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Robert Clary, Who Took a Tragic Journey to ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ Dies at 96
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Music Thwarted by the Holocaust Will Now Be Published
G. Schirmer will publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers, allowing them to be heard on a wider scale.As fascism spread in Europe in the 1930s, Jewish artists and composers struggled to have their music heard. They faced persecution by the Nazis, and were banned by orchestras and cultural institutions because of their Jewish identity. Many fled abroad.As a result, hundreds of works by promising composers were lost or neglected. But a group of researchers and publishers is now working to ensure that their music is heard again.G. Schirmer, a major music publishing house, and Exilarte, an organization at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, announced on Thursday an initiative to publish more than 400 pieces by Jewish composers whose careers were disrupted by the Holocaust, making it possible for them to be performed and recorded on a wider scale.“Our understanding of the 20th century is incomplete without these composers,” Robert Thompson, the president of G. Schirmer, said in an interview. He added that it was vital to guarantee that “composers who were silenced during World War II are not forgotten and their legacies are restored.”The list of music to be published includes more than 300 songs, 100 chamber music pieces, 50 orchestral works and other pieces, in genres including classical, opera, jazz and film music. The first works will be published next spring.“The Nazis wanted a world in which the music of Jewish composers would have been banned and forgotten,” Gerold W. Gruber, Exilarte’s founder and chairman, said in a statement. “It is therefore our obligation to counteract these policies by rescuing the music of exiled composers from oblivion.”Walter Arlen, whose family fled persecution in 1939, is among the composers to be published.Exilarte ArchiveMore than two dozen composers are represented. They include Walter Arlen, a 102-year-old who was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. He longed to study music professionally in Austria, but he and his relatives fled in 1939 to escape persecution by the Nazis.Arlen’s songs and piano pieces will be among the first to be published by G. Schirmer. In a telephone interview from his home in California, Arlen said that he was humbled his works would reach a broader audience.“It’s a lovely experience,” he said. “It’s not easy to be published. I lived long enough to be part of it, to see it happen.”He added that it was important that Jewish voices are remembered. “Six and a half million Jews were killed in the Holocaust,” he said, “including a lot of composers and musicians.”Other notable artists whose work will be published include Julius Burger, a Vienna-born pianist, composer and conductor, who fled to the United States in 1938; and Walter Bricht, whose career in Austria was cut short after it was revealed that he had Jewish grandparents, and who also left for the United States in ’38.The initiative builds on longstanding efforts by Exilarte, which was founded in 2006 to recover, restore and study music banned by the Nazis. Michael Haas, a senior researcher at Exilarte, said that the works by these composers represent an overlooked part of the repertory.“It has the potential to be enormously appealing to the public and to musicians,” he said in an interview. “This is an opportunity to start investigating an area of 20th century music which has been completely unrecognized.” More
- in Theater
How a Pro-Nazi Camp on Long Island Inspired a New Play
YAPHANK, N.Y. — On a Sunday afternoon earlier this month, the playwright Bess Wohl stood on the shores of a lake in this Long Island hamlet about 60 miles from Manhattan. She admired the surface pleasures of the scene — the water, the leaves, a sky the blue of a faded Tiffany’s box, an obliging swan.“But I also see history,” she said. “I see what happened here.”What happened here was a summer camp, operated in the 1930s by the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization. Its teenage participants swam, hiked, competed in archery and went to dances, all the while absorbing Nazi ideology.“On the surface,” said Arnie Bernstein, the author of a book on the German American Bund, “it was like any other camp, except it was filled with swastikas.”The flower beds and rose bushes, he noted, were planted in swastika patterns. And there are photos of the camp of rallies that look like smaller, more rustic versions of Nuremberg.The camp finally closed in 1941, not long after the United States entered World War II. And the town erased it from memory. At the lake the local historical society sponsored a display board, detailing the history of Yaphank. The 1930s and Camp Siegfried were elided.Wohl has salvaged that history in “Camp Siegfried,” an intimate two-character play directed by David Cromer. It’s in previews now, and opens on Nov. 15 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater. Over the course of a summer, a nameless boy, 17, and a girl, 16, fall in and out of what isn’t exactly love. It’s a play about seduction, Wohl believes — by bodies, by beliefs, by stories.The entrance to the camp.Bettmann, via Getty Images Former camp grounds in Yaphank. “If we’re going to live up to the moral imperative of ‘never again,’ we have to look at these stories, we have to tell these stories and we have to learn from them,” the playwright Bess Wohl said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesShe learned about Camp Siegfried about two years ago, during the first summer of the pandemic. She and her husband, the public relations executive Steven Rubenstein, had booked an Airbnb in nearby Bellport. One morning, while Googling area attractions that she could visit with her three young daughters, Wohl stumbled on a site that gave the history of the camp and then she stumbled further, finding photos and archival film.