimes a go-between, an authority that assists in finding the correct path in world participation – as witnessed by Nietzsche’s deliberations in The Birth of Tragedy.

This juggling act can already be seen and heard in Three Roman Nocturnes, where Augustyn exploits texts by Ennius, considered the father of Latin literature, texts by Catullus, a representative of the revolutionary Neoteric group and the philosophy of Seneca – primarily as semantic material, delighting in its sound without getting embroiled in any direct lingual-cum-historical connotations. Drawing on three Latin idioms, already established in the European cultural landscape well after the death of all three mentioned authors (Sub Iove, namely under clear skies, Sub rosa, in other words confidentially, and Sub specie aeternitatis – from a perspective of eternity), he places the choir in three different settings: in first person narrative spoken in the name of the entire humanity, in a dialectical dispute between lovers and finally in a supra-time and supra-individual narrative where the performing ensemble plays the role of a specific collective subconscious.

In Mass with a contradictory subtitle of semibrevis (a reference to one of the markings describing rhythmic values in mensural notation, but also an atypical technical description of a short Mass complemented by a Confiteor rarely exploited in musical forms) there are two identities: that of a communal, fully engaged Polish choir and a professional Latin choir. The method of building these identities – unhurried, restrained, based on a measured gradation of tensions – again recalls a form of subtle, albeit unexpected toying with early sacred music conventions, considering that the applied contrapuntal textures and the narrative’s relative lyricism go hand in hand with the subtle tone-colour effects and work on motivic material that have more in common with Bartókian modernism than Renaissance polyphony.

The identity of the four short pieces Od Sasa, provided by Augustyn with the subtitle Tones-Pauses-Events, is equally fluid and intangible, just like the identity of the texts’ author, the Wroclaw poet Dariusz Sas, well known as a Polish philologist, organizer of underground literary life and co-founder of a certain no longer existing journal for the soul, not to mention an apiarist. Sometimes one cannot be sure that he is Dariusz as in some biographical notes he leaves out his Christian name. In Epistolas (which reminds me irresistibly of a joke about an old woman, who unable to make use of the church hymn book sang at the top of her voice: “dot, dot, two dots, slash, two slashes, o Maryyyyy, etcetera”) the chorus becomes embodied molto tranquillo into the identity of four types of smoked fish sold through the retail trade, albeit slightly watered down by an outpouring of meticulously sung numbers and letter markings from a fiscal invoice. In Song for Netballers there are echoes of a stadium roar from a chorus of fans, in Autumn Malaise the multiplex lyrical subject is divided by details of home cures for a cold while in my favourite Production the chorus identifies unequivocally with Sas – a freshly baked graduate – and divulges to the listener the behind-the-scenes mass production of Polish humanists. The highly amusing Od Sasa (From Sas) are a perfect example of Augustyn’s favourite technique of applying pauses as a building tool of the musical narrative – underspecified, incomplete, with no dot over the 'I’, which is left up to the listener to place.

Augustyn spectacular journey in search of an identity for the contemporary chorus closes with a small cantata tellingly entitled Vagor ergo sum: an attempt at the impossible, namely an endeavour to tackle the unmusical poetry of Zbigniew Herbert. Augustyn would not be true to himself if in this particular spectacle of word and sound he failed to refer to the aesthetics of the theatre of the absurd – together with its uncertainty surrounding our world, its inversion of the traditional, metaphysical order of reality. Here is Herbert (or perhaps Augustyn) on a train journey across Italy, where successive legs of his trip are accompanied by station announcements related to arrivals, departures and delays of railway timetables. The chorus alternately embodies Mr Cogito, passengers, station staff, donkeys passed on the way, as well as stars and 'watery-eyed, grey foolish stalkers’, towards the end only to sing itself out quietly into the role of a sensitive soul on the final words of a Herbert prayer: 'if this is Your seduction I remain seduced for ever without forgiveness’. This is Augustyn’s musical theatre, his primary as well as his most recent fascination of creating new tonal situations out of old and discarded building blocks.

What next? A return from Herbert’s inhuman and unmusical netherworld to Plato’s two worlds? After all, he who knows what is fair, beautiful and good is not going to compose these things on running water. Rafał Augustyn’s true learning has not yet been written down. Perhaps his creative endeavour – even if supported by words – will remain forever in the sphere of agrapha dogmata, perhaps each time reconstruction on the part of the listener will be required. So much the better.

