“This Above All: To Thine Own Self Be True”
Comic Concert about Five Significant German-Jewish Women
What does it mean to be Jewish in Germany? And on top of that, a woman? German Jews have been concerned with questions of belonging and identity for centuries. In recent years, these have been increasingly reflected in graphic novels that deal with the lives and impact of influential Jewish personalities.
To celebrate “1700 Years of Jewish life in Germany”, the composer and pianist Itay Dvori presents a new piano soirée which sets the graphic biographies of five significant 20th-century German-Jewish women to music. The concert profiles the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the first female rabbi Regina Jonas, the mathematician Emmy Noether, the poet Mascha Kaléko and the actress Hanna Maron (in fact, the title of this programme, after the well-known Shakespearean quote, is taken from the graphic novel about Maron).
His partly composed, partly improvised musical settings for comics are combined with simultaneous projections of images and texts from the comics, creating a synaesthetic experience. Individual pieces composed for comic works by Barbara Yelin, Elke Renate Steiner, Ken Krimstein, Cliò Agrapidis and Elena Mistrello are interspersed with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Six Songs Without Words Op. 67. These create a space for reflection and, at the same time, provide inspiration for the musical settings.
The concert premiere, which took place on 2 December 2021 in Berlin, was conceived and produced in cooperation with the Jüdisches Zentrum Synagoge Fraenkelufer e.V. and Jewish Moving Pictures e.V. It was funded by the society 321–2021: 1700 Jahre jüdisches Leben in Deutschland e.V. [321-2021: 1700 Years of Jewish life in Germany]. Click here for photos of the event.