“I was like, this can’t have happened right in my backyard,” she said. “It honestly seemed like a mistake at first, that these pictures were pictures of America.”This was an anxious summer, with both the coronavirus and President Trump’s re-election campaign raging. Wohl found herself driving, alone, through the private roads of what had once been the camp and the nearby bungalow community, with streets named for Hitler, Goebbels, Goering. (Those names have long been changed, but a restrictive housing covenant, which allowed only buyers who could prove German ancestry, stood until 2017.) On those drives, she was looking for evidence of what this place had been and how its past had been.On that Sunday in October, we took a similar drive, past Bach Court and Schiller Court, past signs that announced the community as private and the roads as having no outlet. There were no swastikas anymore. American flags and Trump flags had replaced the Nazi ones. A handful of buildings and bungalows from the 1930s remained. Otherwise the community looked aggressively normal, if strangely deserted, which had been Wohl’s experience.“What shocked me the most was how mundane and pretty and sort of regular everything seemed,” she said. “It’s part of what prompted me to write the play, because if we’re going to live up to the moral imperative of ‘never again,’ we have to look at these stories, we have to tell these stories and we have to learn from them.”For much of its running time, “Camp Siegfried” resembles a romantic drama, a coming-of-age story. That’s a queasy proposition, considering the play’s setting. In this boy-meets-girl, the girl lives on Hitler Street. Wohl — who has Jewish ancestry, a Jewish husband and is raising her daughters in the Jewish faith — is mindful of this, anxious even.“I find her very nervous about these risks,” Cromer, who is also Jewish, said during a phone interview, “beautifully nervous and not self-congratulatory about them at all. But that doesn’t stop her from taking them. It is difficult for her not to take these big risks. And then she executes them with rigor and thoroughness and depth. She does irresponsible things really responsibly.”Back in the 1930s: Adolf Hitler Street ran through Camp Siegfried.Bettmann, via Getty Images And now: Streets named for Hitler, Goebbels and Goering have long been changed, but a restrictive housing covenant, which allowed only buyers who could prove German ancestry, stood until 2017.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWohl’s theater has always involved a certain amount of risk, of contradiction. Her plays often begin as thought experiments or personal dares. Could you write a play (“Small Mouth Sounds”) that is largely silent? Could you write a play (“Make Believe”) with a first act populated exclusively by children? What about a musical (“Pretty Filthy”) about the porn industry? Or a show (“Grand Horizons”) about the sexual and romantic lives of retirees?“She always goes just to the left of where you think she’s going to land on something,” said Leigh Silverman, who has directed two of Wohl’s plays, the Tony-nominated “Grand Horizons” and the early comedy “American Hero.” “She’s always going to embrace the weird, she’s always going to embrace the strange choice. She’s always going to keep pushing herself to do something different. She refuses to repeat the same genre, the same idea.”Recently, she has further expanded her command of genre and medium, writing and directing the psychological horror film “Baby Ruby,” slated for release next year by Magnolia Pictures; writing for the forthcoming Apple TV+ climate change anthology series, “Extrapolations”; and adapting “The Children’s Hour,” a 1934 play by Lillian Hellman, for television.Yet there are continuities among these works. Most of them operate with ample surface charm. (Wohl — funny, frazzled, wildly incisive, with a doll-like prettiness — operates that way, too.) “Small Mouth Sounds,” to take one example, is screamingly funny. But the screaming is the point. An author’s note that begins the play reads: “Everyone in the play is in some kind of agony. In this way they are not unlike the rest of us.”Rachel Chavkin, who directed “Small Mouth Sounds,” saw Wohl herself in that note. “I always think about Bess talking about the most tragic thing, and her heart simultaneously breaking as she’s laughing,” Chavkin said. “She’s holding the tragedy and the comedy in equal measure.”Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran in a version of the play in London at the Old Vic in 2021.Manuel Harlan Wohl didn’t disagree. She likes to write plays and characters that arrive in familiar containers. “And then I lift the lid and there’s just nothing but agony,” she said. “The humor in my plays comes from deep, deep agony. Like really deep agony. That’s the rub that interests me.”This dual register — charm on top, existential anguish all the way down — attracts actors to her work. “That’s all you hope for,” said Samantha Mathis, who starred in “Make Believe.” “Comedy comes from extremes of emotion. So you just have to tap into the extremity of pain that these people are in and the truth of what she’s talking about, which is how excruciating it can be to be a human being sometimes.”Brad Heberlee, who has known Wohl since their days as actors at the Yale School of Drama and has starred in three of her plays, echoed this. “Her writing requires actors to bring their entire humanity,” he said. “The only way it can live is if you attach yourself to the depth of pain these people have, the truth of that.”Both of the “Camp Siegfried” characters are in deep pain — and really, what teenager isn’t? — which becomes more evident as the play goes on. “Camp Siegfried” balances sympathy for them with a horror of their situation and the hope that they may yet escape it.Wohl wrote the first draft swiftly, intuitively, in snatched moments during the summer of 2020, in a sweltering room at the top of the rental house while her children slept or watched “CoComelon.” A version of this draft was staged in London at the Old Vic in 2021. The critic for The Independent described it as “a consummately clever and insightful piece about the frightening psychological appeal of fascism.”“Telling these stories is a way of bearing witness and saying we have to pay attention,” Wohl said.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAfter that, Wohl wrote a new draft, with six characters, and then another, which shrank it back down to a two-hander, its central couple now deepened, the camp around them more convincingly imagined. The trick, she felt, was to balance the ordinariness and seeming wholesomeness of the setting — the swimming, the cookouts — with the genocidal ideas that circulated there. That moral danger had to be apparent, but not immediately. Indoctrination doesn’t usually happen all at once.“They don’t say to you, Hey, do you want to, like, kill an entire race of people?” Wohl said. “They say, You want to feel good, don’t you? You want to be part of a community? You love your country? You want to be a good person?” Indoctrination is stealthy, and so the play is stealthy, too, seducing the audience as the characters are seduced and then helping the viewers to shake off that seduction.“Camp Siegfried” joins several other current shows — “This Beautiful Future,” “Remember This,” “Leopoldstadt” — in exploring the roots and devastations of Nazism. But those plays all concern what happened in Europe. “Camp Siegfried” is local, set less than an hour’s drive from Second Stage, which makes the play a more precarious prospect here than in its London staging.“This is a deeply American play. It’s about America,” she said. “It feels very alive to do it right here.”Cromer wasn’t sure how American audiences would receive the play and its characters. “I’m scared if they love them,” he said. “If they hate them, I worry about that.”Yet “Camp Siegfried,” he thought, was worth the worry. Wohl believes that almost any play about this time and these events would be. Because if we know our history, maybe we won’t repeat it. Maybe we’ll have fewer genocides, insurrections, groundless invasions. Maybe not. But it’s the job of artists to try.In the parked car that same afternoon, Wohl looked out at what had been Hitler Street. “Telling these stories is a way of bearing witness and saying we have to pay attention,” she said. “Just keep telling and telling and telling the story. That’s how you keep it alive.” More
- in Theater
‘Remember This’ Review: Finding Strength Amid Moral Failure
David Strathairn is remarkable in a solo show about Jan Karski, who was profoundly changed by what he witnessed during World War II.There are catastrophes so terrible that the mind struggles to comprehend them. Here is Jan Karski’s description of his visit in 1942 to a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, during which he saw dead bodies lining the streets and starving women nursing their babies from sunken breasts: “This is not a world,” he observed. “It is not humanity.” But this was humanity. And Karski, an agent of the Polish government in exile during World War II, was tasked with reporting it.Theater for a New Audience’s “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” originally produced by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, is a dignified and affecting solo show. Starring a masterly David Strathairn, and adapted from Karski’s own words by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, it brings Karski’s recollections to anguished life. With limited instruments — lights, sound, a table, two chairs, a single suit —the play evokes not only the contours of Karski’s own eventful biography, but also the horrors and privations of the war, with a particular emphasis on the failure of Allied governments to acknowledge and intervene in the murder of Europe’s Jews.A Catholic diplomat recruited by the Polish underground, Karski reported on the changes the Nazis had wrought, entering first the ghetto, and then a transport camp. “I become a tape recorder. A camera,” Strathairn’s Karski