I Never Saw Another Butterfly
Program Notes
Terezin History
The Nazis evacuated the walled city of TEREZIN, Czechoslovakia (Theresienstadt in German) in late 1941, and turned it into a transit camp for Jews brought not only from Czechoslovakia, but eventually from all over Europe, until they could be shipped to Poland's death camps. Originally built to house some 6,000 inhabitants, at its peak Terezín had 60,000 Jewish prisoners. Of the nearly 138,000 people sent there between 1941 and 1945, 33,419 died in Terezín; 86,934 were deported (most murdered); and 17,320 were liberated. A total of 15,000 children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezín concentration camp between the years 1942-1944; less than 100 survived.
Music in Secret
Jews began clandestine cultural activities prior to the establishment of concentration camps after the enactment of racial laws which excluded them from employment. Once at Terezín, deprived of any semblance of a normal life and contact with the outside world except for bits of news from new prisoners, the Jews began musical performances in secret, beginning with well-known folk songs, and later expanding to all kinds of music. (Prior to the establishment of concentration camps, Jewish musicians were not allowed to perform publicly, and music by Jewish composers was not allowed on the radio.)
Exploitation and Propaganda
First ignored by the Nazis, the musical performances in Terezin were later actually supported by them, and in fact, exploited for propaganda purposes. The Nazis even made a film that included performances by the prisoners, and billed Terezín as “Führer’s Gift to the Jews.” Prior to a Red Cross inspection visit in 1944, elaborate preparations were made (buildings were painted, gardens planted, invalids and poorly dressed old people were ordered off the streets, stores were filled with goods, new furniture appeared in the apartments of prominent prisoners, cultural events were planned, nurses were given clean white uniforms, and lovely street signs were put up.) The Red Cross officials looked around, asked polite questions, and seemed impressed. To this day, it is unclear whether they were taken in by the ruse or reported positively on what they saw because there was little else they could do.
Music and the Arts Flourish
Musical life in Terezín increased to amazing proportions, embracing solo recitals, chamber music, orchestral performances, opera, oratorio, jazz, and a cabaret, even though the roster of personnel often changed from day to day with transports to death camps taking place at regular intervals. These concerts offered a periodic respite, in which both the musicians and the audience could momentarily forget their daily suffering and their forebodings of an unknown fate as thousands of inmates found their names listed for the transports "East," being evacuated with the same punctilious precision as that which had brought them to Terezín in the first place.
The Artists of Terezin
ILSE WEBER (1903-1944) was primarily a poet, writer of children's books, and producer of programs for Czech Radio in Prague. Weber and her husband saved the life of their oldest son when they sent him to Sweden on a Kindertransport prior to their own deportation to the Terezín concentration camp in 1942. Ich wandre durch Theresiendstadt was written for this son, Hanus, who survived and lived out his life in Sweden. Ilse wrote more than sixty poems while in Terezín. She set many of them to music, accompanying herself on the guitar while making her night rounds as a nurse in the children’s ward, where she served. When her husband was summoned for transport to the East in the fall of 1944, she volunteered to accompany him with her young son Tommy. Her wish not to break up the family resulted in the execution of Ilse and her son in Auschwitz, while her husband survived her by some thirty years. Wiegala, a lullaby of utmost simplicity, was perhaps sung as a "final caress" to accompany Weber's young charges on their final journey. Eyewitness accounts attest to hearing Weber sing this song with children as they entered the gas chambers in Auschwitz.
PAVEL HAAS (1899-1944), the first-born son of a well-to-do businessman, was born in the Moravian capital of Brno. He enrolled in the Music School of the Philharmonic Society in his early teens, when he also began his first attempts at composition. Drafted into the Austrian army in 1917, he never saw combat and was stationed in his hometown. At the end of the war, he resumed his musical studies at the newly established State Conservatory, where in 1920 he joined the class of Leos Janácek at the Master School. Influenced by Janácek's enthusiasm for Moravian folk songs and by contemporaries of other nationalities, Haas wrote songs, chamber music, and choral and orchestral works. He also wrote incidental music for dramatic productions at the Provincial Theatre in Brno, as well as film scores. (His younger brother Hugo pursued a successful career as a movie actor, first in Czechoslovakia and later in Hollywood, where he managed to emigrate.) Although a well-recognized and well-respected composer, Haas supplemented his income by working in his father's shoe store.
