Breaking Silence: Juliek & Mozart

“One can almost hear the Italian words as the two ‘singers’ (parentheses mine) in their passionate protestations.”

“To be indifferent — for whatever reason — is to deny not only the validity of existence, but also its beauty. Betray, and you are a man; torture your neighbor, you're still a man.  Evil is human, weakness is human; indifference is not”—Eliezer Wiesel (1926-2016).

In late 1944, more than 10,000 men were confined in Buna/Monowitz.  It housed mostly Jewish prisoners who did forced labor at the I.G. Auschwitz plant site.  As the Red Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, according to the Wollheim Memorial web page, the SS ‘evacuated’ the Auschwitz camp complex, including the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp and forced the prisoners to take part in a death march.

About 850 sick prisoners were abandoned in the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp; many died in the following days, and the survivors were liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945.  Elie Wiesel wrote about the death march in his remarkable memoir, “Night.”

The marchers had received double rations of bread and margarine for the road, and Elie reported he had two pieces of bread when he left the camp. Traveling by night to avoid detection by the Red Army, the starving prisoners arrived the second night at Gleiwitz.  It was there a violinist named that Juliek died.

Their duties were varied, but often they provided background music for incoming and outgoing work commandos at the camp gates.

According to Music and the Holocaust, musical ensembles were formed of imprisoned professional and amateur musicians.  Their duties were varied, the website said, but often they provided background music for incoming and outgoing work commandos at the camp gates, and to perform music to accompany executions that were staged, as a deterrent, before the entire camp population.

“During camp inspections, proud commanders showed off the ensembles as ‘special attractions,’ and as proof of their camp’s exemplary performance. They also played for the guards’ private entertainment,” the site said.

Wiesel said Juliek played Beethoven before he died, but why?  Wiesel didn’t say in “Night,” and little is available online.  Even Oprah, failed to ask this question during a YouTube interview in 2012.  In his book, Wiesel asked, “Who was this madman who played the violin here, at the edge of his own grave? Or was it a hallucination?”

“It had to be Juliek,” Wiesel concluded. “He was playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto.  Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound.  In such silence … it was as if Juliek's soul had become his bow."

It has been speculated Juliek's playing was an act of rebellion. Jews could not play Beethoven among themselves, Beethoven being a member of the Master Race and all. According to eNotes, and other sources, it was an insult to the Nazis for a Jew to play German music (Beethoven was a German composer and musician). The Jews were considered inferior and subordinate to the Nazi Germans.

When a people are uprooted, they go about making do with what they have. They turn their new place into a home.

Juliek must have chosen Beethoven for a reason. Was it a protest, or perhaps because Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 (widely believed to hold the fragment Wiesel heard), was ignored by many as inferior, like the Jewish people?

The premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in 1806 was unsuccessful, according to History Today, and Beethoven never wrote another one. Yet, it later became one of the most beloved of all the violin concertos.



In his book, “Elie Wiesel and the Art of Storytelling,” Wiesel said that one must write out of one's own experience, out of one's own identity.  He must cater to no one and remain truthful to himself. If he's being read, it's good; if he's not being read that's too bad.  However, it should not influence the writer.

When people are uprooted, they go about making do with what they have. They turn their new place into a home. Homes have music. Who could have imagined the holocaust? In Jewish ghettos across Nazi Germany, no one believed such a thing would happen. When it did, the Jewish people made do as best they could. All of us would do the same in a similar situation until survival was the only thing left: the shred of pride and community in a painfully played taboo concerto.

But the question remains: Is music a redemptive act?

In his essay “Story and Silence: Transcendence in the Work of Elie Wiesel,” Gary Henry said that survivors of the camps gathered not to eat when first freed, but to give thanks.  What, in fact did the Jewish survivors of the death camps do as soon as they were liberated?

“Believe it or not; they held services,” Henery said. “To give thanks to God? No, to defy him! To tell him, ‘listen, as mere mortals, as members of the human society, we know we should seize weapons and use them in every place and in every way and never stop — because it is our right. But we are Jews and as such we renounce that right; we choose — yes, choose to remain human. And generous.”

It is unlikely, in the crowded, suffocating barracks where Juliek died, many would know he was playing Beethoven.  However, there are several passages in this concerto of such high beauty and transcendence, the sound could have easily been remembered by those within.  They would have known they had made it. They would have known it was over.

And what would it have meant to the Jewish people, Juliek’s playing? A close reading of Henry’s essay made it clear: breaking the silence in defiance of God.

Wiesel said, according to Henry, that while armchair atheists can afford to allow suffering to continue, Wiesel could not.  Nor can, or should, anyone.

Wiesel believed suffering had to be diminished and that every act of protest, against God or man, in which misery is even minutely alleviated is a redemptive act. But the question remains: Is music a redemptive act? But the question remains: Is music a redemptive act? The scientists who wrote “Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices” (scroll down for article) are trying to figure this out. In general, however, music has been reported to evoke the full range of human emotion.

The Sync Project said, for example, that emotions range from sad, nostalgic (and tense), to happy, relaxed, calm and joyous.  Correspondingly, the project reported, neuroimaging studies have shown that music can activate the brain areas typically associated with emotions: the deep brain structures that are part of the limbic system like the amygdala and the hippocampus as well as the pathways that transmit dopamine (for pleasure associated with music-listening):

“The relationship between music-listening and the dopaminergic pathway is also behind the 'chills' that many people report experiencing during music-listening.  Chills are physiological sensations, like the hairs getting raised on you arm, and the experience of 'shivers down your spine' that accompany intense, peak emotional experiences.” 

Beethoven lived in his music, as did Mozart.

Beethoven understood this instinctively, of course.  And Mozart too.  But transformational?  Beethoven lived in his music, as did Mozart.  In Mozart's “Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola K.364,” for example, the Los Angeles Philharmonic wrote (page since removed), that  “...the duality of the violin-viola sound contributed to the piece's stunning beauty.”

Mozart wrote his sinfonia shortly after his mother died, and some writers have speculated that it may express his deep sorrow. Linda K. Schubert, for example.¹ And John N. Burk, in “Mozart And His Music,” said the Anante in C minor, the sorrowful, slow movement, is outstanding. 

Thomas May, writing for the new LA Phil, believed that “beyond these instrumental dimensions, there’s yet another. This is the world of opera, of lamenting song, with a hint of archaic baroque sentiment, which comes to the fore in the sensitive and lengthy Andante, one of Mozart’s relatively rare minor-mode slow movements.

“Here,” May said, “we find an emotional depth, that as Maynard Solomon speculates in his notable biography, may reflect the composer’s experience of loss in coping with the recent death of his mother. Specifically, the duality of the violin-viola sound contributes to another aspect of the piece’s stunning beauty: listen as the solo violin takes up its plaintive aria of grief and the response from the viola, now providing a sudden but believable consolation.”  

Is Juliek found here, too? And all the men who died on that walk—or died during the holocaust? How about all who suffer terrible pain and loss? Will the music stop, or change, any this? Breaking the silence, Juliek's defiance, certainly helped. Elie Wiesel was a very wise man.



Footnote

¹ “This page is also missing from former Los Angeles Philharmonic posts. But somewhere in the “Boston Symphony Orchestra concert programs, 1986, Tanglewood, Summer,” Google Search reported a reader could find Linda K. Schubert’s quote. However, two separate page-by-page searches revealed nothing. On page 696 (46 and 47 in the concert notes themselves), though, Michael Steinberg said: “An operatic Andante of deep pathos follows the splendid and majestic first movement: one can almost hear the Italian words as the two ‘singers’ (parentheses mine) vie in their passionate protestations.”