Did Not Speak Up

The piece sets Martin Niemöller's famous, emotionally charged wartime text, which speaks of the catastrophe that follows from the absence of human empathy and from division along social lines. The instrumental writing examines the text from various formal and emotional angles, while the vocal line reflects more faithfully the spirit of the time in which the text was written — its atmosphere of war and nationalism. The work seeks a wide emotional, dynamic and textural range, expressed among other things in fairly abrupt transitions between high drama, humour, bleak sorrow, abyssal despair and resignation. At times one finds hints of pseudo-period references — a waltz rhythm, repetitive rhythms drawn from military marches and funeral processions — but always self-consciously and with deliberate instability. This grows from a personal reading of the emotion latent in the text: working with the basic material of the vocal line and dismantling it in numerous ways, to the point of neutralising its immediate associations and presenting an abstracted, distanced, almost detached view of the subject.

Text

Martin Niemöller, 1945 — Hebrew translation by Aviya Kopelman

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.

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