André Brégégère - Treblinke dort (2017) - Ensemble 365

Treblinke dort, for violin, cello, piano, and tape, was commissioned by the Kupferberg Holocaust Center, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.*

The commission came with the requirement to employ, in some way, material from the Stonehill Jewish Song Collection, an online archive of more that one thousand songs performed by Holocaust survivors, and recorded by Ben Stonehill in New York City only of few years after the end of the war, in 1948.
After listening to several of these songs, I decided to use Treblinke dort (“Treblinka is there”) a version of a song written when the Warsaw ghetto inhabitants had begun to discover the fates of those who were being deported during the summer of 1942. My choice was based on both musical and thematic reasons: the melody of the song, based on a popular tango, is beautiful and haunting; the lyrics are poignant in their very direct description of the unthinkable events that they relate.
Employing such a song, and touching upon such a subject, in a musical piece, is, of course, a delicate matter. Furthermore, and from a more technical standpoint, it also posed the challenge of integrating a traditionally “tonal” song within a modern compositional language, and do it in a way that was both dignified (i.e., not turning into a parody, or a pastiche), and approachable—honoring the more didactic aspect of this project, which endeavors to promote among the audience awareness and remembrance of the Holocaust.
I employed the song in two ways: first, as a simple instrumental setting of the melody for violin and cello, with piano accompaniment, in the third movement of the trio (which counts five movements). In this first appearance, the song appears like a moment of peaceful relief, within the more dissonant, angular context of the piece as a whole. The song reappears at the end of the piece, in the fifth movement, in a very different light: I directly employed the recording from the Stonehill collection, emerging through loudspeakers (in musical parlance, that is the prerecorded, “tape” part) from the dying sound of the last notes from the piano, while the song’s poignant lyrics, in the original Yiddish and in translation, are projected on a screen. As the song progresses, we hear the sound of a train emerging in the background, which gradually becomes louder, as the song becomes softer. At the end, only the sound of the moving train remains.

* Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this video do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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http://www.ctmd.org/stonehill.htm

http://www.abregegere.com

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