Summer Oratorio: Composer Alexander Knaifel Commemorates The Nazi 900 Day Siege Of Leningrad As Seen Through The Eyes Of A Surviving Child

ALEXANDER KNAIFEL (b. 1943, in Tashkent, Soviet Uzbekistan, as an evacuatee of the Blokada (the Siege) of Leningrad, the Soviet Union.)

AGNUS DEI


"Man – somewhere at some time – happened to be on the edge of perishing.

His deathly calm, terror, and pain – his suffers surpassed any imaginable horizon.

Then Man died.

But does all the anguish he lived through disappear?

Do not the suffers of all people perishing or have perished somewhere in the past accumulate in our world?

Do not these suffers, continuously accumulating, determine some parameters of the world we live in?

Do not these accumulated suffers determine something essential in the soul of each of us?

For the world is one, and all of us – no matter how many of us there might be on Earth – are the links of one chain.

These questions arise when we are concentrating on the text created by a child who witnessed how all her relatives passed away one after another in besieged Leningrad."


Sergei Vakulenko, November 1987
On the Occasion of the First Performance of “Agnus Dei”


DIARY BY TANYA SAVICHEV

ZHENJA DIED Dec 28 at 12 30 o’clock in the morning 1941 / GRANNY DIED Jan 25 3 h in the afternoon 1942 / LJOKA DIED March 17 at 5 o’clock in the mor. 1942 /UNCLE VASJA DIED at Apr 13 2 h night 1942 / UNCLE LJOSHA [DIED] May 10 at 4 h in the afternoon 1942 / MAMA [DIED] at May 13 [at] 7.30 o’clock in the morning 1942 / THE SAVICHEVS DIED / DIED ALL / LEFT ONE TANYA

AGNUS DEI, QUI TOLLIS PECCATA MUNDI,

DONA EIS REQUIEM SEMPITERNAM,

MISERERE NOBIS,

DONA NOBIS PACEM …

EXTRACTS FROM COMPOSER’S NOTES

… to discern the extraordinary in the ordinary…
… can this problem be the subject of art, anyway?…
… “Agnus Dei” may have been created as repentance for my nonexistent fault of being born outside Leningrad…
… inability to physically pronounce this verbal text…
… the Saviour’s descent into Hell…
… through the prism of the irrevocable and eternal beauty of the created world…
… endlessness and oneness in the manifistations of the Sound-Word mystery…
… the whole score consists of the touchings – renewing all the time, the “unique” soundings of the air…
… approaching the fullness of the Life – Moment – Vertical, Time-dissolving…
… and only quite recently have I learnt that during the first winter of the siege my grandpa Joseph Knaifel
shared in the unprecedented sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of Leningrad citizens through his
death by starvation on January 15, 1942…


Recording Data

ALEXANDER KNAIFEL
AGNUS DEI


FOR FOUR INSTRUMENTALISTS A CAPPELLA (1985)
CD 1 49:12
CD 2 71:08


E N S E M B L E M U S I Q U E S N O U V E L L E S


LOUISON RENAULT: percussion, electronics
JEAN-PHILIPPE COLLARD: keyboards, percussion, electronics
SERGE BERTOCCHI: saxophones, keyboards, electronics, percussion
JEAN-PAUL DESSY: double bass, percussion, keyboards, electronics

MEGADISC CLASSICS (Belgium) #7808-07
Price € 35.00

75 Second Audio Sample available at above link.














Soviet Army deployment of small dirigibles -- in front of Saint Isaacs Cathedral --to thwart Nazi aerial bombardment of Leningrad, the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler, each year for three years, planned to hold his grand New Year's Victory Over The Soviet Union Celebration in the grand Astoria Hotel across Saint Isaac's Square from the Cathedral.

Text credit: (c) Copyright Tanya Savichev, Sergei Vakulenko, and Alexander Knaifel via Megadisc Classics, Belgium. All rights reserved. With thanks.

Photo credit: Soviet archival image www.saint-petersburg.com. With thanks.