La Memoria Cantata: A Survivor from Warsaw di Arnold Schönberg nell’Europa del dopoguerra. Joy H. Calico. Edizione italiana a cura di Paolo Dal Molin, traduzione di Silvia Albesano. Milan: Il Saggiatore. 2023. 

Reviewed by Jesse Rosenberg

On the list of musical works inspired by the Shoah, Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw has long held a special status. The realistic description of a roundup of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, the concluding choral Shema that constitutes one of the strongest testimonies of Schoenberg’s re-commitment to Judaism in the last two decades of his life, and the combination of advanced twelve-tone technique with Sprechstimme, one of the composer’s earliest innovations, unite to make a powerful impression on listeners to this day. In her 2014 monograph Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” in Postwar Europe, dedicated to the reception of this work, Joy H. Calico documents in detail the effect of this work on European critics and audiences, and subjects it to a thorough analysis. 

It may seem odd that the book appears now in an Italian translation by Silvia Albesano. Italian musicologists are well in step with their colleagues in other countries, who recognize English as the lingua franca of scholarship; researchers in Italy keep up with English-language publications as a matter of course. The justification for an expanded Italian edition, however, is compelling. Calico organized her 2014 monograph around six carefully chosen case studies, each devoted to the reception of A Survivor in Warsaw in a different European country (West Germany, Austria, Norway, and three countries of the Eastern bloc: East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia). In the postwar period, each of these found itself with a different historical or ideological relation to the Third Reich and its various policies, from antisemitism to musical aesthetics, from domestic goals to dealings with neighboring countries. Each case study thus constituted a unique context for responding to Schoenberg’s composition, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of its postwar reception. Calico made no claim to an exhaustive analysis of the cantata throughout Europe, which would have expanded the study into areas that are insufficiently documented, and spilled past the Cold War era, which was her primary historical focus.  

Paolo Dal Molin, the editor of the volume under review, was undoubtedly correct to discern that Italy’s reception history of A Survivor in Warsaw deserved its own study. Italy too had its own unique relation to Nazism: allied with Germany, it also boasted the most broadly-based antifascist national movement of Nazi-occupied Europe. For reasons that have been heavily debated, a large proportion of Italian Jews survived the German occupation that followed Mussolini’s 1943 deposal from power (though he was soon freed by the Germans and installed as the head of the “Italian Social Republic”). A sizeable Communist Party also distinguished postwar Italy from countries like Austria and West Germany. Enjoying strong support from both workers and the educated middle class, the party acted as an influential intellectual presence on the Italian scene, with estimable scholar-critics such as Massimo Mila writing music reviews for L’Unità, the party’s daily newspaper. Other Italian writers, such as Giorgio Vigolo, put forth views on Schoenberg’s work that have no direct counterpart in any other country. With this distinct national profile in mind, Dal Molin has supplemented Calico’s case studies with a formidable new section, divided into five chapters, on the postwar reception of Schoenberg’s cantata in Italy. Occupying nearly 200 pages, his study amounts to a monograph in itself. Although the resulting book is oddly proportioned with the mega-unit on Italy taking up as much space as Calico’s six-country survey, Dal Molin minimizes the oddity by integrating his research into thematic territory already charted by Calico. The result is a richly informative addition to the scholarly literature on music and the Holocaust.

