Narrator, men’s chorus, orchestra. A fanfare in the trumpets calls us to attention. The narrator’s life-in-death-in-life text set to Schoenberg’s dissonant music. Two later trumpet fanfares call the prisoners to attention each day. At random (it seems) we hear chaotic drum fills, sudden outbursts, plucked and struck strings, rapid repeated notes like verbal jabs. No one knows what sound might come next. As if journeying through Dante’s Hell, the number 3 (or God) is everywhere: 3 trumpet calls, 3 languages, 3 perspectives, 3 sections, 3 pitches in chords, 3 ways to love God . . . Where is God? Where is he? another prisoner shouts while a child’s being hung from the gallows in Elie Wiesel’s Night, his memoirof the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps.
Every country creates its nodes of silence. France, Germany, America, Russia . . . We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past and look to the future (Winston Churchill, 1946). When Schoenberg sent the Boston Symphony “A Survivor in Warsaw,” they hemmed and hawed. They year was 1947, too soon for such reckonings. So the nation’s headlines read “Schoenberg in Albuquerque” where music lovers of every stripe rehearsed like crazy to get it right: cowboys, ranchers, cooks, doctors, lawyers, students, secretaries, students . . .
A German sergeant shouts: “Achtung! Abzahlen!” (“Attention! Count off!”). The prisoners count, then falter. And then again: “Achtung! Abzahlen!” The prisoners count and falter faster falter and faster till all at once they start singing the Shema Yisroel in Hebrew: You shall love the L-rd your G‑d with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. The applause so great, Schoenberg’s Survivor repeated on the spot. Soon after the Paris premiere. Audiences speechless. Audiences in tears.
*I am indebted to Time’s Echo, by Jeremy Eisler, for some of this information.
Performance of A Survivor from Warsaw
Artist Bio (From Wikpedia): Preciada Azancot (1943-2017), was the creator in human sciences of MAT (the Metamodel of Analysis that Transforms), and in oil painting of the pictorial trend Transformational Expressionism.
MAT represents for the human sciences the equivalent of what the Theory of Relativity represented in its day for physics. It is the discovery of the emotional and sensory engineering of the human being’s seven-dimensional personality structure – and not four-dimensional as believed since the time of the Ancient Greeks – and is known as being the first precise science (universal, objective, transferable and measurable) of the functioning of the human being in all his facets, personality typologies, creations and ways of being. As a writer, Preciada Azancot has written more than twenty books and published 18 related to this science.
Since 1986 Preciada Azancot has also developed another facet of her personality as a painter, holding several individual exhibitions in prestigious art galleries of Madrid, Barcelona and museums and foundations such as the Fine Arts Museum of Santander and Caja Madrid foundation in Barcelona. Preciada is particularly known for her portraits of major composers like the portrait of Schoenberg above.
(*) Portions of this bio have been translated into English from the Wikipedia page in Spanish.
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