Orchestra to perform "Diary of Anne Frank"
Composers who write works with texts try to get as close to
their subjects as possible. Only by probing the words, their issues and their
emotions can composers hope to come up with a meaningful artistic canvas.
Among the creative voices who have gone out of their way to make
such connections is Oskar Morawetz, a Czech-born Canadian composer whose life
became profoundly entwined with the subject of a piece he wrote in 1970. The
work is "From the Diary of Anne Frank," which the Cleveland Orchestra and
mezzo-soprano Sandra Graham perform this week at Severance Hall under Vladimir
Ashkenazy.
Morawetz, who is 78 and a long-time resident of Toronto, avoided
Anne Frank's famous diary for more than a decade after its publication. Since
members of his family had died in Nazi concentration camps, Morawetz, who
immigrated to Canada in 1940, wasn't eager to face the diary's painful images.
He read the diary in 1966. Four years later, when the Toronto
Symphony was looking for a piece for soprano Lois Marshall, Morawetz decided to
base the commission on an excerpt from the diary. Anne Frank became a symbol of
decendy and hope, as well as a role model for young women worldwide, for the
remarkable maturity and compassion she revealed in her diary during the three
years she hid in an Amsterdam attic with family and friends. In 1944, the Nazis
discovered the hiding place and sent the inhabitants to Auschwitz.
Anne and her sister, Margot, died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp in March 1945. Of the others who had hidden, the only
survivor was Anne's father, Otto, who devoted his life to his daughter's memory
until his death in 1980.
Before embarking on his Anne Frank piece, Morawetz contacted the
publisher to receive permission to use an excerpt. The publisher told the
composer Otto Frank held rights to the diary, so Morawetz wrote to him in
Switzerland.
Not only was permission granted, but Frank and Morawetz became
friends. Frank told Morawetz he was the first composer to be moved to write a
piece using his daughter's words. One Frank letter to Morawetz arrived just
before the work's Toronto premiere in May 1970.
"I am sending you herewith a small silver dish," wrote Frank.
"It is one of the few possessions which have been spared from our former
household. I received it as a wedding present in 1925 and I thought you would
enjoy having it."
For the Toronto premiere, Frank also cabled flowers to soprano
Marshall. The bouquet was presented by Victor Kugler, a Toronto resident and the
man who had hidden the Franks in Amsterdam.
The excerpt Morawetz chose for his work concerns Lies Goosens, a
former school friend of Anne's, who had been sent to a concentration camp. In
the diary entry, Anne writes of seeing Lies in a vision. The apparition
exclaims, "Oh, Anne, why have you deserted me? Help, oh help me, rescue me from
this hell!"
Anne pours out her feelings of powerlessness, but also a plea
that God "protect Lies; protect her; defend her, save her and bring her back to
us!"
There is a jolting irony in these words, as Morawetz would only
realize once he and Otto Frank became correspondents. Lies, in fact, had
survived incarceration and was living in Israel in 1970.
Perhaps even more incredibly, when Anna was transferred from
Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, she was assigned to a compound adjacent to one in
which Lies was residing. The friends spoke through a barbed-wire fence on three
brief occasions before Anne died, almost 16, seven weeks before the end of the
war.
"From the Diary of Anne Frank" would be a relevant musical
document at any time, but it is particularly moving this year - 50 years since
Anne's death, the liberation of the concentration camps and the end of World War
II. Morawetz's piece will receive almost a dozen performances in 1995, from
Cleveland and Vancouver to Winnipeg and Toronto. The composer will be at
Severance Hall this week and the Cleveland Museum of Art next Sunday to hear a
performance of his Duo for Violin and Piano by Cleveland Orchestra members,
Stephen Warner, violin, and Carolyn Gadiel Warner, piano, a former Morawetz
student.
The orchestra's performances of "From the Diary of Anne Frank"
are likely to bring back harrowing memories for many concertgoers. The piece
also is bound to remind us of the courage and fortitude a teenage girl must have
sustained to see the good in humanity at a time when so much of humanity was
being obliterated.
Morawetz's 19-minute score evokes its dark subject in somber
dramatic gestures and a declamatory vocal line that conveys Anne's thoughts with
striking urgency. The orchestral writing is alternately subtle and explosive. A
solo clarinet or flute reflect the desolation and loneliness Anne is feeling.
The triangle, xylophone, vibraphone, harp and piano join forces to suggest
divine messages. The entire ensemble comes to the fore sparingly to reflect
emotional turmoil.
As Anne asks God to watch over her friend, a hint of a brass
chorale takes shape: "And when I pray for her, I pray for all the Jews and for
all those in need."
Like Morawetz's "Memorial to Martin Luther King," which members
of the Cleveland Orchestra, principal cellist Stephen Geber and conductor Kurt
Masur performed here in 1987, "From the Diary of Anne Frank" is the creation of
a composer whose art becomes an eloquent, if anguished, act of conscience.
