Experience of the Holocaust in Music: Examining the Case of Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ Op. 46

The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which the experience of the Holocaust can be represented, embodied or relived in/through music. The category of experience has gained recently a great recognition and importance in the interdisciplinary research. Surprisingly, it is still little applied in musical art, although it seems to be a major category when talking about the compositional process, as well as referring to the performance and listener/interpreter points of view. The experience category (as defined by Ryszard Nycz) thus serves as a main methodological aid in this survey. It helps to reconstitute the proces of expressing the experience of the Holocaust in music, specifically in music of Arnold Schoenberg. ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ Op. 46 for narrator, men’s chorus and orchestra came into existence two years after the Second World War was finished. Schoenberg wrote the text himself including at the end of the piece a Jewish prayer ‘Shema Yisrael’. Textual and musical figures representing violence, fear, despair and hope are discussed in detail. Lastly, all these aspects are explored in the context of Schoenberg’s written opinions and ideas regarding human rights.