says. Later, he elaborates: “I understand my mission. I am not supposed to have any feelings. I am a camera.”The forerunners to “Remember This” are not necessarily or essentially theatrical. (Though Victor Klemperer’s “I Will Bear Witness,” which played Classic Stage Company two decades ago, is a kind of antecedent.) The more significant influence seems to be documentary film. Karski was featured in two documentaries by Claude Lanzmann, “Shoah” (1985) and “The Karski Report” (2010), though Goldman, the laboratory’s artistic director and the director here, also drew on other documents, including Karski’s 1944 memoir and a 1994 biography. Here there is frequent underscoring — the sound design and original compositions are by Roc Lee — which gives the show a cinematic feel, emphasized by Zach Blane’s evocative lighting.Strathairn delivers an expert and unshowy performance as Jan Karski, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhatever its form, “Remember This” serves as a remarkable showcase for Strathairn, who moves fluidly among characters and time periods. He leaps onto a table at one point and off it at others. Throughout, he manages to communicate both Karski’s extraordinary moral strength and his passionate reactions to what he sees. Because Karski has feelings. He is, as Strathairn depicts him, much more than a camera or a stylus — he is a man profoundly changed by what he witnesses.Strathairn delivers an expert performance, but it is also an unshowy one, never calling attention to itself at the expense of the content. This restraint renders “Remember This” perhaps most affecting and effective in the tension between the coolness and expertise of its form and the hot horror of its subject. It is in the space between these poles that the particular evil of the Holocaust is conveyed and understood, that unimaginable suffering is imagined. Allied leaders — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anthony Eden — wouldn’t be convinced of the truth, despite Karski’s efforts. But we in the audience are, which grants us a squirmy moral superiority, even as the show asks us, gently, to examine what we are doing in our own lives to oppose hate.This is most likely the lesson the title refers to. And Strathairn’s Karski articulates it this way: “There is no such thing as good nations, bad nations. Each individual has infinite capacity to do good, and infinite capacity to do evil. We have a choice.”Karski, who became a celebrated professor at Georgetown and received, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, died in 2000, which means that he lived long enough to see Holocaust minimization and outright denial come back into vogue. But this doesn’t seem to have worried him. “These voices are weak,” he says in the play. “They have no future. As I tell my students, we have a future because we are speaking the truth.”But truth seems to have become an increasingly fungible concept. Faced with our current culture of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, I wonder what particular advice Karski might have for us now. How would he have recorded this?Remember This: The Lesson of Jan KarskiThrough Oct. 9 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More
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‘Four Winters’ Review: The Jewish Resistance
The men and women in this densely story-filled documentary recount taking up arms as members of the Jewish resistance in the forests of Eastern Europe.The Jews in World War II who formed resistance groups include one steely-nerved survivor in Julia Mintz’s story-filled documentary “Four Winters” who says it best: “If I’m not for me, who’s for me?” The men and women in this harrowing but spirited film took up arms in the forests of Eastern Europe to fight Nazis and their collaborators, living to tell tales that could be fodder for movie plots.Mintz cycles through eight interviewees who recall missions to kill Nazis, as well the day-to-day struggle for survival. After the horror of seeing family members murdered — often the end point for many Holocaust stories — these civilians fortunately escaped, and took the leap of learning to become soldiers.Everyone’s recall of tactical detail is daunting: we learn how to blow up a railroad, for one thing, and what to do with bullet wounds. One survivor, Faye Schulman, appears in a leopard-skin coat in pictures, adding an unexpected touch of panache.The talking-head close-ups convey more than what’s spoken. Notice how a normally stolid Frank Blaichman flicks a satisfied look to the camera when saying the name of the big, tough farmer they outfoxed. Gertrude Boyarski, a self-described “spoiled girl” before the war, speaks with an especially flinty gaze.The film’s deficits lie in its structure, which loses shape as it goes along. It could also use more information about its archival footage. But “Four Winters” offers an enduring warning amid today’s global struggle with authoritarian forces: As one speaker explains, her neighbors were already antisemitic before the war, but with power, they became vicious.Four WintersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More
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Opening Old Wounds as the Man Who Warned About the Holocaust
