Notes on Holocaust Cantata - by Donald McCullough

Holocaust Cantata: Songs from the Camps received its world premiere at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. on March 17, 1998. Composer/Conductor Donald McCullough incorporated into the piece words and music written by prisoners in Polish concentration camps during World War II. Discovering these textual and musical fragments at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., McCullough then wove them into a work that is both powerful and poignant. Written in English and scored for narrators, chorus, vocal soloists, cello and piano, Holocaust Cantata is a work of extraordinary depth that deals with an intensely uncomfortable subject. McCullough has expressed ambiguity on the ultimate meaning of the piece, but has said that his one hope is that it may “transform statistics into people in the minds of the Cantata's listeners, and perhaps be a part of making it more difficult for such a horror ever to occur again.” In many ways Holocaust Cantata flows inexorably back to its source: it is the voice of humanity, crying out to be heard.

The program closes with a short piece, also by Donald McCullough, entitled We Remember Them. It causes us to consider that it is not enough that the victims of the Holocaust be remembered only on special occasions, nor that the burdens of remembering fall on only one segment of the world's population. We must all remember, and carry with us constantly the knowledge of what can occur when bigotry and oppression go unchallenged. We Remember Them concludes with these words by an anonymous author:

For as long as we live, they too shall live.

For they are now a part of us, as we remember them.