UNATTAINABLE PEACE (Symphonic Poem No. 1)
This Symphonic Poem follows no set program. It is, rather, an attempt to set in music emotions and feelings associated with certain historic events. The first impetus for this piece came from reading an article in the August 3, 1992 issue of The New Yorker magazine by Timothy Ryback entitled Report from Dachau. Particularly resonant for me was a paragraph recounting the memories of a man who had lived above the square where transport trains arrived during the darkest hours of the century.
I. Der Bahnhofsplatz: Early morning in Dachau – cold and clear. Trains converge from the distance and arrive with the dawn in a screech of brakes; metal wheels on rails. Huge wooden doors slide open violently. Into the light peer thousands of weary eyes, each set belonging to a human who is wondering why they were brought here; and in such a way. Any thought or curiosity is shattered by the shouts of the guards to step down and line up. The morning stillness is broken by the sound of wooden shoes tramping over the cobbled square.
II. Der Teufelsspielplatz: The large central movement of this work is based on a B pedal and two pitch cells: D , A, C , E and D, A , C, E and their juxtaposition. While I was scoring the work I looked down at a page I had just finished and realized that it was covered with tritones, the diabolus in musica. I muttered to myself, "my God, it's the Devil's playground" and decided that would be a good name for the movement, translated, with a little poetic license, into German.
III. Unattainable Peace: Dawn again. A strange dawn; the birds have returned to the woods outside Auschwitz–Birkenau after having been driven away by the awful stench of human misery, as compellingly described by Jorge Semprun in Literature or Life. Freedom has come, but joy does not come with it. Years of privation, slavery, and death have taken their toll and it will be decades before the strongest survivors' wounds will heal. In those decades of rebuilding there are many stories of great courage and quiet fortitude yet: as the survivors near the end of their natural lives they face anew the horror of the past as their claims are routinely denied by banks, insurance companies, and others who have profited by their loss. They must also face the ignorant and the demagogues who deny the single most horribly defining years of their time on Earth. It is not a happy ending and it must be fought to the grave. The final sound heard is a string drum, a pan-cultural instrument that is know by many names around the world which, in one of its incarnations, was called a "Bulls Roar" and was used by the Hungarian Empire to mass troops for battle. On the final page of my score is inscribed this quatrain from a poem by Czeslaw Milosz:
So the Earth endures, in every petty manner
And in the lives of men, irreversible.
And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?
What for, if the world will forget us anyway.
The third section of Unattainable Peace, with very slight variations, was first composed, performed, and recorded as a tribute to Yitzach Rabin (Hush'd be the Camps To–Day, available on VMM 3039). I chose to utilize this as the finale for Unattainable Peace as many of the same feelings are involved: anguish, despair, and a sense of hopelessness and wonder at the brutality of Mankind; yet, in this movement, a glimmer of hope creeps in that someday, somehow, we will set aside our mundane differences and realize that we are "A piebald parliament…of that multiform pilgrim species, man". (Melville)