"A masterpiece inspired by the Resistance": Arnold Schoenberg’s "A survivor from Warsaw" in post-war Italy

dal molin

2022-01-01

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Abstract

The conception of "A survivor from Warsaw" as a Holocaust cantata, or a memorial to the genocide of the Jews that includes a sense of the Jewish resistance, has been largely or totally lost until recent decades. This is for cultural and ideological reasons, rather than documentary ones. This chapter seeks to identify those reasons that were evident in 1950s and 1960s Italy. First, it considers the work’s early reception in the years immediately following the Italian premiere: the cantata’s Jewish heritage was immediately neglected by most of the press, except when considering the literal meaning of the libretto, which in any case was quickly taken for granted and therefore largely neglected. The chapter then focuses on the main interpretations with which the cantata’s Jewishness was substituted: protest music, Ecce homo, a warning against barbarism and music of the Resistance. Humanity replaces the Jews, the reality of their extermination swallowed up by the all-pervasive nightmare of war and the increasingly prevalent narrative of Liberation from Nazi-fascism. This research is based on recent studies of the Holocaust, resistance, music criticism and the reception of Schoenberg in postwar Italian culture. It considers a range of texts published during the period (1950-1969) in concert programmes, concert reviews, essays and extracts from books that shed light on the cantata and Schoenberg. The authors considered here include Luigi Dallapiccola, Massimo Mila, Luigi Rognoni, Giacomo Manzoni, Umberto Eco and Piero Santi.