SCHOENBERG, Arnold 1874-1951

[Op. 46]. A Survivor from Warsaw [Full score]

for Narrator, Men's Chorus, and Orchestra ...

Long Island City, N.Y. Bomart Music Publications [PN bmp I/1], 1949.

Folio. Stapled. Original publisher's light gray wrappers printed in blue. 1f. (blank), 2ff. (title, texts, notes), 23, [3] (blank) pp. Narrator's text in English with some German; preliminaries with full French and German text. Chorus in transliterated Hebrew.

Series statement to lower wrapper: International Contemporary Series.

From the collection of noted musicologist Stanely Boorman, with his signature to front flyleaf and occasional annotations in pencil.

Wrappers lightly worn and browned; small price stamp to upper outer corner of upper.

First Edition. Rufer (E), pp. 73-74. GA B/19, pp. 63-64.

"The plot of the “Survivor from Warsaw,” which Schönberg wrote himself, describes a scene, typical of national socialism’s organized terror, of roll-call selection, where the human inventory was inspected, and those sentenced to death were pulled from the prisoners’ ranks; in this way, it was possibly to portray the significant patterns of everyday life in the concentration camps. Schönberg’s literary method of obscuring the Warsaw Ghetto – the symbolic location – by focusing on a locationally indefinite episode along the continuum of a larger historical process, entails that it remains factually undefined, as well. It is not, however, the authenticity of the details, but rather the interpretation thereof that is important for the reading and understanding of the terror of extermination as the signature of modern social history: “Now, what the text of the Survivor means to me: it means at first a warning to all Jews, never to forget what has been done to us, never to forget that even people who did not do it themselves, agreed with them and many of them found it necessary to treat us this way. We should never forget this, even such things have not been done in the manner in which I describe in the Survivor. This does not matter. The main thing is, that I saw it in my imagination.” (Letter to Kurt List, November 1st, 1948)" Therese Muxeneder © Arnold Schönberg Center.

Item #33260

Price: $175.00  other currencies