Some of Haas' most important compositions stem from his experience of personal and national tragedy. At the time of his birth, Moravia was part of the Hapsburg Empire. The newly independent Czechoslovakia came into being in October, 1918, after 300 years of Hapsburg oppression. The strongly patriotic Czech hymn of St. Wenceslaus resonated in Haas when the Nazis came to power. Some of the words from the hymn are, "Let us not perish, us and our descendants, Saint Wenceslaus!" A motif from the St. Wenceslaus chorale is incorporated in his Four Songs on Chinese Poetry.
Haas was sent to Terezín in 1941 expressly as a member of a team designated with building up the camp’s cultural credentials. He arrived alone, having formally divorced his wife, saving her, their young daughter, and Hugo's child, now in his wife's care, from a concentration camp. Arriving ill and depressed, the miserable conditions there further affected his severe depressions, resulting in total indifference to the very busy musical life of Terezín; he suffered an almost complete breakdown, only coming out of it with the help of other musicians. Gideon Klein could not reconcile himself to seeing an artist of Haas' caliber not participating in the musical activities. So, one day, to wake him from his lethargy, Klein put in front of him several sheets of manuscript paper, on which he himself drew the musical staff, and urged Haas to stop wasting time. And indeed, Haas composed several pieces during his stay in Terezín, although only three of them have been preserved, including the set performed here. Another of them, Study for string orchestra, was immortalized when a performance, in the presence of the composer, was included in the Nazi propaganda film, Der Führer Schenkt den Jüden eine Stadt (Hitler gives the Jews a Town). Haas died in Auschwitz in October, 1944.
Moravian-born GIDEON KLEIN (1919-1945) went to Prague at the age of eleven to take liberal arts courses at the Jirásek Gymnasium along with intensive private studies in piano. In the fall of 1938, he registered at the Charles University to study philosophy and musicology and simultaneously entered the Master School of the Prague Conservatory, graduating in piano after only one year.
His university studies came to an abrupt end on Nov. 17, when the Nazis closed all institutions of higher learning in the occupied Czech territories. During the following year, Klein pursued the study of composition as a private student of Alois Hába and, at the same time, concertized as much as the circumstances permitted, establishing himself as a pianist of distinction and appearing under the pseudonym Karel Vránek after the imposition of the race laws in Czechoslovakia in 1939. Since Jews were not allowed to perform in public, they held clandestine concerts among themselves, entering buildings not as couples, but one by one so not to arouse suspicion, often staying overnight, since curfews were in place. Klein often performed at these concerts.
Sent to Terezín in December, 1941, Klein quickly became involved in musical life there. At first, he arranged Czech, Slovak, Hebrew, and even Russian folk songs for various choral groups.
In the beginning, Klein turned his attention to composition. Later on, however, as one, even two broken-down pianos became available, he and most of the other pianists became involved in chamber music, recital accompaniments, operas, oratorios, or other genres. There were no fewer than half a dozen concert pianists who performed frequently in solo recitals and numerous other presentations. Klein was in constant demand as a pianist, arranger and rehearsal accompanist. His exceptional talents, intellect, and charismatic personality affected many of those who knew him.
A number of his pre-war compositions were found some 50 years after the war, and several of his Terezín works were saved by his older sister, Elisa Kleinová, who was a professor of musicology in Prague. Klein died in the camp at Fürstengrube around January 27, 1945. Ukolebavka is one of Klein's numerous arrangements of well-known songs, probably made in response to requests from individual singers.
VIKTOR ULLMANN (1898-1944), Pavel Haas, and well-known composer Hans Krasa (who wrote the children’s opera Brundibar, which was performed over 55 times in Terezín) were sent to Auschwitz on the same day and all three were gassed immediately upon arrival. Ullmann was an internationally celebrated composer when the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Overnight he became a “subhuman creature unworthy of existence,” whose works immediately vanished from the stage. Ironically, much of Ullmann’s pre- Terezín work has been lost, while many of the Terezín compositions have survived. In 1943 he began work on what he thought might be a book of songs based on the poetry of Hölderlin. In the end, he composed only three songs, one of which is Sonnenuntergang; they are considered to be among his masterpieces and are some of the last songs that he set.
Ullmann was born on 1 January 1898 in Teschen and murdered on 18 October 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau. On 8 September 1942, he was forced to enter a train in which he was deported to Terezín, located forty miles north of his habitual residence in Prague. During the following twenty-five months of captivity in Terezín, a former citadel that the Nazis had turned into a concentration camp, he composed his seventh piano sonata, the opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" and the melodrama "Die Weise von Liebe und Tod" on a text by R.M. Rilke. These works led to Ullmann's international reputation, which has been growing since 1990 in the framework of the rediscovery of composers who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis.