In the solo play “Remember This,” David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski, a witness to the Nazi genocide during World War II.The actor David Strathairn would rather you didn’t read this. He has his reasons.They’re not so much specific to his Off Broadway project — “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” the solo play he’s starring in for Theater for a New Audience — as they are rooted in the general principle of preserving some mystery for audience members who haven’t yet seen a show. He prefers to keep his art pristine.“If you have the facts before you have the emotive experience, it’s a different process,” Strathairn, 73, was saying the other day in a dressing room at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where “Remember This” is in previews.By the time he made that point, he had been speaking for nearly an hour — about Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who warned the Allies to no avail of the Holocaust in progress, and about the play, in whose successive iterations Strathairn has portrayed Karski since 2014.Did Strathairn, then, take exception to his interview about the show even as he was giving it?“Kind of yeah,” he said, smiling behind his face mask and meaning it anyway. “I kind of do. Just, objectively speaking, I find that it diminishes the magic of the experience if they know too much coming in. They have preconceptions.”Strathairn — whose most cherished credits include the films “Nightmare Alley,” “Nomadland,” “Lincoln” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” for which he received a best actor Academy Award nomination — also takes issue with critics who, as he put it, “lay the patient out on the table and you see every organ, every tumor.”Which doesn’t mean that Strathairn, who is currently on movie screens in an Atticus Finch-style role in “Where the Crawdads Sing” and was last seen on Broadway in 2012 opposite Jessica Chastain in “The Heiress,” is broadly anti-journalism.“There are things in the world that absolutely need to be outed, revealed, that need that transparency,” he said. “I don’t think the creative arts does.”So, a warning: Facts ahead. There’s zero chance, though, of this article spoiling everything about “Remember This,” let alone everything about Karski. There simply isn’t the space.Even if there were, Karski himself — who died in 2000 and was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012 — knew how abstract a thing can seem when it is imparted as a story, and how unignorably potent when it is experienced firsthand.Strathairn, left, with the play’s writers, Derek Goldman, center, and Clark Young during rehearsals for Theater for a New Audience’s production of “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”Emon Hassan for The New York TimesHours into “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s colossal 1985 documentary about the Holocaust, an urbane, silver-haired man sits before the camera in suit and tie, gathering his courage to tell a story. This is Karski. He takes a breath.“Now I go back 35 years,” he begins, a strong Polish accent flavoring his words. But almost instantly his poise crumbles, and he begins to weep; the memories he is being asked to tap are too excruciating.“No. I don’t go back,” Karski says. As the camera watches, he flees the room.To Strathairn, who saw the nine-hour-plus “Shoah” in a single stretch when it was first released, that “microscopic moment” in the movie is “the portal into 35 years of silence.” In the theater’s dressing room, glasses perched atop his head, he traced a timeline of Karski’s life on the tabletop — events that, in Strathairn’s mind, are all contained somehow in that brief, tormented bit of film.At the start of the timeline, Karski’s childhood, when his Roman Catholic mother taught him to tell her when he saw “bad Catholic boys” throwing dead rats at Jews, so she could do something about it. Next his late 20s, in German-occupied Poland, when Jewish leaders sneaked him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp, so that he could tell the world what he’d seen happening there. Then the many postwar years when, having written a book about his experiences, he no longer spoke of them, even as he taught for decades in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Last, the chapter that began in the late 1970s, when Lanzmann convinced him that it was his responsibility to bear witness again for “Shoah” — which, after that initial loss of nerve, Karski did, and kept doing elsewhere.“Remember This,” which opens on Thursday in Brooklyn and is scheduled to run through Oct. 9, was created as a multicharacter piece at Georgetown for a centennial celebration in 2014 of Karski’s birth. Written by Derek Goldman, the artistic director of the university’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and one of his former students, Clark Young, who graduated in 2009, it was initially titled “My Report to the World,” a phrase borrowed from the subtitle of Karski’s best-selling 1944 war memoir, “Story of a Secret State.”That book and E. Thomas Wood’s 1994 biography, “Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust,” were among the source materials for “Remember This,” alongside “Shoah” and other oral histories. The playwrights’ research also drew on the memories of people who knew Karski at Georgetown — and, in one case, Young said, at a local dentist’s office.In its ensemble form, the play traveled to Warsaw in 2014, and New York in 2015. Reshaped into a solo piece, it went to London in early 2020, and last year to Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Goldman, who directs the play, said that its current form allows Karski to stir “the moral conscience” as he talks to his students — that is, the audience — about his life and what he saw of the Holocaust.