Music Program, Historical Studies Program, and Hannah Arendt Center present:
Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism
Part Two: Music of Warsaw, Lodz and other Eastern Ghettoes
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Olin Hall
7:00 pm
The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is presenting a special series of concerts titled, “Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism,” featuring music composed and performed by Jewish prisoners in Nazi territories during World War II. Three concerts will feature an introduction by a noted scholar in the field placing the music within the context of the larger social, historical and political background out of which it developed.
These events are made possible through the generosity of a grant from the Bertha Effron Fund of the Community Foundation of the Hudson Valley.
The second concert in the series, “Nationalism, Continuity, and Creativity: Music of Warsaw, Lodz and other Eastern Ghettoes,” will be performed on Saturday, April 20, and will include Robert Cuckson’s 2003 song cycle, “Der Gayst funem Shturem,” (The Spirit of the Storm) with text taken from the poems of ghetto survivor Binem Heller. It will be performed in Yiddish by mezzo-soprano Malena Dayen, with piano accompaniment by David Rosenmeyer, the couple for whom Cuckson composed this cycle. The Warsaw Ghetto song cycle is informed by the rift within Jewry itself between Western and Eastern European models of Jewish accommodation and Jewish being in the modern world, a recurrent theme in Arendt’s Jewish writings. The musical performances are all, each in their own way, an expression of this internal struggle within the largerJewish community during the Holocaust. There will be a panel discussion with Cuckson and others immediately following the performance.