Charles Davidson’s choral song cycle,
I Never Saw Another Butterfly
(1968), is one of many Holocaust-inspired
musical works related to the Theresienstadt
(Terezin) experience. It is also one of a
number of settings, by various composers, of
poems from the collection of the same title
(in its 1964 English-language edition)—poems
written by Jewish children imprisoned in
that former walled city turned
transit-concentration camp as they awaited
removal to death camps. Davidson saw in
these poems the artistic potential of a
serious choral work that would in no way
trivialize the Holocaust or the barbarity
symbolized by Terezin. For this is no
simplistic, meek victims’ memorial, nor is
it an aesthetically enhanced so-called
commemoration of an event in history that
has no place for aesthetic value on its own
terms. Rather, it is a dramatic reminder to
the world—by virtue of the childlike
innocence and naïve hope expressed in the
resolute courage of those young poets—of the
depth of the unredeemable, savage brutality
of the German and German-led death machine
that sought nothing less than the
annihilation of the Jewish people and its
children. It is, of course, also the
composer’s way of providing remembrance for
these children, most of whose lives were
extinguished soon after their poetry was
written and who thus have no descendants—in
emblematic Judaic terms, "no one to say
kaddish for them. But its deeper
significance may be its function as a
document of the essence of sheer, unalloyed
evil, personified by the Germans and their
collaborators in their destruction of
European Jewry and Jewish life—facilitated
by all those whose action might have made
some difference but who remained
disinterested or silent, vocally or
militarily. Commissioned by the East End Synagogue in
Long Beach, New York, I Never Saw Another
Butterfly was composed originally for a
three-to-five-part choir of boys’ voices. It
is dedicated to the Columbus Boychoir, in
Princeton, New Jersey, since renamed the
American Boychoir, which has performed the
work at concerts throughout North America
and Europe. It can be performed with equal
success, however, by other types of treble
choirs—girls’ voices, or boys’ and girls’
voices in combination. The work comprises settings of twelve
poems, preceded by a Preludium, "Night in
the Ghetto. The poetry and its musical
expression are filled with poignant
sentiments of bleakness and fear, as well as
touching references to deprivation and
longing—all tempered by youthful resilience—and
the music echoes in its most lyrical moments
the universally typical spirits of children
rather than mature lugubriousness or a sense
of doom. That the poems might not on their
surface reflect the full reality of the
surreal horror of the situation, nor
acknowledge the certainty of the eventual
murder that awaited most of the children
only heightens for us some of the more
deeply layered subtexts of the genocide and
of the perversity that could perceive some
mortal threat in these children’s very lives. In 1988 the original piano accompaniment
was orchestrated by the British composer and
conductor Donald Fraser for a performance
and recording by the American Boychoir at
Princeton University’s Richardson
Auditorium. That choir has also frequently
performed the work in a staged presentation
created by the Broadway stage director
Dennis Rosa. In addition, the work has
received, in the aggregate, more than 2,500
performances throughout the world by many
non-Jewish (including public school and
church) as well as Jewish children’s and
youth choirs during the more than forty
years since its completion. Among these have
been several presentations at the Vatican in
the presence of the Pope and those at the
Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. But for Davidson, the most moving and
most momentous of all its renditions was its
1991 performance at the actual site of the
poems’ genesis, Terezin, in the presence of
Václav Havel, the writer turned president of
what was still known as Czechoslovakia (later
the Czech Republic), and in the presence of
350 aging survivors of the prison camp that
once occupied the city. That performance,
with symphony orchestra, once again featured
the American Boychoir, which also sang it in
Prague and at the Jesuit church in Brno in
that time frame. The choir’s European tour
was timed to coincide with the Terezin
performance, the occasion of which was the
official opening and dedication of the new
Jewish Museum in the former barracks of
imprisoned Terezin children—something
unimaginable in the only recently collapsed
era of the Iron Curtain, when Czechoslovakia
was still under the Soviet Union’s embrace
as a satellite country. Nineteen ninety-one
marked the fiftieth year since the Germans’
establishment of Theresienstadt as the
infamous way station for Jews destined for
death camps and as the ruse sadistically and
mendaciously called the Paradise Ghetto,
which was designed to delude and deceive the
International Red Cross (and through it, the
world) on its inspection visit there during
the war, thus to put the lie to circulating
rumors of mass murder and genocide. The
October 1991 dedication ceremonies, at which
Havel spoke, were cosponsored by the Terezin
Initiative, an organization of concentration
camp survivors; the Jewish Committees in
Czechoslovakia; the State Jewish Museum in
Prague; and the International Terezin
Committee. A documentary film for television
was made of the occasion, including the
actual ceremonies as well as footage of the
town and its surroundings, along with the
arrival of the survivors, dignitaries, and
other guests—among whom was Charles
Davidson—and interviews. For Davidson, this was understandably one
of the most moving as well as troubling
experiences of his life. "I had lived with
the music and the poetry for many years, he
wrote in 1993, "and have always believed
that it expressed my deepest feelings of
sorrow at the destruction wrought upon the
Jewish people and other peoples by the
inhumanity. . . . But I never thought that I
would be forced to confront the reality of
the poems and their authors in the very
place they last lived before they were
murdered." Of all his numerous works—of many genres
and on so many programmatic topics—I
Never Saw Another Butterfly remains
closest to Davidson’s heart, the one
composition—were he forced to choose—by
which he would want to be remembered. Indeed,
though he has earned countless well-deserved
accolades for much of his liturgical oeuvre
as well as his larger, musical-dramatic
pieces, many in the Jewish as well as
general choral worlds consider I Never
Saw Another Butterfly to be his finest
work.
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Sheila Silver : To the Spirit Unconquered Inspired in part by the writings of Italian poet and
Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, Shelia Silver's To
The Spirit Unconquered is, in her words, "about
the ability of the human spirit to transcend the most
devastating of circumstances, to survive and to bear witness."
Commissioned by the Guild Trio, it was premiered in 1992 and
subsequently recorded for the CRI label in 1996. Silver
designed each movement to reflect a different aspect of the
concentration camp experience Levi conveyed in his writings,
though she confesses to having added a bit of optimism not
present in Levi's work. In the first movement, marked "With
great intensity—strained, sometimes violent," fear is expressed.
Dark tremolos in the strings and crashing dissonant piano chords
create a strong sense of foreboding. "As if in a dream," the
second movement, focuses on memory and its importance to camp
victims' survival. Here, piano lines often seem to float above
swooning strings. At other times, the different instruments play
off one another like flashes of memories passing by in the mind.
The third movement, "Very fast, rhythmic, and precise," a
scherzo, depicts barbarism. The rhythm is quick and syncopated,
with staccato stabs and angular melodies. Only a pause separates
the third movement from the finale, "Calm and stately," which,
with its soaring melodies, represents the spirit's transcendence.
In a 1998 interview with the Milken Archive, Silver claimed
To the Spirit Unconquered as her most successful piece
to date, stating that it had been widely performed and had won
over audiences skeptical of modern music.
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