“Karski, I think, was that kind of teacher, who wanted to offer students access to the most elemental questions, because he had been grappling with them his whole life,” Goldman said. “‘How is this possible?’ ‘What does it mean to know?’ ‘What is a nation and what is a government if it can turn away from this?’”Goldman, 52, and Young, 35, both spoke of the failure that Karski felt when his eyewitness account of the Nazi slaughter, which he delivered in person to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among numerous influential others, did not stop the Holocaust.“In many ways,” Young said, “I see him as someone who internalized a sense of failure that wasn’t his to hold. He was holding failures of nation states and individuals in power.”If that terrible sense of a vital mission not accomplished was part of Karski’s trauma, Strathairn observed that we can only speculate about the reasons for his decades of silence.“He never said why,” Strathairn said, and turned contemplative as he noted older generations’ sometimes overwhelming impulse to shield the younger from pain.“Do we impart horror upon our children? Or do we want to protect them?” he asked. “In many ways, we protect them from things that are part of life. We protect them from seeing us dying. We protect them from our grief, and we protect them from our fears. We don’t want to burden them with those things. And is that in service of their maturation, or is it not?“For me,” he continued, “that’s a teeter-totter. ‘I don’t want to talk about the war.’ ‘I don’t want my kid to think that the world is horrible and people did this to each other.’ ‘No, I’m going to stay on the sunny side of the street.’ Or do we prepare the next generation for the possibilities? Do we give them the awareness that this could happen again? In order to prevent that, you have to know what it was.”Onstage as Jan Karski, opening old wounds for his students to see, he is telling them what it was: barbarity. More
- in Music
Review: ‘The Silent Woman,’ an Opera About Putting on an Opera
Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of Richard Strauss’s opera, composed amid the Nazis’ rise to power.ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — “Ha! A silent woman?,” sings the basso buffo Morosus in Richard Strauss’s “Die Schweigsame Frau.” “You’ll only find her in a churchyard under a stone cross.”The casual misogyny of Strauss’s only opera buffa — a work that unfolds like a love letter to Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti — was hardly a point of controversy when it premiered in Dresden in 1935. But controversy there was: The opera’s libretto was written by Stefan Zweig, a Jew, who submitted it two weeks before Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933.On Friday night, Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of “The Silent Woman” at Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College that went some way toward reconciling the featherlight subject and its fraught historical context. The witty staging, engaging cast and efficiently evocative designs made a good opera feel like a great one.Much has been written about Strauss’s miscalculations with regards to the Nazi regime, his attempts to stay out of politics while currying favor and protecting his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandsons.He accepted the presidency of the Reich Chamber of Music, a post he later described as a “tiresome honorary office” in a letter that got him into hot water. In his notebooks, he called Nazi antisemitism “a disgrace to German honor.” Ultimately, he underestimated the National Socialist dictatorship as a political fashion, a nuisance affecting his work with Zweig, who was forced to flee the country.Strauss, who once thought his creativity wouldn’t survive the sudden death of his beloved librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, wrote to Zweig: “If you abandon me, too, I’ll have to lead from now on the life of an ailing, unemployed retiree.”According to a letter from Strauss, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler, presumably finding nothing subversive in “Frau,” approved it. After Strauss insisted that Zweig’s name appear on the program book, the propagandist and his boss skipped the premiere. It was only after Strauss expressed his dim view of Nazism in a letter intercepted by the Gestapo that the opera was banned.In 1942, Zweig, under pain of exile in Brazil, took his own life. Strauss, defeated by the bombing of Germany’s opera houses and the collapse of its culture, nonetheless had music left in him, including his Horn Concerto No. 2 and the “Four Last Songs.”From left, Matthew Anchel, Federico DeMichelis, Anya Matanovic, Edward Nelson, David Portillo, Chrystal E. Williams, and members of the Bard Festival Chorale.Stephanie BergerAgainst this backdrop we have “Die Schweigsame Frau,” an opera about the retired admiral Morosus, whose tinnitus makes him a world-class grouch who can’t bear the tolling of church bells or the idea of a nagging spouse. Zweig supplied an Italianate comedy without psychological underpinning, and