Psalm 38
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Work introduction
The composition "Psalm 38" is a pasticcio from my secular oratorio "Wir sagen uns Dunkles" (published by UNIVERSAL EDITION).
On the occasion of the terrible attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, I arranged this part (pasticcio) as a new score to draw attention to the consequences of the flaring up anti-Semitism using Paul Celan as an example.
In the 1st part of the oratorio "Wir sagen uns Dunkles" I refer to Celan's origins. For a long time after the end of the First World War, the Jews of Bukovina were the keepers of the German language and culture.
The poet Paul Celan came from there, "a region", as he himself put it, "where people and books lived".
The fate of the Jews in the Nazi era and its effects on the survivors such as Celan, who suffered from "survivor's guilt" throughout his life, is the subject of the first part, introduced here instrumentally by excerpts from my piano quartet Schachnovelle (after Stefan Zweig).
Psalm 38 follows in Hebrew (2013 in collaboration with the Jewish cantor Mimi Scheffer from Berlin).
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)