“May His great Name be exalted and sanctified (Amen). In the world which He created according to His will. May His kingdom be established during your lifetime and during your days, and during the life of the entire House of Israel, swiftly and soon. And say, Amen.” Thus begins the Kaddish – one of the most revered prayers in Judaism. It is often understood as a mourning prayer, but it rather proclaims God's power and the immortality of Israel, not the death of a relative or a belief in the afterlife.
The tradition of reciting Kaddish during funeral ceremonies dates back to the 13th century, becoming obligatory in the 15th century within one year of a relative's death. The text and form were standardised in the 18th century. In music, it has been used by various composers, including Salomone Rossi in 1623 in his Kaddish Shalem. It also appears in the works of 20th-century composers such as Maurice Ravel in Deux mélodies hébraïques (1914), Ernest Bloch in Avodat Ha-kodesh (Sacred Service, 1933), Leonard Bernstein (Symphony No. 3 “Kaddish”, 1963), and Krzysztof Penderecki (Kadisz, 2005).
The last symphony by Mieczysław Weinberg, Symphony No. 21 “Kaddish”, was composed in 1991, five years before the composer's death. This nearly hour-long composition resonates deeply with Weinberg's past. It is dedicated to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and also touches upon the fate of Weinberg's parents and his sister Ester, who were murdered by the Nazis in Poland between 1942 and 1944 (you can learn more about the tragic history of Mieczysław Weinberg's family in his profile).
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The work on his twenty-first symphony overlapped with Weinberg's composition of the film score for Boris Yermolaev's Otche nash. The film tells the story of a Jewish mother and child trying to avoid being transported to the ghetto by wandering around the city at night and in winter, seeking to save their lives. Their journey also takes them past a church where the Lord's Prayer (Otche nash) is being recited. Ultimately, they are found, frozen to death, and heartlessly thrown onto the back of a truck. The sketches for the “Kaddish” symphony indicate that Weinberg drew from Mahler's song Das irdische Leben (Earthly Life) from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn cycle, specifically from the phrase Mother, mother, I am hungry; give me bread, or I shall die, to which the mother responds: Just wait, just wait, my dear child. One of the main thematic threads is the violin solos, a memory of Weinberg's father Shmuel, whom he often heard playing the violin in his childhood. Although the piece is written for a large orchestra, Weinberg rarely uses the full ensemble. Alongside the solo violin, one can hear a distorted march in the solo double bass, wild imitations of klezmer ensembles, and stunning solo piano entries quoting Chopin's Ballade No. 1 in G minor, which was often played in the ghetto. All this is crowned in the final movement by a solo soprano, wordlessly soaring above the orchestra like an angelic voice from above.
Kaddish is among the composer's most personal works. It is a lament for a world that no longer exists, filled with boundless suffering but also with a longing for life and endless hope. It seems almost unbelievable that the National Theatre will present this masterpiece in its Czech premiere.
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