Ukrainian Requiem

There is no shortage of evidence proving our human capacity for cruelty, whether we consider the issue historically, or even in our own lives.  We take solace, however, in the fact that the better angels of our nature – those angels that can lead us to organize a dignified and civil society – might allow us to move past these basest of impulses.  So it is particularly horrifying when, in the course of human events, that very intelligence and organizational ability is used to perpetrate unspeakable cruelty. This was the tragic case of Ukraine’s Holodomor (literally extermination from hunger) in 1932-33.  Though Ukraine had already known, and would again know, famine shortly before and after those dates, the Holodomor uniquely reverberated through the collective consciousness because the full apparatus of the Soviet State was brought to bear on deliberately keeping food from starving Ukrainians.  It was a careful calculation that authorities banked would help feed those more loyal to the communist cause and simultaneously solve the problem of Ukraine’s troublesome nationalist impulses.  And so, with a steely gaze, the plan proceeded apace, unmoved by unimaginable human suffering and the literally millions of corpses that filled villages all over Ukraine.

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Today, 85 years on, we gather to commemorate those millions who died – not simply to honor their needlessly extinguished souls, but also to call witness to the fact that they died. The word Holodomor is not known to many, and this is no coincidence: at the time the famine occurred, a New York Times reporter, complicit with Soviet authorities, blithely suggested that any news of famine was false or exaggerated. Subsequently, during the entire existence of the Soviet Union, the official line was that there was no famine, much less an ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians. And so there is something particularly moving that, in the very year after the Soviet Union dissolved and Ukraine declared itself – finally, after centuries of domination from others – an independent nation, the celebrated composer Yevhen Stankovych turned his attentions to composing a Requiem for those victims of the Holodomor. A Requiem with an unapologetic text from his contemporary colleague, poet Dmytro Pavlychko, which does not shirk from proclaiming the truth of what happened. A Requiem that somehow only now, at this performance, is receiving its North American premiere. It is as extraordinary an act of testament as it is a work of art.
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Stankovych’s Requiem exists in several liminal spaces at once – it transitions between paroxysms of discordance, compositional techniques of the avant-garde that Stankovych knew and used in the first part of his career, while mostly relying on the plain-spoken vocabulary of his later work; it embodies the full human response to tragedy, moving from supplication to rage to lament to acceptance; it hovers between a spiritual world, invoking Orthodox chants and the profundity of belief, and the earthly suffering of starvation. The first of 15 interconnected movements, all performed without pause, begins in complete stillness: a single note, intoned from all corners of the orchestra, provides an unwavering backdrop to a lamenting violin solo and statements of Amen from the two choruses. The next movement proclaims God’s strength and models it, too, in vigorous rising lines punctuated by percussion. The first appearance of a narrator – declaiming Pavlychko’s text – calls for us to remember those years of starvation. A warm bass solo opens the third movement, as he recalls work on the land and what it meant to Ukrainians; but at the words “on Satan’s orders” a fearsome shout arises from the depths of the chorus and pushes the music to a dissonant fanfare. A final prayer for God’s intervention ends the movement.
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The succeeding music channels a folk idiom, dotted with the warnings of shrill woodwinds, to help us hear the horrors experienced in the villages; it is followed by a return to spiritual contemplation. The propulsive sixth movement depicts the unstoppable drive of the “red banners” to commit and ignore their crimes. The very center of the work, literally and emotionally, is the seventh movement’s moving soprano solo; Stankovych here requests the less embellished sound of a folk, rather than operatic, singer. Her words are those of a dying child’s, pleading with her mother to ensure that they might once again meet in heaven. The second half of the Requiem frequently revisits material from the first, lending the overall piece cohesion and a kind of fractured mirror structure. The eighth movement is textless and begins with a violin solo of increasingly frantic desperation; this leads to a wordless chorus singing the lamenting theme of the first movement while anxious string rhythms play out overtop. The ninth revisits the terrible fanfare and the narrator’s initial request to remember, while the tenth recalls music of the child’s lament under additional narration. We are returned to prayerful contemplation in the next movement, then a hushed recollection of the village theme (appropriately in a fleetingly brief movement where the narrator reads “silently, like a candle, the people burned out”), and an even more ferocious homage to God’s strength. After one final dissonant fanfare, the fourteenth movement – an energetic, rhythmically vivacious Alleluia – begins in earnest. It feels as if this might end the work, but Stankovych, composing in the first year in which he would have been free to even acknowledge this atrocity, pointedly returns to a place of remembrance for the finale. The Alleluia is cut off with a scream from the orchestra, but then met with profound calm. The choruses sing the words “eternal memory,” the traditional ending of the Orthodox Requiem liturgy. In the final Amen, the last of many such gestures, Stankovych opts to unexpectedly conclude on a major chord, a sliver of illuminating brightness.
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That brief ray of light with which the work ends is fitting. If the beauty of this art – the quintessential product of those better angels of our nature – can still be pressed into service to help us not just remember, but feel, the human experience of nearly a century earlier, then perhaps there is distant hope yet that we can still work past our capacity for cruelty. The millions of Ukrainians who perished then – and the thousands more on the front lines defending Ukraine’s sovereignty once again today – deserve nothing less.
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Play Buried Truth
performed  by George Wyhinny

This is the widely unknown true story of how Ukrainian farmers: men, women, and children were murdered by artificial famine. Told from the point of view of four journalists: one who lied and three others who tried to expose him and Joseph Stalin for their lies: how millions of Ukrainians were slaughtered and how the Kremlin hid these atrocities from the Western world. Using primary source documents, first hand accounts, and witness testimonials, this piece memorializes the victims and celebrates Ukraine’s heroes. This is an excerpt from the full play, Hidden Truth.