A Facsimile of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw

Abstract

A FACSIMILE OF SCHOENBERG'S A SURVIVOR FROM WARSAW Arnold Schonberg. A Survivor from Warsaw, opus 46. Faksimile nach dem Autograph aus den Sammlungen der Musikabteilung der Library of Congress, Washington = Facsimile Edition of the Autograph from the Collections of the Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Herausgegeben von = Edited by Therese Muxeneder, with a preface by Nuria Schoenberg Nono. (Meisterwerke der Musik im Faksimile, Bd. 29.) Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2014. [Pref. in Ger. and Eng., p. 5-8; introd. in Ger. and Eng., p. 9-18; documents and sketches, p. 19-26; facsimile, p. [27-60] (unnumbered). Cloth. ISBN 978-3-89007-778-9. i168.]A Survivor from Warsaw, Arnold Schoenberg's brief but potent cantata commemorating the Holocaust, is one of his bestknown works. It is also one of his most controversial. From the very beginning it has occasioned debate on both aesthetic and ethical grounds. For every listener who is profoundly moved by its harrowing account of suffering, followed by a choral finale in which Jewish prisoners defiantly sing the Shema Yisroel prayer as they are led to their deaths, there is another who winces at the extreme mimesis of the musical setting and the decision to make art music out of the suffering of others. The work is best understood as a very early attempt at Holocaust commemoration in the United States, one that predates the establishment of verbal and musical vocabularies for grappling with the unthinkable. It is a distinctly American work, one written by a naturalized citizen, mostly in English, for American audiences.For all of these reasons it is good to see Schoenberg's piece featured in LaaberVerlag's Meisterwerke der Musik im Faksimile series, which is billed as a showcase for the most important works of music by the greatest composers from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Its thirtynine volumes favor the culturally Germanic and the common-practice period, with only the scores for Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (volume 1) and Bartok's Sonata for Solo Violin Sz. 117 (volume 26) falling outside both of those categories. Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw op. 46 (volume 29) was completed in 1947, and is the most recently composed work in the series. It joins the Bartok sonata as the only pieces in the series that were composed in the United States.The present volume is a most welcome addition to what appears to be a surprisingly small number of published facsimiles of complete Schoenberg scores, all of which have appeared since 2002. The Kritische Gesamtausgabe has dedicated itself to beautifully produced, responsibly edited, and meticulously researched editions with a few sample pages in facsimile, although in 2002 it issued Gurre-Lieder: Reproduktion des Autographs nach der Faksimileausgabe von 1912 (Samtliche Werke / Arnold Schonberg, Abteilung V: Chorwerke, Reihe A, Bd. 16, T. 2, ed. Ulrich Kramer [Mainz: Schott Musik International; Vienna: Universal Edition, 2002]). This was followed by facsimiles of two songs from Belmont Music Publishers, the American company that publishes and distributes his music, and whose name (Belmont) is a French play on the composer's name: Wiegenlied (2002), and My Horses Ain't Hungry: Traditional Appalachian Folksong Arranged for a cappella Chorus by Arnold Schoenberg (reconstructed and completed by Allen Anderson, 2007). The Arnold Schonberg Center itself then brought forth Sechs kleine Klavierstucke, opus 19 (Vienna, 2009). Also relevant in this context are two new editions of Schoenberg's prose published by the University of California Press in 2010: the 100th anniversary edition of Theory of Harmony in a translation by Roy E. Carter, with a foreword by Walter Frisch; and the 60th anniversary edition of Style and Idea in a translation by Leo Black, edited by Leonard Stein, with a foreword by Joseph Henry Auner.The Arnold Schonberg Center (hereinafter ASC), which spells the composer's surname with an umlaut even though he had the spelling legally changed to the transliterated version in the United States, holds a vast treasure trove of primary and secondary sources, and its staff is very generous in sharing information, access, and digital scans of materials. …