Massacre of the Innocents: creating a Holocaust memorial libretto

Abstract

ABSTRACT Part I of the article looks at the challenge of writing Holocaust poetry and music in the light of Adorno’s revision of his famous pronouncement about poetry after Auschwitz into an acknowledgment that suffering ‘demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it,’ and goes on to consider how the poets Paul Celan, Karen Gershon, Geoffrey Hill, Primo Levi, Sylvia Plath, Peter Porter, Nelly Sachs and Hilda Schiff, and the composers Harrison Birtwistle, David Lumsdaine, Steve Reich and Arnold Schoenberg make use of their personal distance from their subject matter as they attempt to create art out of atrocity. Part II discusses how the historical source material of the author’s libretto in memory of the child victims of the Holocaust was crafted into the musical forms of recitative, lieder, lullaby and biblical lament.