Four Yiddish Songs

Poems by Abraham Sutzkever

SWR Vokalensemble | Conductor: Yuval Weinberg (2024)

The cycle of songs to texts by Abraham Sutzkever consists of four Yiddish poems from different periods of his life, ranging from his early Siberian poems, through poems of the Vilna Ghetto, to the poems he wrote after immigrating to Israel in 1947. Sutzkever was a great poet in every sense and by every measure, and although he is often regarded as "the poet of the Holocaust" due to the centrality of this experience in his poetry, he was also a remarkable nature poet and lyrical poet.

In the final song—"Ver vet blaybn? Vos vet blaybn?" ("Who Will Remain? What Will Remain?")—I incorporated translations in both Hebrew and German, for two reasons. The first reason relates to the fact that Yiddish is, to a large extent, a fusion of Old German and Hebrew (with Slavic and Polish additions), so it felt natural to integrate these languages into my composition. The second reason is personal: my late father used to speak to me in Yiddish, and I would reply to him in Hebrew. This bilingualism is deeply engraved in my heart.

Abraham Sutzkever (1913–2010) was a renowned Yiddish poet and survivor of the Vilna ghetto. His newborn son and his mother were murdered there. He fled the ghetto with his wife in 1943 and the couple emigrated to Israel in 1947. The present work consists of four movements, the texts of which were written in three different decades and represent the poet's entire thematic range: Although Sutzkever was primarily known for his treatment of the Holocaust, by which the second and third movements (written in 1943 and 1946 respectively) are particularly influenced, he also excelled in his nature lyric, as can be seen in the first movement (1936). The fourth and last movement (1974), which gave the cycle its name, deals with the transience of all human endeavors. The composer’s complex tonal language lends the text mystical qualities while preserving its lyrical and rhythmic character.