Lest We Forget: A Manifest of Struggle and Hope

Politics and art have often been powerful partners, and many artists have been articulate and influential politically. Who wrote the music to Italy’s Risorgimento but Verdi?

In her foreword to this recording, Merlyn Quaife makes explicit its purpose, stating that its genesis was as a protest against the ‘recent events in our country’ which were ignored in the context of our ‘relaxed and comfortable culture’. Her message is that ‘not caring is never harmless’. Katz and Quaife – and Tall Poppies – are standing up to be counted.

This is a highly diverse grouping of songs. They concern the heartbreaking loss of homeland (Würzburger’s Vereinsamt or Isolation), disillusionment with the homeland (Randy Newman’s Political Science), the loss of political innocence (Poulenc’s C) and the personal losses of war (Kurt Weill’s Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib) and political action (Duparc’s Elegie). But in case you think these are too easy to listen to, there are bitter cabaret songs from the Nazi’s Terezin camp, a song of Irish dispossession (Arnold Bax) and the tragedy of a ghetto child (Oscar Straus). Had the grainy photos of Strange Fruit not been in the newspapers of our own generation, we would not imagine such a poetic image possible, let alone its basis in reality. It gets worse: Dennis Vaughan’s Words are History is a painful evocation of the losses of Australian indigenous peoples (“I’m sorry. OK?”).

The songs are as stylistically diverse as the sentiments they express. French, German and Spanish texts are translated or sung in English, and excellent annotations to each song (by young Australian director Anthony Ernst and pianist Andrea Katz) make the reasons for the choice of songs very clear. Among the poets represented are Nietzsche, Brecht (of course), Thomas Moore, Daisy Utemorrah, with self-composed lyrics by Victor Jara, Randy Newman and John Lennon. The performances are in every way true to this diversity. Warmth, strength, irony, loss and at last, peace.

The final songs, then, speak of the possibility of peace. Lennon’s, of course, and the exquisite Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh (Over all the hilltops is peace), a setting of Goethe, by Liszt. Quaife writes that ‘selfishness has nothing real to offer. Only love and compassion do’.

She speaks well. But don’t forget that the point has been made: Victor Jara’s Manifesto, (sung in English) says: ‘I don’t sing for singing’s sake, nor for having a good voice. I sing because my guitar has a reason and a purpose’.

This disc is a protest – against uncaring, drawing its songs from some of humanity’s darkest moments. The tone moves between the plangent wailing of Shtiler, shtiler by 11-year-old Alec Volkoviski inside a Vilna ghetto in 1943, to Abel Meeropol’s unforgettable invocation of the lynching of blacks in the US South, Strange Fruit, through the highly evolved language of the European art song in works by Duparc, Liszt and others, and on to the almost unbearably brittle cabaret parody written by inmates of Hitler’s concentration camp at Terezin. There is contemporary satire by Randy Newman and Poulenc’s setting of a Spanish Civil War poem by Louis Aragon.

The sequence of some tracks is so hard-hitting as to almost defy listening in a single session. Quaife mixes the forceful colours of outraged humanity with moments of peace.