The tragic end of his biography should not obscure Ullmann's notoriety as a composer between the two World Wars in Czechoslovakia and abroad; his works had been successfully performed in Prague, Geneva, Berlin, London and New York. His achievements were partly undermined by the murderous cultural and racial policies of the Nazis and thus, fell into oblivion after World War II.
Viktor Ullmann was born in Teschen, which today is called Cieszyn (in Polish) or Cesky Tesin (in Czech). Both his parents were descendants of Jewish families, however, they converted to Catholicism before Viktor's birth. His father Maximilian Ullmann therefore was able to become a professional soldier and during World War I he was promoted to the rank of colonel and was knighted.
In 1909 Viktor began high school in Vienna. His musical interests and abilities opened doors to the Arnold Schönberg circle. Directly after the completion of his A-levels he volunteered for military service. Having been deployed at the Isonzo front in Italy, he was awarded a study break and he began law studies at the University of Vienna. In October 1918 he was also enrolled in Schönberg's seminar for composition. In May 1919, however, he ended both these pursuits and left Vienna for Prague in order to devote his entire time to music.
Alexander von Zemlinsky became his new mentor and under his direction Ullmann conducted at the New German Theatre in Prague until 1927. His seven songs with piano accompaniment from 1923 initiated a series of successful first performances of compositions that continued through to the early 1930s ("Sieben Serenaden"). During the 1929 Geneva Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, Ullmann's "Schönberg-Variations,” a piano composition on a theme written by his former Vienna teacher, were highly regarded. Five years later, the orchestral version of this piece was awarded the "Hertzka" price, named after the former director of the "Universal Edition". Meanwhile, he worked for two years as a conductor in Zurich and ran an anthroposophical bookshop in Stuttgart, before returning to live permanently in Prague in 1933.
While his works dating back to the 1920s had been heavily influenced by Schönberg's atonal composition style and by Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck", Ullmann developed these approaches further in his compositions written after 1935. Ullmann's personal new style was characterized by dissonant harmonies at the borderline of tonality, tensed musical expression and the skilful mastery of many forms.
Until his deportation to Terezín, Ullmann composed forty-one works, including three piano sonatas, song cycles on poems by various authors, operas and the piano concerto op. 25 (which he had finished in December 1939, just nine months after German soldiers invaded Prague). Most of these works are considered missing; their manuscripts presumably were lost during the German occupation. However, thirteen printed music scores from Ullmann's own publications survived because he had asked a friend to safeguard them.
In Terezín, Ullmann remained very active musically; he acted as a piano accompanist, organized concerts, wrote musical reviews and continued composing. These compositions have survived almost in their entirety and include choral works, song cycles, stage music, his last three piano sonatas, the third string quartet, the melodrama after Rilke's "Cornet" and the chamber opera "The Emperor of Atlantis".
CHILDREN’S ARTWORK and POETRY that was created in Terezín has survived, in part, due to Willy Groag, a former prisoner of Terezín, who was appointed coordinator of the children and youth department after the liberation and the war’s end. He was entrusted with two suitcases of children’s art work by a student of artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis in 1945. He brought the suitcases to the Prague Jewish community where they sat on a shelf collecting dust for over ten years. Then the drawings were rediscovered and exhibited, and have since been seen by millions throughout the world. They, along with children’s poetry written in the camp – the best known of which is Pavel Friedman’s “The Butterfly” – appear in a volume entitled “I Never Say Another Butterfly.” The texts for the piece written by contemporary composer JOEL HARDYK all come from this book.
In Terezín there were art classes taught by well-known artists, one of whom was Dicker-Brandeis. A Bauhaus-trained secular painter of portraits and landscapes, she turned down a visa that would have enabled her to enter Palestine, because she felt her place was in Europe. In 1942, she began her residency in Terezín. Others who taught often expected and received compensation in bread, but she would accept no payment. She went from group to group, calmly and instinctively teaching, though she had no pedagogical education. The children awaited her visits eagerly. She taught exercises in breathing and rhythm, the study of reproductions, textures, color values, the importance of observation and patience. She would tell stories and the children would be required to draw the objects she had mentioned twice. They drew flowers, butterflies, rainbows, streets, railways, family portraits, and merry-go-rounds, among many other things. They drew their concealed inner worlds and tortured emotions, which Dicker-Brandeis was then able to enter and try to heal. The children of Terezín created about 5,000 drawings and collages, while Dicker-Brandeis herself drew very little – she saved the paper and paint for the children. She was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and died in Birkenau.
The last remaining Jews left Terezín on August 17, 1945. It has since returned to its tranquil surroundings. Virtually no trace remains of the ghetto years. One sees the rolling hills, the gentle juncture of the two rivers, the Bohemian mountains.
And the butterflies.