(Translated by Anna Kaspszyk)

If any of the 20th century composers had managed to create as precise and consistent a language in their works as Thomas Mann had when composing the linguistic scores of his short stories and novels, we would have gained a music to overshadow the whole legacy of modernism. The sensitivity with which he spun leitmotifs, the ability to lead verbal melodies in an intricate counterpoint, the consciousness of form, and, predominantly, the sense of musical time of the narration which was once continuous and then jagged, cyclic and linear, falling at times into a mythical, fable-like timelessness, brings to mind non-existent symphonies, operas that were never sung and painfully elusive works of chamber music. Regardless of whether he directly referred to the music of that time in his works (like in Buddenbrooks – built in the image and likeness of Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung) or whether he wrote about imaginary music, completely different from his own preferences (like in Doctor Faustus whose hero Adrian Leverkühn in a way unintentionally became the character of Arnold Schönberg) he made a typically German “music of the word” in the spirit of Tieck, Hofmann and Heine, which was, however, larger in scale and more consistent as regards its concept.
The Magic Mountain can be interpreted in the same vein, as it is, after all, a pastiche, if not a parody of the classic Bildungsroman, as well as a story about death and illness, an allegory of the violent clash of ideology and thoughts at the turn of the century, a reflection about the space-time continuum. Also, in the context of music, what Mann clearly makes readers realise at the beginning of Chapter Seven: “Can one tell – that is to say, narrate – time, time itself, as such, for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking. (…) For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are inextricably bound to it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once”. He explains the implications of this situation a few pages further on: “We freely admit that in bringing up the question as to whether time can be narrated or not, we have done so only to confess that we had something like that in view in the present work. And if we touched upon the further question, whether our readers were clear how much time had passed since the upright Joachim, deceased in the interval, had introduced into the conversation the above-quoted phrases about music and time (…) we should not have been dismayed to hear that they were not clear. We might even have been gratified, on the plain ground that a thorough-going sympathy with the experiences of our hero is precisely what we wish to arouse, and he, Hans Castorp, was himself not clear upon the point in question, no, nor had been for a very long time”.
The hero, Hans Castorp, will experience a violent transformation a few chapters later when a certain German product appears in Berghof, “the truly musical, in a modern, mechanical form, the German soul up to date”. The enchanted treasure, a Polyhymnia gramophone, which Castorp will soon appropriate, becomes the only dispenser of musical delights, out of fear that “the sick, but thick-skinned” will desecrate the records using worn needles, leaving them scattered on chairs or playing goofy pranks. Our “good-natured nuisance” will get out from the state of great stupor, stop playing patience and start listening. He will comprehend the meaning of those many years spent in the sanatorium, sum up his experiences to date, gain strength, mature and come to the surprising conclusion that the subject that he loves most, with a healthy and vigorous love, is death.
He will arrive at this conclusion with the help of his most beloved records, with the aria “Avant de quitter ces lieux” from Gounod’s Faust, the prelude to Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, the final duet “O terra addio” from Verdi’s Aida, the end of the second act from Bizet’s Carmen with the well-known tenor “Flower song”, and above all the song Lindenbaum from Schubert’s cycle Winterreise. Castorp listens to these records in an utterly different manner than toward live performers, whose artistry made such an impact on the reception of music by Thomas Mann himself – the writer who experienced his musical initiation at the age of 17 at the performance of Lohengrin in Stadttheater in Lübeck and considered it one of his most significant experiences. Mann witnessed the very first performance of Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand as well as Pfitzner’s Palestrina and Berg’s Lulu. He was friends with the conductor Bruno Walter, a legendary interpreter of Mahler, Mozart, Brahms and Bruckner. He enjoyed sitting at the piano in solitude and playing his favourite fragments from Tristan und Isolde, allegedly the only opera that could make his stern and always poised face reflect any emotion. For a long time, he could not take to the recorded music, although he succumbed to it while still in the era of mechanical records, before the first gramophone for electrical recordings appeared on the market.
