Arnold Schönberg
A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46
Condensed score. 1947

Schönberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46 portrays a roll call during which the prisoners of a camp are sent to be murdered in the gas chambers. The piece culminates in a chorus by those fated to die. Together, they intone the “Schma Jisrael,“ one of the most important prayers in Judaism, at the beginning of which stands a proclamation of the unity and uniqueness of God. Schönberg’s cantata is both an emotional musical confession and a music-combinatorial work of art. The underlying twelve-tone row is designed in such a way that positions 3 to 5 in all of the 48 derivations contain only four different three-tone groups, which are related to one another by major thirds and can form, accordingly, four different augmented triads. A large-format sketch page was used for the preparation of bars 35 to 37 and 72 to 80, in which the orchestra allegorizes the “Abzählen“ [counting off] – the selection of camp inmates for execution. In the uppermost music staff, Schönberg notated the four augmented triads, which “rotate“ around their own axes in changing placements while the remaining pitches of the row are grouped into different collections. Schönberg constructed a nightmarish intensification that breaks off suddenly and leads into the “Schma Jisrael“ intoned by the men’s chorus (the beginning of which is sketched on the upper left of the page). The melody corresponds exactly to the row sequence, so that the rhythmic organization and the repetition of certain pitch collections evoke the aura of psalmodic chant.