Strauss was delighted.When Morosus’s nephew Henry shows up with his theater troupe, Morosus, appalled at Henry’s chosen career, disinherits him and insults his wife, Aminta. The troupe teaches him a lesson recognizable from Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”: Aminta, disguised as a demure ingénue, marries Morosus in a sham ceremony and proceeds to throw tantrums and turn his life upside-down until he begs for mercy.For Bard’s delightful production, the director and set designer Christian Räth stages “Frau” as an opera about putting on an opera. Stagehands execute scene changes in full view of the audience, and Morosus’s single-word mantra, “Ruhe” (quiet), glows like an exit sign above the doors of his orderly home.The deception of Morosus becomes a show itself. The theater troupe riffles through clothing racks from other Strauss productions for their costumes. Morosus auditions his three potential brides-to-be on a mini-replica of the stage where “Frau” had its 1935 premiere, presenting the winner with a silver rose straight out of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” (and “The Bachelor”).The troupe — and the cast — fully commits to its roles. Harold Wilson commands a sonorous bass as the proud, endearing Morosus. Jana McIntyre (Aminta) and David Portillo (Henry) sing with bright, earnest lyric voices that hint at stridency under Strauss’s demands. Edward Nelson, sounding handsome and polished, turns the Barber into an unusually compelling factotum. Matthew Anchel, a riot as the impresario Vanuzzi, shows an appealingly compact bass with depth of tone. Ariana Lucas (Housekeeper), Chrystal E. Williams (Carlotta) and Anya Matanovic (Isotta) delve zestfully into their characters.Mattie Ullrich’s funny, dazzling costumes transformed the cast, including a male corps de ballet that never missed a chance to shake their platter tutus.Strauss underscored spoken dialogue with arch instrumental commentary, but the orchestra, at times hamstrung by his sumptuous style and parlando vocal lines, shifts its weight like an elephant in ballet shoes. At Bard, the conductor Leon Botstein, deprioritizing tonal grandeur, showed the opera to be light on its feet. The overture’s quirky doodling emerged fast and clean, and the magical duet-turned-trio that ends Act II lilted, with Straussian wafts of pungent woodwinds.Räth, injecting resistance into a work that was politicized despite itself, turned the chaotic wedding scene into a nightmare sequence: Choristers and dancers swarmed the stage with large face masks of real-life personages (including Mozart, Bach, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Maria Cebotari, the first Aminta). Ominously, the masks of Hitler and Goebbels flanked a mask of Strauss and carted him off by the elbows.The opera closes with a reflection far removed from the prevailing mayhem, not unlike the glorious final monologue from Strauss’s last opera, “Capriccio.”As the strings swelled, Wilson’s Morosus stepped forward, offering a glimpse of peace, sung with touching restraint, from an ailing, unemployed retiree at the end of his life. In his hands he held the masks of Strauss and Zweig, forced apart by murderous bigotry, reunited at last.The Silent WomanThrough Sunday at Bard College; fishercenter.bard.edu. More
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‘From Where They Stood’ Review: Auschwitz, as Seen by Prisoners
Christophe Cognet’s documentary pores over photographs, some of them clandestine, taken by prisoners, inside the Nazi concentration camp.Christophe Cognet’s “From Where They Stood” scrutinizes an astonishing record of the Holocaust: photographs secretly taken by prisoners within Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps. Cognet’s analytical documentary adopts the stance of an investigating historian to explicate the pictures, which were made and smuggled out at mortal risk.Unlike many documentaries about the Holocaust, this film hinges on still images rather than archival footage or interviews with survivors. Cognet joins scholars to pore over these pictures and their silent testaments; in one clutch of images, women displaying wounds on their legs are revealed to be subjects of Nazi medical experiments. Other portraits catch people in eerily calm-looking repose.But the clandestine pictures known as the Sonderkommando photographs carry the gravest weight of all. These ghostly images depict nude women on the way to the gas chamber and, afterward, corpses left in the open air (both scenes overseen by the cremation prisoner workers known as the Sonderkommando). Shot from a significant distance, apparently through holes in the gas chambers, these figures are small and not greatly defined, but no less devastating.Cognet (who also made a documentary about artworks created in the camps) visits camp sites to re-create the precise positions and sightlines of the photographers and their subjects. His film can feel overly cerebral—a bit like being plunged into a seminar—and the text cards do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting. But Cognet’s forensic approach does insist on memorializing these events in an important, physically specific way and, intentionally or not, queasily anticipates a world without any living eyewitnesses to these horrors.From Where They StoodNot rated. In French, Polish and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More
