I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY

In 2018 Helena van Heel, mezzo, Nancy Braithwaite, clarinet and Vaughan Schlepp, piano recorded I never saw another butterfly, a cycle of six songs, written by the American composer Thomas Oboe Lee, on poems made by children in the ghetto of Terezin (Theresienstadt).

Thomas Oboe Lee: I Never Saw Another Butterfly (1991) - full score, opus 49

“A total of 15.000 children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp between the years 1942-1944; less than 100 survived. With its high proportion of artists and intellectuals, culture flourished in the ghetto – alongside starvation, disease and constant dread of transports to the death camps of the east. In art classes the children in Terezin wrote poems and made drawings. What did it do to those children, that ghetto? Much of what it did to them we can see in the art they left behind. The children’s poems and drawings, revealing a maturity beyond their years, are haunting reminders of what no child should ever have to see.” (Excerpt from the book I never saw another butterfly)

Flowers and a butterfly – Dorit Weiser(1932-1944), Undated

With permission of the Jewish Museum in Prague

 

Recording, Peter Arts

3. ON A SUNNY EVENING

On a purple, sun-shot evening

Under wide-flowering chestnut trees

Upon the threshold full of dust

Yesterday, today, the days are all like these.

Trees flower forth in beauty

Lovely, too, their very wood all gnarled and old

That I am half afraid to peer

Into their crowns of green and gold.

The sun has made a veil of gold

So lovely that my body aches.

Above, the heavens shriek with blue

Convinced I’ve smiled by some mistake.

The world’s abloom and seems to smile.

I want to fly but where, how high?

If in barbed wire, things can bloom

Why couldn’t I? I will not die!

1944 Anonymous

Written by the children in Barracks L318 and L417, ages 10-16 years

 

Recording, Peter Arts

5. THE BUTTERFLY

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing

against a white stone…

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly ‘way up high.

It went away I’m sure because it wished to

kiss the world good-bye.

For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto.

But I have found my people here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut candles in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

4-6-1942 Pavel Friedmann

 

Recording, Peter Arts

6. Spem in alium nunquam habui

Praeter in te, Deus Israel,

Qui irasceris et propitius eris,

et omnia peccata hominum

in tribulatione dimitis.

Domine Deus,

Creator caeli et terrae

respice humilitatem nostram.

The text from a 40-part Renaissance motet by Thomas Tallis, composed in 1570.

From the Book of Judith.

 

(I have never put my hope in any other

but in You, O God of Israel

who can show both anger and graciousness,

and who absolves all the sins

of suffering man.

Lord God,

Creator of Heaven and Earth

be mindful of our lowliness.)

 

Dream – Helena Mändlová (1930-1944), Undated (1943)

With permission of the Jewish Museum in Prague

 

Flowers – Ruth Ščerbak (1934-1944), Undated (1943-1944)

With permission of the Jewish Museum in Prague

 

Forest – Vilém Eisner (1933-1943), Undated (1943)

With permission of the Jewish Museum in Prague