Dal Molin’s first chapter is devoted to the institutional context of the first Italian performance of A Survivor from Warsaw: the postwar revival of the Festival Internazionale di Musica Contemporanea (FIMC) held in connection with the Venice Biennale festival. The following chapter pans out to consider two of the larger issues surrounding the composition, the rapid spread of the twelve-tone school in terms of both critical consensus and the number of composer-adherents, and the growing awareness of the Holocaust in postwar Italy. Dal Molin carries out his critica alla critica (criticism of the criticism) against the background of the dominant strain of aesthetic thought in Italy, the neo-idealism of Benedetto Croce, whose insistence on the unity of technique and expression in “the act of creative intuition” appeared difficult to reconcile with Schoenberg’s putatively cerebral method. Chapter 3 returns to the FIMC, with a particular focus on writings in the official publications the thirteenth edition of the festival (1950). These included René Leibowitz’s essay on “Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw or the Possibility of ‘Committed’ Art” (1947), the peculiar shortcoming of which were noted in the Introduction and West Germany chapter of Calico’s monograph. In his next chapter, Dal Molin surveys over forty critical articles on A Survivor published in connection with performances in Venice, Rome, and Torino (1950-1952), identifying common themes among these reactions. The final chapter also concentrates on the press reception while deepening the perspective, as Dal Molin sorts out the factors which led to the divergence of views among commentators. These chapters are followed by a conclusion that carries the study forward through the 1960s in critical studies by Luigi Rognoni, Giacomo Manzoni, Umberto Eco, and others. In the writings he cites, Dal Molin documents how the specifically Jewish content and ramifications of the work were consistently downplayed, strikingly similar to tendencies that Calico analyzed as exemplifying a process of “de-Semiticization,” typically carried out in the name of national reconstruction and antifascism. One example of this was the failure to include translations of the Sh’ma in any of the concert programs consulted by Calico save those from Czechoslovakia; in Italy, the programs did not even include a transliteration, let alone a translation, of the Hebrew text. A highly useful anthology of some of the complete reviews which Dal Molin drew on for his observations brings the book to a close. 

The Italian premieres of A Survivor from Warsaw that Dal Molin explores (Venice in 1950, Genova, Rome, and Venice again in 1951, Torino in 1952, Florence in 1954, and Milan in 1961) fall neatly within the chronological limits of Calico’s study. Dal Molin does not limit his examples to music critics and their published reviews; like Calico, he carefully scrutinizes the printed concert programs, with their accompanying essays and illustrative material, integral to the process by which perceptions of the work were shaped. He also takes note of contemporaneous writings from within the Italian Jewish community. In these ways Dal Molin successfully carries the themes explored by Calico into the Italian context. I take as an example the issue of Jewish participation in performances of the cantata during the years in question. Although A Survivor from Warsaw is unmistakably the work of a proud Jew, few Jews were involved in the European performances documented by Calico (rare exceptions were the Gdansk-born Heinz Freudenthal, who conducted the Oslo premiere in March 1954, and the Norwegian pianist Robert Levin, who assisted the chorus with their Hebrew pronunciation for the same performance; in Leipzig the cantor Werner Sander was brought in to fulfill the same behind-the-scenes office). But Freudenthal conducted the work only once, and the contributions of Levin and Sander were invisible to the public. By contrast, in every one of the Italian performances of the work from 1950 to 1961, including a live radio broadcast conducted by Bruno Maderna in Torino in the latter year, the Jewish baritone Anton Gronen Kubizki took the all-important role of the narrator, a significant increase of Jewish visibility.  

One area fruitfully explored by Calico is left largely unexplored by Dal Molin in the Italian context: the challenge of deciding what to program alongside A Survivor from Warsaw. With a running time of under eight minutes, the cantata is far too brief to take up an entire program. There is also the related issue of where to place the work on a program (the beginning? the conclusion? right before intermission?). Calico cites the knotty issue raised by Celia Applegate, the practice of pairing Survivor with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; depending on the sequence of the two pieces, we may come away with a perception of the Holocaust as a tragically ironic answer to Beethoven’s optimism or with a more comforting sense of tragedy leading to redemption. [1] Since the Italian premiere of Survivor took place in a contemporary music festival, it shared the program with new works (only). This naturally avoided ambiguous juxtapositions of Schoenberg’s cantata with Beethoven, not to mention the downright troubling pairing of Survivor with J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in a 1972 performance conducted by Hans Zender, in which the same singer who handled the narrator role of Schoenberg’s work sang the role of Jesus in Bach’s. This is not to deny that the intentions behind such programming can ever be honorable; it may well be that a concert that brings Christ’s suffering into dialogue with Jewish suffering can enhance Christian empathy for Jews. But listeners who first take in the horror of Jewish suffering through Schoenberg’s work, and then hear the Jews’ bloodthirsty cry “Kreuzige ihn!” (“crucify him!”) in Part II of Bach’s Passion, may wonder if the Jews didn’t have it coming after all. In any case, Dal Molin is not moved to comment on the question of programming in a number of the early Italian performances of the work, such as the head-spinning pot-pourri heard in the Rome premiere in 1951: Schubert’s Rosamundeoverture, Brahms’ Violin concerto, the Adagio from Mahler’s unfinished Symphony no. 10, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, and Wagner’s overture to Rienzi. 

