A Survivor from Warsaw

When Hitler’s Nazi party took power in Germany in 1933, Schoenberg, who was Jewish, had no illusions about the future in store for him and his people. Abandoning his teaching position at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, he emigrated to America and settled in Los Angeles. His creative response to the Holocaust was the cantata A Survivor from Warsaw, for narrator, male voice choir and orchestra. Schoenberg wrote his own text, and composed the music within 12 days in August 1947. The first performance was given a year later in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The idea came from an eyewitness account by a former Warsaw Ghetto inmate, who related to Schoenberg how, in response to the brutality of the concentration camp guards, the assembled Jews had responded by defiantly singing the Jewish prayer “Shema Yisrael”. The narrator’s story is accompanied by Schoenberg’s music at its most modernistic and intense, culminating in a dramatic masterstroke as the unison choir breaks into song with the final prayer.