Josef Malkin: Yizkor

On May 4th, National Remembrance Day, the Dutch premiere will take place of Josef Malkin’s composition Yizkor, a cantata for soprano soloist, choir and orchestra. Conductor Bernhard Touwen will lead the orchestra Concerto Brabant and ‘s Hertogenbosch Memorial Choir in two performances of this piece. The first will take place at 18:00 in the Joanneskerk in Oisterwijk, the second at the Jheronimus Bosch Arts Center in ‘s Hertogenbosch at 20:45. The soprano solo part will be sung by Channa Malkin.

Yizkor can be seen as a Jewish requiem, written in honour of the victims of the Holocaust. The world premiere took place in St. John’s Cathedral in New York in 2008, where Channa Malkin also sang the soprano solo part. Below is a personal account by composer Josef Malkin on the background of his composition:

“Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God; the Lord is One!
A profound declaration in Jewish tradition, recited twice daily—morning and evening—as well as at the end of the Day of Atonement.
More significantly, it is uttered in the face of impending death, with one’s final breath.
Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God; the Lord is One!
These were the six final words that my grandmother and grandfather, along with countless other murdered victims of the Holocaust, screamed, yelled, whispered with their dying breath.
And the music to these words, which suddenly came to me one day in January 2005, was the beginning and the inspiration for my entire composition.
Later, I wondered why I had been flooded with musical ideas related to the Shoah, the Catastrophe, at this particular moment in my life. Was it because we had lived right across from the former Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam for the last 15 years? Or was it because almost every other house in our neighborhood has witnessed Jewish families being taken away? Or was it because I had reached the age of my grandfather, whose name I carry, who was burned alive in Ukraine in 1944? Who knows…
In search of more Hebrew texts, I opened the prayer book of the Liberal Jewish Community that includes the most important Jewish holidays. There, under the National Memorial Day, I found not only the mourning prayers, Yizkor and Kaddish, but also a poem by the Israeli poet Avraham Shlonsky: Neder, “Oath”. An oath to never forget, which has become the prologue of my composition:

I have taken this oath:
as I breathe and live
to forget not a thing
of that which took place
till the tenth generation forget not,
till each of my insults
be completely assuaged,
till the last of my lashes
had chastened their lot.
Cry Heaven, if in vain
passed that night of rage,
cry Heaven if by morning
I resume my trod,
not learning the lesson
taught me by this age.

On the same page, I also found poems by Ida Vos, a Dutch writer who, as a 12-year-old child, survived the war in hiding.
Her poetry collection,
35 Tears, was written in memory of her 35 classmates who never returned and whom Ida could never let go.

Shalom Rachel
shalom David
shalom Esther Yosef
let’s have some fun together
let’s have a chat together
but no, we can’t
because of this:
you are all dead
I live…

The poems by Ida, which she created as an adult and mother of three children on the advice of her psychiatrist after a suicide attempt, deeply moved me with their immense sadness, expressed with almost childlike simplicity.

When the 5 poems became 5 songs, I asked Ida, whom we had become friends with a few years earlier, to come visit. My daughter Channa, accompanied by her mother, sang these 5 songs for Ida. Very moved, Ida gifted me her poetry collection 35 Tears. A week later, seven more songs were added. Unfortunately, Ida did not live to see the first performance of the songs on May 4, 2006, in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. She died exactly one month and one day before.

Once all the prayers and all the songs had been set to music, the actual process of composing could begin: to create one piece, one composition, out of what seemed like separate pieces of music at first glance. The prayer Shema Yisrael has become the leitmotif of my composition. It is heard several times in the choir, but also in the orchestral intermezzo and Kaddish as an ostinato, and in the coda.

The twelve songs tell the story of the persecution of the Jews, first through the eyes of a young girl, then those of an adult woman: the obligation to wear the yellow star, the hiding, the raids, the deportations, the destruction, and finally an almost unbearable longing for the classmates lost.

All the themes that sounded before and will come after are integrated into an orchestral intermezzo. To me, this part of the composition reflects the Hebrew name of God, which symbolises the past, present, and future.  The title of the prayer Yizkor means Remember and it reads:

May God remember their souls for good of all our loved ones who have passed away, may He, for the sake of the connection we still feel with the memory of their souls, remember with mercy six million victims, may their souls be included in the bundle of eternal life together with the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, together with the souls of all righteous men and women in Gan Eden, thereon we say: amen.

The Cantata ends with Kaddish, a prayer for the dead, a prayer that one recites every morning for 11 months after the death of one’s dearest: one’s parents or children, as well as during all memorial days. A prayer that is a hymn of praise to God, void of even a single word of sorrow or mourning. I tried to express this contradiction in my music. Is the short coda at the end a warning? A cry of despair?”

More information about the concerts can be found here…
Entrance is free, seat reservation is recommended and can be done through the above websites.