How to put the Holocaust to Music?
About Noah
I first met Noah Max in 2018 during his father Robert’s 50th birthday ‘cellobration’: a gathering of cellists Robert had taught and admired, playing together in a monumental cello concert. Here was Robert’s shockingly articulate and confident 19-year-old son (who had recently quit the Royal Academy of Music after one term to forge his own path in the classical world as a composer, conductor and painter), standing in a packed hall of eminent musicians singing ‘Under the Sea’ from The Little Mermaid.
In the intervening five years Noah has made good on this extraordinary courage and self-belief. He has premiered many new works with his Echo Ensemble, mounted several public exhibitions of his paintings, entered a publishing deal with United Music Publishing and seen an album dedicated to his music released on Toccata Classics.
About the music
Noah has set himself a huge aesthetic challenge in writing this piece: how does one set the Holocaust to music? What musical sounds are the right ones to reconjure the darkest chapter of human history? Is it ethical to try? Noah feels it is inevitable that artists will be moved to respond to something as epoch-shattering as the Holocaust, not only to comment on it but also to help us understand it better. As a director my goal is primarily to realise Noah’s piece as fully as possible. Secondarily, it is to reveal to Noah what he has produced so that he can understand his own work more thoroughly.
Though the work contains various formal elements that harken back to classical models (for instance, the first scene is structured in a broad sonata form), I think Noah has created an opera with an immediately discernible large-scale structure which will resonate powerfully with audiences.
Blocks of tonal choral music, redolent of Synagogue service music, frame the work. This establishes a musical space which feels like 'home' - powerfully rooted in traditional, recognisable harmony and cadences, arching cantorial melodic gestures and four-square rhythm.
After this sonorous opening the familiar world gradually melts away, the music 'retuning' the ensemble with perfect fifths resounding in all registers. We transition into a dissonant landscape that is still broadly tonal yet spikier, unfamiliar, unanchored. Very often the vocal line will be accompanied by instrumentation in painfully close harmony, clusters of semitones contradicting the characters' utterances. This, coupled with angular, wide-ranging vocal leaps, adds to the sense of unease and dislocation that both children feel in the new world that Nazism has fashioned around them.
Within this dissonant sound-world are islands of glowing tonality that appear at key moments in the children’s evolving relationship. The piece makes subtle use of leitmotifs: this 'friendship chorale’ recurs and transforms throughout as their friendship grows. These oases of respite serve as reminders of normality and beauty in a place that is distant from both whilst always avoiding mawkishness and sentimentality.
Alongside these moments of connection, the 'home' Synagogue music regularly appears, punctuating the uneasy mists and screaming barbarity with powerful pillar-like hymns. We are brought gently out of the linear dramatic flow as if by a narrator. This gives us space to reflect on what feels like a memory of what has been left behind, as well as the eternal spiritual values that have outlived every tyranny of mankind.