Strings Attached To Primo Levi

Eight fragments from the Holocaust writer’s poetry inspire Michael Hersch’s new work for unaccompanied violin.

“When I wanted to write this piece,” Hersch says, “the Levi [poetry] came to mind with the music. The text was more of a companion.” Richard Anderson

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

When Michael Hersch wrote his “Fourteen Pieces” for unaccompanied violin, which will have its American premiere on Sunday, he was inspired — perhaps guided — by eight fragments from the poetry of Primo Levi. That is not in itself unusual. Hersch has written several other pieces that had their genesis in poetry that moved him deeply. But “Fourteen Pieces” came to him quickly, and the entire process was different from what he had experienced before.
Although he is only 36, Hersch is anything but a novice composer. If anything, he has been more like a meteor streaking across the contemporary art music firmament, a late starter who didn’t even listen to classical music until he was 19, but who has garnered almost every major prize,

commission, grant and accolade an American composer can receive, from the Prix de Rome to the Charles Ives Scholarship and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
So if he expresses surprise, he means it.
“I found it extraordinary,” he says, speaking from his home near Philadelphia. “I didn’t plan on it, I didn’t write it for anyone in particular. What was going on, I just had to do it. It was a quick process, although it’s a rather large work and very taxing for the violinist.”
It was in his involvement with the Levi texts that the process was different.
“Unlike every other time I’ve used texts, there’s usually some process and a paring-down [of the words] and a lot of thought,” he explains. “When I wanted to write this piece, the Levi came to mind with the music. The text was more of a companion; it was so organic from the beginning. There was an immediacy about the words, an energy in his words, a certain momentum, a physicality to the text that meshes with the music in a way.”
The fragments that started Hersch on his own creative path are all drawn from poems in which Levi broods, somewhat obliquely, on the betrayals of the Western ideals of heroism, with references to Ulysses or the “heavenly legions,” or images of nature as ominous and threatening.
The seemingly odd linkage of physicality and literary text is actually quite typical in Hersch’s work. The most obvious example is his monumental piece for solo piano, “The Vanishing Pavilions,” which the composer himself performs on the debut recording of the work. Inspired by the writings of the English poet Christopher Middleton, “Pavilions” is more than two hours long, and it calls not only for stamina but a for daunting combination of raw power, subtlety and restraint as it swerves between massive blocks of sound and near-total silence.
“The poetry I respond to, like the ‘Vanishing Pavilions,’ is almost fragmentary,” Hersch says. “There’s only one complete poem of [Middleton’s] in the entire piece.”
And neither “Pavilions” nor “Fourteen Pieces” is a setting of the texts. Hersch has set literary texts as song in the past, but it has been well over a decade since his last concerted efforts in that vein.
“When I see [verse he’s inspired by musically], it’s a very visceral reaction,” he says. “The writers that I set, I cannot overstate how close I feel to those words. At the risk of sounding self-centered, when I see these fragments there’s some element of seeing reflections of myself. It’s what I want to convey in the music. I’ve never tried to communicate the poetry through sound. There’s nothing representational about it. I’m not trying to capture those words through music. They’re companions. I hope the music would be able to stand on its own terms. The poetry certainly stands alone. The experience of each is heightened by the other. It’s hard for me to pinpoint.”
Perhaps the obliqueness of Hersch’s approach to these texts is reflective of his feelings about the non-musical aspects of his life, what he calls “external” influences, upon his composing. Hersch is intensely private and deflects most questions about those externals. He readily acknowledges their effect on his music, but won’t go into details. Asked about his sense of Jewish identity, he is passionate and articulate, but only slightly more forthcoming.
“I’m very aware of my identity,” Hersch says. “It’s not something overtly central to my life, but it’s central to my identity. In terms of who I am and how I see myself it is. It is omnipresent in a more fundamental way.”
One of his most widely performed pieces is a 1998 piece for orchestra, “Ashes of Memory.” The second movement of that piece is based in part on a series of variations on “Deutschland uber Alles.” It would be pretty hard not to make a connection between the title of the composition, the particular musical launching point for the second movement, and Hersch’s Jewishness.
In fact, he says with a certain amusement, it would be almost impossible.
“It’s been pointed out to me many times,” he says. “It was totally unconscious. It’s so obvious, but it’s a perfect example of something creeping into one’s expression that is floating around in the air. It wasn’t something I was intending to do.”
However, he also notes that “Ashes of Memory” is the first piece he composed to which he gave an actual title, and adds that, like almost all American Jews, he grew up in a household in which the knowledge of the Jewish past was usually somewhere in the background.
“Ashes of Memory” is the sort of piece that people have in mind when they ask Hersch why he doesn’t write like that anymore. But artists, if they’re any good, don’t stand still.
When people ask him why he doesn’t turn out more pieces like, say, his First Symphony, Hersch has a polite but pointed answer.
“If people are interested in that music, it’s there, they can play it,” he says. “I don’t need to do it again. When I wrote ‘Ashes of Memory,’ I was in a period of ‘becoming.’”
He pauses for a thought. “I hope I still am.” n
A program of solo instrumental works by Michael Hersch will be performed at Merkin Concert Hall (129 W. 67th St.), on Sunday, May 11 at 8 p.m. The program will include the U.S. premiere of “Fourteen Pieces” for unaccompanied violin, the New York premiere of “Caelum Dedecoratum” for unaccompanied double bass, and Sonata No. 2 for unaccompanied cello. For information, call (212) 501-3303 or go to www.kaufman-center.org/mch.
“The Vanishing Pavilions” is available in a recording by the composer on the Vanguard Classics label.

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Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization