Poignant words from girl's diary sung with VSO
"YESTERDAY evening, before I fell asleep, who should suddenly appear before my eyes but Lies.
I saw her in front of me, clothed in rags, her face thin and worn. Her eyes were very big and she looked so sadly and reproachfully at me that I could read in her eyes, 'Oh, Anne, why have you deserted, me? Help, oh help me, rescue me from this
hell.'
"And I cannot help her, I can only look on, how others suffer and die, and I can only pray to God to send ber back to
us."
Those words are from Anne Frank's diary, in which she expresses her fear and a prayer for the survival of her school friend, Lies.
It's also from the text of composer Oskar Morawetz's dramatic composition, From the Diary of Anne Frank, the major work on the next trio of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra Jubilee concerts Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at the Orpheum. Kazuyoshi Akiyama will conduct and mezzo-soprano Judith Forst will sing the text.
The work was given its premiere in 1970 with the Toronto Symphony and soprano Lois Marshall. Since then it has been in the United States, Australia and Israel.
At the time during the Second World War when Anne wrote those words - the ones Morawetz uses in his text - she and her family were in an attic in Amsterdam, hiding from the Nazis. Viktor Kugler had taken them in and hidden them.
There were more than 200 diaries that survived the war, diaries that chronicled the
suffering and the anguish each family faced while hiding out in Holland.
But Anne's was special. It was the most human, the most poignant. It was writing that transcended the horror, because the teenager refused to give up hope. Her writing was filled with the tragedy of a youth who knew her own life would never be
fulfilled and yet who believed in human decency.
Morawetz's music chronicles the relationship between Anne and Lies - 19 minutes that move
from tenderness and introspection to violent emotional upheaval.
The Czechoslovakian-born Morawetz (1917) didn't read Frank's diary for more than 20 years because, he once said,
it would remind him of his own tragedy. Ninety per cent of families he knew had died
in concentration camps during the war and he felt guilty being safe in Canada. He had come here in 1940 and became a citizen in 1946.
When he finally read the diary in 1961, he was so moved by the passages that he was determined to set sections of
it to music. Eventually, he met Anne's father, then living in Switzerland.
A meeting between the two brought Anne's relationship to her friend, Lies, to light. He found Lies living in Jerusalem under her married name, Lies Pick. She told him that Viktor Kugler was living
in Toronto.
Morawetz wasn't the only Canadian to set the diary to music. Godfrey Ridout had written several. But Morawetz had the advantage of being close to the Anne's father. It was a relationship that gave the composer insight into what Anne had written.
Her father, who died in 1979, read the diary for the first time after the war. The emotional impact was so great he had to read it over a period of weeks. Its content came as a surprise.
He told Morawetz the depth of the writing, the ideals his daughter expressed, the courage, were astonishing. He concluded that parents don't really know their children.
The diary ends on Aug. 1, 1944. A worker had revealed, for $3 per person found, the family's hideout. Of all eight people in the two families in the attic, Anne's father was the only one to survive the concentration camps.
The Frank family was sent first to Auschwitz. The mother died there. The two daughters were moved to Bergen-Belson where first Anne's sister Margot and then Anne herself died of typhus.
Morawetz, who will be at the VSO performances, is giving a lecture about the music and the diary, at Temple Sholom, 4426 West Tenth Ave., at 8 tonight.
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