Dal Molin considers an interesting Italian example of a Christianized take on the Holocaust in the booklet distributed for the Venice premiere: the inclusion of a reproduction of Marc Chagall’s painting Le Martyr, with its quasi-crucified Christ-figure towering over a shtetl. Chagall was far from the only Jewish creative artist drawn to the crucifixion as a “universal” symbol of human suffering, but when the juxtaposition of Jewish and Christian martyrdom comes from the Christian side, greater sensitivity is called for. Dal Molin stumbles slightly in his attempt to connect this tendency to similarly Christological interpretations of the Holocaust by Jewish Italian writers including Alberto Moravia and Natalia Ginzburg. He might have mentioned that the former, son of a gentile mother, married in the Roman Catholic rite, while the latter was a convert to Catholicism.

The organization of the book is not without its anomalies. Dal Molin changes the straightforward title of Calico’s monograph into a subtitle, preceding it with the evocative phrase La Memoria Cantata — literally “sung memory” (perhaps with an intended play upon the word “cantata”?). In common with many continental authors, he spells Schoenberg’s name “Schönberg,” as did the composer himself before settling the United States in 1933. There is little reason to emphasize this detail (along the lines of what Paul Henry Lang referred to as the “Battle of the Umlaut” in twentieth-century publications about George Frideric Handel), but it seems an odd choice when we consider how Schoenberg’s American citizenship played in European perceptions of his cantata. The list of abbreviations at the front of the volume are from Calico’s 2014 monograph, thus omitting certain abbreviations utilized by Dal Molin in his lengthy section on Italy; readers wishing to understand references to ASAC or the above-mentioned FIMC will need to catch them the first time around, where they are spelled out in full. More problematically, the bibliography at the end of the volume is largely a translation of the bibliography originally prepared for Calico’s book, thus leaving out a number of sources cited by Dal Molin, such as Robert S. C. Gordon’s The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 (Stanford University Press, 2012). Of the illustrative materials in Calico’s 2014 monograph, including several photographs, only a map of postwar Europe has been retained. Albesano has produced a highly competent translation of Calico’s writing, save for a crucial misreading of the discussion of the abbreviated Sh’ma text with which Schoenberg concluded the cantata (it corresponds to Deuteronomy 6:4-7 rather than the entire first section of the prayer, Deuteronomy 6:4-9). As Calico indicates, certain commentators have suggested the truncation may have been designed to end the Hebrew text with uv’kumekha (“when you rise up”) as a reference to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.  Surely other interpretations are possible. The verses omitted in Schoenberg’s setting are the source for certain practices of Jewish observance (the laying of tefillin, use of the mezuzah) which remained foreign to him. But Albesano obscures the issue of the abbreviated Sh’ma by inexplicably rendering the word “concludes” in Calico’s text as allude, so that in the Italian translation, the Sh’ma in Schoenberg’s setting merely “alludes” to the moment of rising up.  

Does the prominent role of the augmented triad in Schoenberg’s work, first heard at the words Adonai Eloheinu, symbolize the divine presence? Here, too, Calico limits herself to noting the interpretations put forward by scholars, prudently avoiding any assessment of their claims. Dal Molin’s tone is decidedly less dispassionate when he engages with critiques which he finds problematic. A Survivor in Warsaw, never intended to be easy, will undoubtedly continue to reverberate in controversial ways. 

Jesse Rosenberg
Clinical Associate Professor of Musicology, Northwestern University

[1] Celia Applegate, “Saving Music: Enduring Experiences of Culture,” History and Memory 17 (2005): 226.