The omniscient and, at the same time, completely non-scient narrator of The Magic Mountain speaks from the perspective of a neophyte with an obsessive passion for listening into the gramophone tube. Mann was perfectly aware of the fact that the phonographic revolution turned the existing model of listening to music inside out. It took music out of its social context. It stripped the closed form of its integrity, making it possible to listen to the chosen passages virtually endlessly. It involved the listener in an intimate dialogue with the work of art, and, at the same time, increased his distance to the musicians. It aroused his imagination, forcing him to carry out a mental reconstruction of the visual aspect of the performance and the missing elements of the purely musical landscape. As we read about Castorp in the subchapter Fullness of Harmony: “The singers male and female whom he heard, he could not see; their corporeal part abode in America, in Milan, Vienna, St Petersburg. But let them dwell where they might, he had their better part, their voices, and might rejoice in the refining and abstracting process which did away with the disadvantages of closer personal contact, yet left them enough appeal to the senses to permit some command over their individualities”. Similar to Wagner’s Parsifal, the pure simple man was slowly reaching the truth, he “writhed when they failed. He bit his lips in chagrin when the reproduction was technically faulty; he was on pins and needles when the first note of an often-used record gave a shrill or scratching sound – which happened more particularly with the difficult female voice. Still, when these things happened, he bore with them, for love makes us forbearing”.
The majority of the readers of The Magic Mountain incorrectly assume that Mann equipped Castorp with a collection of records from the epoch, gave him a standard set of mechanical records from the time before the Great War. Meanwhile, the writer projected on the hero his own phonographic fascinations, whose beginning coincided with the author’s visit to George M. Richter in 1920, which was recorded in his journals. Admittedly, Radamès and Aida sing in the voices of Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso in the record from 1909, but the character of Valentin who leaves his sister, Marguerite, under the care of his beloved friend, Siébel, was impersonated by the German baritone Joseph Schwarz recorded almost ten years later. The British-American tenor Alfred Piccaver, the star of Staatsoper in Vienna, recorded the “Flower song” in 1923.
Similar was the case of the record with the piece that was of key importance for the hero’s inner transformation: “It was Schubert’s ‘Linden-tree’, it was none other than the old favourite, ‘Am Brunnen vor dem Tore’. It was sung to piano accompaniment by a tenor voice; and the singer was a lad of parts and discernment, who knew how to render with great skill, fine musical feeling and finesse in recitative his simple yet consummate theme. We all know that the noble lied sounds rather differently when given as a concert-number from its rendition in the childish or the popular mouth. In its simplified form the melody is sung straight through; whereas in the original art-song, the key changes to minor in the second of the eight-line stanzas, changes back again with beautiful effect to major in the fifth line; is dramatically resolved in the following “bitter blasts” and “facing the tempest”; and returns again only with the last four lines of the third stanza, which are repeated to finish out the melody”.
In the description of the narrator of The Magic Mountain there is a telling phrase “none other than the old” referring to the words “Am Brunnen vor dem Tore”, while the song sung by children and the German people – and most probably known to Castorp also in this form – uses a shorter text; the longer one had not yet been developed by the poet Wilhelm Müller who introduced into it the linden tree, the sacred tree of the Germanic peoples, associated with the cycle of life, and so with death and unavoidable passing, absent from the song’s traditional form. The folk song about the house of the beloved woman which was located by a well in front of the gate, was sang in Germany by everybody: at home, school, in an inn or by a bonfire, in the very simple version by Friedrich Silcher for voice accompanied by any given instrument, which served as a point of reference for one of the most famous and most sophisticated songs of Schubert’s cycle Winterreise.
It is possible, although quite unlikely, that Castorp knew only Silcher’s interpretation and encountered Schubert’s masterpiece for the first time in Davos. Regardless of that, he could not have listened to it in Berghof, at least not in the version described so sensually and meticulously by Mann further in the paragraph. This “clear, warm voice, with his excellent breathing technique, with the suggestion of a sob” as a result of which “the listener felt his heart gripped in an undreamed-of fashion; with an effect the singer knew how to heighten by head-tones of extraordinary ardour on the lines ‘I found my solace there’ and ‘For rest and peace are here’” definitely describes the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber, an outstanding performer of Mozart characters, operetta parts and the German Lieder, whose records Thomas Mann listened to “with passion verging on misdeed”, five years after the end of the Great War.
And with this song, he sent his Castorp to attack the trenches. Singing Lindenbaum “as one sings, unaware, staring stark ahead”. He left us unsure whether Castorp would survive or fall, saying farewell to his hero in an elaborate musical cadence which befits a non-existent symphony by Mahler more than even the longest of novels.
What was the purpose of this anachronism in the narration of The Magic Mountain? Could Mann really have attempted to narrate time, time itself, as such, for its own sake? An attempt that is perversely successful because it is performed in the categories of musical time which is intrinsic to a completely different form? The time of Hans Castorp, rarefied by the seven-year long stay in Berghof, became suddenly thicker, future-oriented, made a circle and formed a spiral. Like in a real sonata cycle.

(Translated by Patrycja Cichoń)