Saturday night I attended a concert in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s ongoing
International Chamber Music Festival. This performance featured the members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta in
Heiner Goebbels’ “Songs of War I Have Seen.” Goebbels first came on my radar through his amazing collaboration with the Ensemble Modern, “Eislermaterial.”
Like ” Eislermaterial,” “Songs of Wars I Have Seen” is a theatrical chamber music presentation which uses spoken word, in this case Gertrude Stein’s “Wars I Have Seen.”
Stein’s writing about her war–or at least the excerpts used by Goebbels–does not discuss politics, the fate of the Jews or other topics of controversy. The poems in “Songs of Wars…” are about civilian life in a time of war: eating honey rather than sugar, the character of each nation’s radio sign-on, the paths of bombers, the progress of rumors, travel, loss, the way our thinking becomes distorted in a time of danger. The piece, beautifully written and staged, is profoundly moving. If you ever have a chance to see it, do so.
A memory of reading about Stein’s equivocal personal history tickled at my mind throughout the performance, and I verified it when I came home that night. She and Alice B. Toklas led a sheltered existence in eastern France during the Second World War, protected by the patronage of Bernard Faÿ , a closeted, right-wing, antisemitic Vichy official. Yes, Terry Castle wrote about it, in a review of Janet Malcolm’s “Two Lives” in the London Review of Books.
So here we have it, a spoiled, apolitical genius writes an apolitical, sharply observed piece about a political, world-shaking event from the vantage of protection and safety. A Jew fails to note what is happening to her co-religionists in her time, under her nose, at the hands of her protector. Willed ignorance. And yet the truth of war will out. Goebbels realizes it beautifully.
pic from OAE blog
This photo gives you some sense of what the performance looks like. The stage was lit by spotlights and lamps. Women instrumentalists were ranged in a rough semicircle in the front, men lined up in the back. The women spoke the text into microphones.
