Yesterday I was lucky enough to be present at the Montreal Premier of Oratorio Terezin by Ruth Fazal. It was presented at Salle Wilfred Pelletier at Place des Arts, a posh spot, and although the theater was only 3/4 full, the audience was attentive and appreciative. It was quite long—over three hours in all–and very intense, but the singing was wonderful. Several choirs were present: The Vanier Singers, a childen’s choir and another choir, plus a small orchestra and five soloists.
Ruth Fazal, who is a Christian, takes letters and poems written by Jewish children in Terezin concentration camp and weaves them together with passages from the Old Testament. In the work, as the children–and the Jews themselves–remain in the camp, they go through various stages of emotion, almost like the stages of grief that have been written about: denial, during which they talk about how they will be going home soon; annoyance, in which they talk of minor complaints; despair, during which they cry out for God to save them; anger, with which they tell themselves that their Lord will smite the unjust; uncertainty, when they wonder if God has forgotten or rejected them; anguish, when they ask themselves what they could have done to anger Him; sorrow at their situation and at God’s silence; hope for a future in which they can be reconciled to God.
In the midst of all this intensity, there is a segment that made me wonder. It is the passage from Isaiah in which the prophet talks of a man growing up in obscurity, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”, who was “afflicted” and “suffered for our sins, and who was “led like a lamb to slaughter.’ I wondered, as I sat there listening, if the Jews in the audience realized that these are the words that classical music lovers know well because they are used in a part of Handel’s Messiah, where they refer to Jesus. For the Jews, I guess they refer to the Messiah, but it’s confusing, because Isaiah speaks of this person in the past tense rather than in the future tense, which is odd for a prediction, whether of a Messiah or of Jesus. Could Isaiah originally have been speaking of someone who had already lived? Did the Jews pick up his words and think they described a future Messiah the way the Christians saw them as a prophesy about a future Jesus?
More to the point, why did Ruth Fazal use this passage in Oratorio Terezin?
Is she suggesting that what kept the Jews alive was a hope in the coming of the Messiah? That seems strange, for if the Messiah was going to come and suffer, the Holocaust would have been a good time for him to have appeared, when there was suffering enough for all. Is she suggeting that the Jews identified themselves with a suffering Messiah they thought Isaiah had promised them? Or was she, on some level at least, implying that they might have had more hope if they had believed in Jesus?
Ruth Fazal is not only a Christian, but a very fervent one, one who believes that God led her to this material and sustained her during her composition of it. Could she then have been without any Christian sentiment as she wrote it? Could she subconsciously have chosen that passage with Jesus in mind, even as she arranged it as one of the prophesies from the Jewish prophets? Could she in fact have included this passage to suggest a kind of link to Christianity, which also believes in a suffering leader, as if to say that we have something in common with the Jews, even apart from the fact that we have used all their stories from the Torah for our own Old Testament, plus their prophesies as ones for our Jesus?
There is also, according to my husband, a place in the work where she introduces a few lines of a well-known.hymn by Handel, She was apparently quite annoyed when the conductor, on his own, told the orchestra to play this with disdain, since it was a Lutheran hymn and Lutherans hated the Jews. He understood that Fazal was putting in in there ironically. Instead, she had some idea about Lutherans that was positive. All this does make me wonder if she had a hidden agenda.
One of the soloist is supposed to be The Voice of God. The singer was a tall, young man with shoulder length hair, a tenor, quite a surprise for those who think of God as a mature, Jove-like being with a beard. His songs made me mad, even though they were beautiful in themselves. As the choirs sang of the Jews’ cries of sorrow, pain and outrage, the Voice of God sang passages from Psalms and from the prophets about how God had always loved the Jews, therefore how could he forget them? Rather than then voicing God’s advice or consolation, the young tenor sang the lovely words from the Song of Solomon: “Awake, my love, it is spring, and the sound of the turtledove is heard in the land.” I beg your pardon? How does this help the suffering Jews? I know that these passages, which contain such lovely love poems, are considered by both the Jews and the Christians as symbolic of God, i.e. the bridegroom, calling His people, or his Church., i.e. the bride, but I still don’t see how this fits in which the situation in the Oratorio. If this is God’s answer to his suffering people, the Jews, what is he saying? He’s saying “I love you”, I guess. But it sounds both beautiful—invoking as it does the beauty of spring–and cruel, since the Jews are in a concentration camp, forced to find beauty in dandelions and the occasional butterfly.
It doesn’t matter, of course, except that as it is, the piece doesn’t really have a conclusion that works, in my estimation. After the anger and sorrow of the songs, there is a passage from Psalms about going into a garden and seeing the richness of the earth. I thought, “Oh great. This suggests Israel, God’s gift to the Jews after all their suffering, and how they will turn a desert into something rich and arable.” But no, the next poem, in describing some aspect of natural beauty, mentions the barbwire again, so they must still be in the camp.
And then, just when there seems to be no answer to the situation of the Jews at all, the children begin to sing: ‘Da da da da da da da da da da da,” over and over and over, until it is finally taken up by the adult choir and eventually by the orchestra. It is a very long passage of repetition, and then, with a flourish of trumpets and timpani, the work ends. What does ‘da da da’ mean, though? Does it represent whistling in the dark? The passage of time? John says it is supposed to be a song of joy. Oh, really? It’s monotony keeps it from sounding joyful; it sounds like Morse Code, using all dots and no dashes, not like notes of joy. And it feels as if Ruth Fazal really didn’t know how to resolve the tension of the work she had created. I had half-expected a ‘rescue by the Allies’ segment of victorious music; or a segment when they sang in joy at release; or one when they set sail for Israel, or reconciled with their God; or thanked him for the gift of a new land. But no; it’s as if at the end we are only hearing telegrams being sent around the world, which eventually lead to, supposedly, the flourish (of freedom?) at the end.
Very strange. It was quite beautiful and dramatic, however, and I’m glad I went.
