When The New York Choral Society asked me to write a choral work on the subject of Passover, two ideas interested me immediately. The first was the theme of motion from oppression to escape to freedom. Dayenu tells two such stories in two large movements: the Biblical flight from Egypt, which the Passover holiday celebrates, and an escape from a World War II concentration camp. The contrast between these two stories is immediately evident: the first involves hundreds of thousands of people with frequent, powerful and spectacular intervention by God; the second just a single man, surviving by his wits, courage and luck, (apparently) without God’s assistance.
The second idea that called to me was the concept behind the title. “Dayenu” means “enough” in Hebrew, and is the refrain for the traditional Passover song which enumerates the manifold blessings bestowed by God in ancient days, declaring that each blessing by itself would have been enough (dayenu). After fifty years of singing “Dayenu” at Passover seders, I found that the word began to take on an independent existence for me. I have received more of the blessings and pleasures of life than I expected — dayenu, it would have been enough — and yet there are always more.
Passover isn’t that simple. Once I started reading the texts, including Exodus and Holocaust writings, and talking to Jewish scholars and rabbis, I began to see the doublesidedness of all of these concepts, indeed, all the concepts surrounding Passover. Freedom? Who wants it? Not the Israelites, who yell at Moses:
“What have you done to us, taking us to die in the wilderness?
Are there not graves enough in Egypt!?” (Exodus 14:11)
They were right: almost all of them died in the desert. Triumph? I did not have the stomach to set to music the bloodthirsty victory song of Exodus 15; instead, I found myself appalled at the horrific things that happen to the Egyptians in this story. Wasn’t compassion, even for the enemy, an essential component of a long Jewish tradition?
In writing this oratorio, I thought of myself as a storyteller disguised as a composer, posing questions through the way I tell the story. I do not pretend to be able to provide answers.
The first movement of Dayenu, “Part I: Egypt,” begins with a brief summary of the Biblical flight from Egypt. A passage of Furtive Prayers follows, sung by each member of the chorus independently of the others, hushed, secretively, and alone, as if in a time when prayer is dangerous and must be done quickly and so quietly that only God can hear.
The main body of the first movement relates the traditional Exodus story (using the Biblical text) including God’s appearance to Moses in the burning bush, Moses and Aaron’s demands to Pharaoh, the ten plagues, and the escape across the Red Sea. The two male soloists carry the narration and provide the voices of Moses, Aaron, and Pharaoh. The voice of God is represented by the male soloists singing in English, backed by the chorus singing in the original Hebrew. This should create the effect for the audience of hearing the surface content of God’s words without being able to grasp their full meaning.
Interspersed throughout the narrative are choral excerpts from the Hallel (Psalm 113), a song in praise of God, sung in Hebrew. These sections function similarly to the chorales in Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, reacting to and commenting on the narrative. After the Red Sea closes on the Egyptians, the chorus sings an extended, joyful reprise of this music. God interrupts the celebration, saying, “Why do you sing Me praises when My creatures are drowning?” The chorus responds with a subdued prayer to “Harachaman,” the All-Compassionate One.
In “Part II: Terezin,” sung almost entirely in English, most of the texts are taken from literature written during and after World War II by Holocaust survivors and victims. More furtive prayers open the movement, followed by a prisoners’ chorus, followed by the centerpiece of this movement, a setting of Evzen Hilar’s harrowing first-person account of his escape from the Terezín concentration camp, sung by the two soloists. Hilar knew the risks of freedom and was willing to pay the price:
“If we are to be killed, then at least fighting, but not as defenseless slaves.”
After his escape, Evzen Hilar joined the resistance forces in Slovakia and fought until he was wounded and permanently disabled.
The piece ends with two choruses: first, an English setting with original music of the traditional Passover song “Dayenu.” The chorus sings through the list of God’s blessings twice, with increasingly complex counterpoint gradually blurring the text, as if the blessings were too numerous to recount precisely. The music cycles all the way around the circle of fifths, building up tremendous harmonic as well as rhythmic momentum. In this context, surrounded by Holocaust writings, the text of “Dayenu” takes on overtones of bitterness, ambivalence and irony. I felt it necessary to add extra verses to the song, which the chorus sings in a climactic ending:
Had He only saved us from Terezin!
Had He only freed us from Auschwitz!
Had He only delivered us out of the Holocaust!…
Dayenu!
The finale, a setting of the poem “May 1945” by Dagmar Hilarová, provides possible solace, ending:
It was May
and everything opened up to freedom.
Evzen Hilar and Dagmar Hilarová married after the war. I imagine her as having written “May 1945” for him, perhaps to say that despite his struggle, sacrifice, pain, loss, mutilation, and the deaths of his loved ones and friends, he could still savor this one beautiful day in freedom.
“May 1945” was the first text I read when I started working on Dayenu. Although I had no other ideas and hadn’t written a note yet, I immediately knew that I would use the poem and that I would place it at the very end of the work, however that work turned out. When taking a long journey, it helps to know where you’re going.
For me, Dayenu was a journey into the unknown, into areas of thought and feeling that I had never fully explored. I found that the more specific my choices, the more universal the result. The primeval rhythms of the ancient Hebrew texts served as gateways to areas of visceral power, ferocity, anger, violence, tenderness, joy, gratitude, fear and despair. The sheer sound and rhythms of the language and the music communicate much more than the content of the words, even to a listener with no knowledge of Jewish culture or Hebrew.
I would nevertheless like to translate a few key Hebrew words that recur throughout Dayenu. Adonai is the word that Jews use in place of the true name of God. Eloheinu and similar words also refer to God. Mitzrayim means Egypt or the Egyptians.