WIEGALA (score & parts)

Ilse Weber (1903-1944) was a Jewish author and songwriter. Following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 Ilse, her husband Willi and their young son Tommy were confined in Prague’s Jewish Ghetto before being sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. Whilst there she wrote numerous poems (including Wiegala), setting many of them to music, employing deceptively simple tunes and imagery to describe the horror of her surroundings. At the camp Ilse worked as a nurse in the camp’s children’s infirmary and at night she sang lullabies to them.

Ilse’s husband was deported to Auschwitz in October 1944. When the children at Ilse’s infirmary (including her son Tommy) were also listed to be sent there Ilse volunteered to go with them. Upon arrival at Auschwitz one of the Sonderkommando (prisoners who were forced to assist in the gas chambers and crematoria) recognised Ilse from Theresienstadt. Knowing their fate, he advised her to go as quickly as possible into the gas chamber and sing with the children so “that way you will inhale the gas quicker”. He later testified that he heard Ilse singing Wiegala within the gas chamber, so the children’s pain of dying was alleviated. Auschwitz was liberated four months after their murder: amongst the survivors was Willi.

The haunting and simple beauty of Ilse’s Wiegala will forever be intertwined with her tragic story. Only the melody and lyrics of Ilse’s lullaby were published. Sensitive harmonisation and weaving lines have been added in this arrangement for wind quintet. At the end of the piece, one by one each part is marked ‘morendo’ (dying away) until, at the very end, there is silence.

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