Brigade of Death: Memory and Outrage
01/17/22 • 35 min
On 8 September, 1939, when Krzysztof Penderecki was just a few weeks shy of his sixth birthday, German forces took control of his home town of Dębica with its majority Jewish population. Between then and the liquidation of the Dębica ghetto in 1943, the young Penderecki had to witness the Nazi regime’s systematic intimidation, segregation and extermination of Europe’s Jews as it played out literally his own doorstep. Twenty years later he took Leon Weliczker’s Holocaust memoir, Brigade of Death, and constructed a work for narrator and electronics which, following its premiere, would not be performed again until 2011. Reflecting on a painful history in this podcast, we explore Brigade of Death and the reactions of different generations of listeners to Penderecki’s work.
On 8 September, 1939, when Krzysztof Penderecki was just a few weeks shy of his sixth birthday, German forces took control of his home town of Dębica with its majority Jewish population. Between then and the liquidation of the Dębica ghetto in 1943, the young Penderecki had to witness the Nazi regime’s systematic intimidation, segregation and extermination of Europe’s Jews as it played out literally his own doorstep. Twenty years later he took Leon Weliczker’s Holocaust memoir, Brigade of Death, and constructed a work for narrator and electronics which, following its premiere, would not be performed again until 2011. Reflecting on a painful history in this podcast, we explore Brigade of Death and the reactions of different generations of listeners to Penderecki’s work.
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Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima: Terror and Sorrow
Fifty two strings. Eight minutes. Thirty seven seconds. Completed in 1960, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima has become one of his most well-known works thanks to its use in soundtracks of films by David Lynch, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuarón. In this podcast we explore its genesis, how its textures suggest an incomprehensible terror and sorrow, and its transition from abstraction to memorial.
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