About the creation

In 1994, while I was with my family on a Sabbatical year in New York, I came across a book of poems by Primo Levi in English translation. I knew most of Primo Levi's literary works but had never before read the poems by this very special and profound writer who, in his novels and short stories, gives us a unique personal view of the various human and inhuman aspects of confrontation with the horrors of the Holocaust.

At times philosophical, at others rather matter of fact, his writings express his thoughts and beliefs in a straightforward manner, without either self-pity or superfluous pathos. These qualities become even more crystallized in his poems - of which there are less than a hundred - dating from 1943 to 1987.

My encounter with the poems in English aroused my curiosity as to what they sound like in the original Italian and indeed I liked the sounds very much although my knowledge of Italian is quite limited. However, I decided to write the music to the original poems, and I was assisted in all that concerns the right pronunciation and rhythms of the poems by the singer Zimra Ornatt. to whom I am grateful for her help. Another person I have to mention here with much pleasure is my friend and former student Yaacov Bergman, an ardent enthusiast of Primo Levi's writings, who kept encouraging me to write these songs and who is to conduct the world premiere in Colorado and later at a concert in New York. I also wish to thank Mr. Jerry Jacobs, Chairman of the Interfaith Committee of Remembrance for his assistance in the New York performance and last but not least - to my dear friends Ruth and John Rauch, founders and heads of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity in Los Angeles, to whom this work is dedicated.

The five poems I have chosen to express a variety of thoughts and moods, from the frightening nightmare of Erano Cento (There were a hundred) through the violent anger of Dateci (Give us) to the nostalgia of Cantare (Singing). In between these Il Tramonto di Fossoli (Sunset at Fossoli) comes in as a philosophical look at life and death, and Da R. M. Rilke (After R.M. Rilke) as a very personal expression of crucial thoughts about his present (1946) and the choices he had to make then for some kind of future. In the final song, CANTARE, I could not resist the temptation of using a quotation from a well- known Italian folk song (Santa Lucia) as well as the famous motive of Ariadne's Lament by Monteverdi. Both symbolize to me a painful beauty of a long-lost past.