Schubert’s Wintereise Inspires a Yiddish Elegy
Bass-baritone Mark Glanville, opera singer and author of an honored memoir, “The Goldberg Variations,” has enjoyed a lifelong passion for Schubert lieder and affection for Yiddish songs. When he began introducing Yiddish and Hebrew songs successfully into his classical recitals, it was not long before memories of family members murdered at Auschwitz materialized.
So it was that he awoke at three one morning envisioning a cycle of songs with a Holocaust context. That revelation would soon evolve into “A Yiddish Winterreise: Elegy for a Vanished World.”
During his first meeting with pianist Alexander Knapp at London’s Westminster Synagogue to perform classical Jewish music for high festival days, Glanville discovered that Knapp was a scholar, arranger of Jewish music and an expert in the Yiddish language with its medieval, oriental flavor and intonation that differs from German. Thus began their partnership in developing the song cycle.
Glanville emphasizes that the Holocaust always figured significantly in his sense of who he is and where he is from. Schubert’s “Winterreise” is about a man wounded in love and reminiscing wistfully as he travels away from his beloved. Glanville’s hero has just witnessed the destruction of his world, Vilna, the great Jewish city liquidated by the Nazis in 1941 and the home of his father’s family.
It made sense that his hero would be a professional singer, someone he can identify with, so the cycle begins with a favorite song of his traditionally performed by a badchen (wedding singer). This is the last thing the protagonist sings before the ghetto is destroyed. When he arrives on stage, he is in trauma, so he uses songs to reminisce about the world he has lost and lift himself up.
The words and melodies Glanville chose to replicate the sad journey taken by the Schubert protagonist are traditional Yiddish art songs. Some of them are upbeat, but as the cycle progresses, the terrible things he has witnessed, including the murder of his children, are revealed. In the end, he becomes mad with grief and calls on his own father as if he is a child himself. The last song, sung in Aramaic, is a kaddish associated with funerals or memorials.
