Songs at Night
A large-scale song cycle drawing on the poems of Yiddish-language poet Anna Margolin
Songs at Night is a nine-movement song cycle on poetry by the early 20th Century Yiddish writer Anna Margolin.
During a late night JSTOR-athon in 2018 I stumbled upon Shirley Kumove’s Margolin volume of translations, Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin. In Kumove’s translations, I was struck by the contrast of surreal imagery and indistinct storylines with brutally honest revelations. Take the last lines from the final song, All mute things speak today…
Solemnly and grandly
a rich chant
peals forth
from the gray, shrouded stone.
And you, my dear, my dear,
you are silent.
If only talking to you were as easy as talking to a rock! An absurd thought, but one that brightly reflects back the frustration of feeling unheard. And who is silent anyway, God? A pre-verbal baby? Someone long dead? Or perhaps worst of all, it is someone who simply doesn’t want to talk back.
Drawn in by these flashes of light among ambiguous scenery, I began studying the original Yiddish. Margolin is a poet for whom the form, sound, and rhythm of the words must be crafted to their meaning, and not the other way around. Some poems feature a strict iterative rhyme scheme as in Die Goldene Pave. Others are organized through alliterations and incantatory refrains (Dusk in the park). And some swing wildly from word to word. Writing this music, I embraced Margolin’s fluidity and let the form and style arise spontaneously in response to each poem. I selected these poems by finding pairs that offered contrasting views on the same themes, with one outlaw poem in the middle. Designer Camilla Tassi has created projections that generously allow us to hold the English translations and Yiddish originals at the same time. If there is a story here, I think we’ll all discover it together…
Khave Gros, Khane Barut, Sofia Brandt, Clara Lenin, and Anna Margolin are among the pseudonyms of Rosa Lebensboym, born in 1887 in what is now Belarus. She received a secular education and traveled widely, visiting and living for times in London, Paris, Warsaw, Palestine, and Odessa. She eventually settled in New York City where, rising above the various warring artistic movements of male Yiddish writers, she eschewed categorization.
Margolin’s prismatic identity and writings offer a view of a vanished time in which people are as flawed, creative, and fragmented as we are today. With Songs at Night, I wanted to create a dream world where any kind of music is possible, and where I could lay out the core themes of Margolin’s work: disconnection from the world, miscommunication, morality, and the sometimes equally terrifying prospect that despite being mortal, we all have to be alive together right now.
– Lila Meretzky
In Short
Music by Lila Meretzky
Text by Anna Margolin (trans. Shirley Kumove)
Duration: ~40 min
Instrumentation: two vocalists and chamber orchestra
Performance history:
The expanded song cycle was performed by Contemporaneous on February 27, 2024 at Roulette Intermedium.
Booking: For booking inquiries, contact Contemporaneous Executive and Co-Artistic Director Dylan Mattingly at dylan@contemporaneous.org or (510) 333.2543.
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Artists
Lila Meretzky, Composer
Camilla Tassi, Production Designer
