The Yiddishe Winterreise – a Review
by Malcolm Miller

An imaginative reinterpretation of Schubert’s classic song cycle Der Winterreise formed a moving and uplifting concert to commemorate Holocaust Day. It was devised and performed by the bass baritone Mark Glanville with special piano arrangements by Alexander Knapp. The premiere took place at Central Synagogue, Great Portland Street , London W1, on Sunday 28 January 2007 , presented by the Jewish Music Institute and Central Synagogue before an enthusiastic audience.

The evening was introduced by Geraldine Auerbach , Director of the Jewish Music Institute and by Mr Raban Richter, a German Embassy cultural attaché, who acknowledged the responsibility of the younger generation, his own generation, both to understand and learn from the history of the Holocaust, and to ensure that such events would never occur again. As Mark Glanville himself explained in his programme note, the underlying concept was an exploration of the paradox of the German-Jewish experience in the context of the Holocaust. Schubert’s masterly song cycle picks up where the poet of Die Schone Mullerin breaks off, and deals with the harrowing emotional suffering of the poet-lover as he leaves his faithless beloved and is confronted with the bleak, cold winter that reflects his interior moods of loss and despair, as well as the memories of happier times. ‘Der Leierman’, the final song, depicts his leaving with the hurdy-gurdy man, a symbol perhaps of the eternal outsider and the constancy of the spirit. In Glanville’s version Schubert’s lover-poet becomes a Yiddish wedding singer, or ‘badkhn’, whose twenty four songs begin and end with unaccompanied melodies, the first a wedding song ‘Khosn Nazingns’ (ascribed to the veteran Yiddishist Majer Bogdanski), and the last, the ‘kaddish’ (mourner’s prayer), in a traditional Ashkenazi prayer mode.

Mark Glanville’s sequence of songs is designed to suggest an emotional journey of the wedding singer, a symbol of the Jews of central and Eastern Europe , during the Holocaust, as he leaves his Shtetl, one of the villages of Poland or the Russian Pale of Settlement, and witnesses the destruction of the culture in which he was nurtured. If the general imagery of the betrayed lover was apt to represent the feelings of a betrayed Jewish people wandering in the hostile desert of the Holocaust, that connection was underlined all the more poignantly in the quotation of one of the songs of Der Winterreise, ‘Der Lindenbaum’, sung in a remarkable Yiddish translation. Here the tree offers rest and peace, but for the restless, vulnerable poet it is just an illusion, a wisp of happier memory. Yet there is a note of hope in the specific ‘translated’ narrative of Der Yiddishe Winterreise, which closes with four songs about childhood, reflecting memories of innocence and joy, the peace of sleep and divine rest. The poignantly poetic final song, ‘A Malekh vert Geboyrn’ (An Angel is Born), suggests survival, both of the Jewish people and of the spirit of humanity in general, through the prayers of a new generation.

Overall it was a musically mezmerizing and beguiling experience. Glanville’s powerful resonant baritone, redolent of years of experience in leading opera companies such as Opera North, Scottish Opera, and New Israeli Opera, gained in focus and intensity during the course of the cycle, while Knapp’s accomplished pianism displayed masterly command of colour and line. One of the intriguing aspects of the cycle was how some of the very familiar Yiddish songs took on new meanings and moods, due to their place within the twenty-four song sequence, to Glanville’s intensity of characterisation, and to the evocative expression of nine new arrangements by Alexander Knapp, in which surprising harmonies mapped the mood inflections of the texts with subtlety, enhancing the melodies with colour and shade. Knapp, a scholar and composer who has also published attractive arrangements of Ladino songs, painted anew each verse of the slow expressive ‘Oyfn Pripetchik’, its Verdian piano preamble followed by meandering textures and chromatic chords reminiscent of Brahms or Busoni. ‘Rozhinkes mit Mandeln’, one of the most popular Yiddish lullabies, had a fresh mood of elusive warmth, while the simple dance refrain of ‘Tumbalalayka’ returned repeatedly spiced with unpredictable modulations, emphasising the jaunty sense of mystery. Finally the jolly ‘Rabbi Elimelech’ was subject to vivid variations, from sinewy and slow to folk like cimbalom imitations to spiky ironic marches, moments of jumpy comicality leading to a rhapsodic climax.

Glanville’s robust characterisation well conveyed the bleak horror and the life affirming images of the folk poetry, balancing the expressions of anguish and pain with those of defiance and hope. Slow songs like ‘S’brent (Its burning) about the destroyed ‘shtetl’, ‘Jerushaloyim’, a prisoner’s impassioned yearning for Zion, and Moyshele Mayn Fraynd’ a reminiscence of a lost, vivacious childhood, were contrasted by ebullient, snappy dances such as ‘A Zemer’, the klezmery ‘Der Rebe hot Geheysen Freylech Zayn’ and ‘Hot a Yid a Vaybele’, and a Cossack dance. In several songs alluding to liturgical music, Glanville injected a necessary cantorial fervour, and at times the ‘sobbing’ style, notably in ‘Habein Yakir Li Efrayim’ by Rabbi Levi Yitshok of Berditchev. Other highlights included the operatic grandeur of ‘Unter Dayne Vayse Shtern’ (Under Your White Stars), enriched with Knapp’s Rachmaninov-like arrangement, and the Chopinesque calm of ‘Der Zeyger’ (The Clock) with its ‘Raindrop’ prelude style accompaniment.

The ‘a capella’ final ‘Kaddish’ formed a stirring and chilling close to the cycle, an affirming gesture highlighting how prayer and song go hand in hand as a force to conquer destruction and evil. All in all, Mark Glanville and Alexander Knapp succeeded in showing how a folk idiom such as Yiddish song may be adapted to the demands of a sophisticated aesthetic goal through inventive artistic arrangements and large-scale dramatic pacing. The event as a whole emphasised a particularly Jewish spiritual expression of faith in the face of suffering, appropriately universalised in this concert to mark the Holocaust Day anniversary, a responsibility to remember the past, to awaken the morality of the present and to hope in the promise of a peaceful future.

Malcolm Miller © 2007

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