Two multimedia programs by Mark Ludwig of the Terezín Music Foundation
By Albert Stern / BJV Editor
LENOX – Last summer, Mark Ludwig – long-time violist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, director of the Terezín Music Foundation, and author of Our Will to Live: The Terezín Music Critiques of Viktor Ullmann, the invaluable document of the Theresienstadt ghetto in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia – sold out two illuminating programs at the Tanglewood Learning Institute. The multimedia presentations, titled “Immersion: Defiant Music,” combined lecture, art, and live performance to explore how the Nazi Party’s cultural policies were connected its racial policies, and how both shared roots in earlier German history.
This summer, Ludwig returns to the TLI on Friday, August 16 and Saturday, August 17, with a new two-part series titled “Trauma, Memory, & Transcendence in Music.” Ludwig will draw on his Terezín research and also use the work of contemporary composers to explore the nature of trauma and how it is transmitted through musical expression. This program will also feature performances by Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians, as well as a conversation with noted Jewish composer, Osvaldo Golijov, who was raised in Argentina and studied in Israel.
“On its surface, the theme…is a pretty heavy topic,” he explains. “Yet I hope it won’t scare people away, because what we’re looking at is what music can do as a language that’s so unique to the experience” of trauma, memory, and transcendence. He says that the “cross-platforming” techniques he will employ will provide something of a “more multidimensional experience of a program notes” that he hopes will not only enrich the audience’s experience of the works he will sample, but also shift the way they experience other creative works.
Ludwig says his overarching subject will be: “How do you deal with trauma, and the memory of it? And how does that get channeled through the creative process? We’ll be looking at it through the lens of music. Is [the trauma] repurposed? Does it change? How does it morph? And then in some cases – not all, of course – but in some cases, the rare ones, it gets us to transcendence.” By drawing on different works and composers from the past and present, Ludwig will explore the type of character transcendence of this sort might assume.
In Friday%u2019s program, "Do Not Forget Me," Ludwig will focus on the all-too-short life and career of Gideon Klein (1919-1945), a Czechoslovakian Jew who was interned at Terezin, became one of the leading composers at the camp, and was later murdered at a subcamp of Auschwitz not long before the end of the war. His best-known work is a string trio that music blogger Michael Haas (Forbidden Music) writes is “now standard repertoire and performed in concerts that do not take the Holocaust or Terezín as its subject. There is painfully little that remains, but what remains is more than just the promise of a young talent cut short.” Haas even speculates that the experience being a prisoner might have elevated Klein’s talent, in the way that fellow composer Viktor Ullman posited in writing: “I would like to point out that Theresienstadt was not an obstacle to my work, it actually inspired me. That by no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the rivers of Babylon, and that our zest for culture fully matched our zest for life.” (Ullman was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.)
In this program, Ludwig says he will explore the different paths that trauma might find its expression in a creative artist’s work. “Some composers who write about trauma may be writing about events that they may not themselves have been involved or experienced firsthand, but that they're responding to through their music. Then you get to another layer of composers where perhaps a specific trauma was part of their lives, and they deal with it as occurring during that specific time [in the past]. Then you get to composers like Gideon Klein – when you look at his life, his creative period as a composer, in totality, spanned occupation by the Nazis and then being in a concentration camp. He never had a period of being a free person composing. Trauma envelops his music throughout.”
On Saturday, Ludwig will be joined by contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov, who will discuss his 2020 work “Falling Out of Time,” which was inspired by Israeli author David Grossman’s novel of the same name about the parental grief of losing a son in combat. In an interview with the Classical Post website, the composer explained, “We still don’t know what ‘Falling Out of Time’ is. We know it is not an opera, and it is not a song cycle either. We concluded that the most apt description is “a Tone Poem in Voices,” following [Grossman’s] own description of his novel as “a Novel in Voices.” The piece – an intense expression of almost unbearable anguish sung in English and Hebrew – was recorded by the Silkroad Ensemble in 2020.
Says Ludwig: “In The Inferno, Dante wrote: ‘At grief so deep, the tongue must wag in vain.’ The language of our senses and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain. Music can be that vocabulary.”
Although the themes of Ludwig’s programs were worked out before the Oct. 7 attack and the Gaza war, the themes of trauma, memory, and transcendence will no doubt have a profound contemporary resonance. Memory is itself a creative process and we are seeing in real time how trauma is starting to turn into memory.
Says Ludwig: “About what has been happening in the Middle East – 40, 50, 60 years from now, we have no idea how events will be processed. But there will obviously be works of art. That's part of the process of not only wrestling with what happened, but digesting it and [figuring out] where do we go from here? And that is key to what I want to show in these two talks. Where were these composers thinking of going from where they found themselves? It wasn't just, ‘Here's my trauma, and I'm going to remember it and sit with it.’ We are going to experience music that gets to transcendence. That music doesn’t just stay with you for the moment – you take it with you. And what happens with that? Memory is part of the creative process that we are involved in, too, because we, in turn, after we have absorbed a work of art, interpret it in our own way.”
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“Trauma, Memory, & Transcendence in Music” is a two-part event collaboration between the Tanglewood Learning Institute and the Terezin Music Foundation. The program will be facilitated by Mark Ludwig, Terezín Music Foundation director and Boston Symphony Orchestra member emeritus. Both presentations will be presented at the Linde Center, Studio E.
Trauma, Memory, & Transcendence in Music. Part 1: Do Not Forget Me on Friday, August 16 at 2:30 p.m.
Tickets for each day are available for $35 per seat and may be purchased at the Tanglewood box office or online at bso.org.
Photo by Michael J. Lutch