English opera singer Mark Glanville’s most ambitious idea came to him in the middle of the night three years ago—to take Schubert’s song cycle, Die Winterreise, what he called “the greatest song cycle that’s ever been written,” and reinvent it in a Yiddish context.
The result was A Yiddish Winterreise: Elegy for a Vanished World, the compelling story of a Holocaust survivor’s journey told through Yiddish song, which will make its New York debut at Symphony Space Feb. 16.
“When I’m performing it I’m very clear in my head of the journey the man is going on,” says Glanville. “He leaves the Vilna Ghetto and sings about the burning of his home and as he’s walking away he’s reminiscing about it all.”
Mark Glanville.
Glanville and composer/pianist Alexander Knapp have toured all over Europe and have won critical acclaim for the cycle, something Glanville attributes to “the fact that it has come from the heart.”
Their U.S. tour will include a second song cycle, Di Sheyne Milnerin- A Yiddish Die Schone Mullerin, set to be performed in New York City Feb. 14 at the same venue.
For Glanville, whose Berlin-born mother lost relatives in the Holocaust and whose London-born father “used to talk about the Holocaust almost every single day,” working on Winterreise was a kind of reconciliation in dealing with the events of the Shoah. Winterreise, Glanville says, “doesn’t pull punches about what happened in the Holocaust. It’s brutally clear… it’s pretty horrific. But in any situation, it’s very difficult to move on if you don’t forgive people.”
That reconciliation came full circle when the German government offered to invest money towards the production of the Winterreise CD, and Georg Boomgaarden, the German ambassador in London, declared the cycle to be a “contribution to reconciliation and understanding, and to our shared future.”
Glanville, a linguist who can read seven languages, grew up with only a smattering of Yiddish words, like shmendrik and tuchus, thrown into conversations. Yet once he began hearing and embracing Yiddish folk songs, he realized he had found his true calling.
“It’s hard to define why it was,” he says. “I found my Jewishness through music and through humor—all of which you get in abundance in Yiddish culture and songs.”
Glanville sifted through hundreds of Yiddish folk songs to arrive at the 22 chosen for the cycle, which also includes one Hebrew song and a Schubert original, translated from German to Yiddish.
Di Sheyne Milnerin is the story of unrequited love between two young people, and Glanville says, “It shows a different aspect of Yiddish culture and music [than Winterreise]. The two complement each other but are still very different.”
Yet even with the obviously larger Jewish market in New York, Glanville is quick to point out that his goal is more broad, saying that to some extent, if his audience were exclusively Jewish, he’d feel like a failure.
“It was never my idea just to keep this music in the ghetto,” said Glanville. “I’m trying to communicate this music that I think is fantastic but is not really known outside the Jewish world.”
