A Survivor from Warsaw

A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46, is a work for narrator, chorus and orchestra by the Los Angeles–based Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, written in tribute to Holocaust victims. The main narration is written in Sprechgesang style, between speaking and singing; "never should there be a pitch" to its solo vocal line, wrote the composer.^[1]

Scored for narrator, men's chorus and orchestra, it resulted from a suggested collaboration between Jewish Russian émigrée dancer Corinne Chochem and Schoenberg, but the dancer's initiative gave way to a project independently developed by the composer after he received a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation for an orchestral work. Concept, text, and musical sketches date from July 7 to August 10, 1947 – the text, by Schoenberg, being in English until the concluding Hebrew plea, except for interjections in German. Composition followed immediately, from August 11 to 23,^[2] four years before the composer died. The work was premiered by the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Kurt Frederick on November 4, 1948.

Czech writer Milan Kundera dedicated an essay in his book Encounter (2010) to A Survivor from Warsaw. It annoys him that educated people don't know that the cantata "is the greatest memorial ever dedicated to the Holocaust... [but] people are fighting to ensure that the killers are not forgotten. But they forget Schönberg."^[3]