Soprano Eva Ben-Zvi sings the Holocaust diarist’s legacy.
By STEVE LINDEEva Ben-Zvi(photo credit: Courtesy)
Eva Ben-Zvi tears up as she recalls her unforgettable solo opera in which performed the role of Anne Frank in Moscow in April 1991.“It was the first time there was a public performance for Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow,” says Eva, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, in her melodic voice. “It was a historic day, and it was my husband, Shmuel, who organized it.”Both Shmuel and Eva made aliyah from Lithuania. Shmuel, who served at the time as director of the Jewish Agency’s office in Moscow, takes up the story.At the Kremlin, Eva Ben-Zvi with composer Grigori Fried in December 1996, thanking American maestro Constantine Orbelian after the performance of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ (Courtesy)“In October 1990, carrying the music sheets for a piano performance of The Diary of Anne Frank, I arrived in Moscow, met with a top musical impresario and told him I was looking for the composer, Grigori Fried,” he says. “They found Fried, who was then about 75, and we met secretly. He had created a composition of Anne Frank’s story for voice and orchestra.”Ben-Zvi began to negotiate with the famous Bolshoi Theater Orchestra over presenting what was called in Russian, “The Diary of Anne Frank” – an opera-monodrama in four scenes.“They said it sounded like a good idea, but who was going to be the singer? We need to give her an audition. So I booked one of the most prestigious locations in the whole of Moscow, the Glinka Museum, and I invited all the top echelon of classical music in Moscow – including representatives of the Bolshoi Orchestra – and leaders of the Jewish community.”Eva interjects, saying, “Oy vey, I didn’t know this then!”Shmuel continues the story, smiling, “So Eva sang sections of the Anne Frank opera to all the who’s who of Moscow, without knowing who was actually there.”Eva corrects him. “Actually, the first half was an actress reading out ‘Letters from the Ghetto’ with candles, and it was very emotional. Then I sang the Anne Frank opera, which had been given to me by Joseph Dorfman, a famous Russian composer and pianist in Israel.”
She pauses briefly, taking a deep breath to relax and remember exactly what happened.“It took me a few months to learn it,” she explains. “My mother, who was in the Kovno Ghetto during the Holocaust, witnessed her seven-year-old son being shot in the eyes. I asked myself how I could sing this?”She answers her own question. “I got over it. The heart can pump very rapidly from excitement, but the mind has to go on working like a computer. It’s good that I didn’t know that all the Russian elite was in the audience. But I sang what I sang, and they seemed to like it.”Shmuel adds, with obvious pride, “She really impressed them. They took a decision on the spot to go with it. It took me a day to get over it myself, that the Bolshoi had agreed to play with Eva, but of course this was Eva’s accomplishment, not mine.”Shmuel and Eva Ben-Zvi in Moscow in April 1991, before the historic performance on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Courtesy)Shmuel Ben-Zvi, a former head of foreign languages at Israel Radio and Russian-language news anchor for the Israel Broadcasting Authority, notes that this was the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union just after the Iron Curtain fell. “It was all very new and unprecedented,” he says. “It was the beginning of a new era. Between the end of 1989 and 1991, the gates were open, and we witnessed the largest ever aliyah from the Soviet Union.”Asked if he had to organize the event under the radar of the Soviet regime, he says, “No, by this time, it was all in the open. We had opened the first office of the Jewish Agency in Moscow that year, and I received approval from Boris Yeltsin, who was to be elected president later that year.”The Soviet Union officially collapsed on December 25, 1991, when the hammer and sickle flag was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin and later replaced by the Russian tricolor. Earlier in the day, Gorbachev resigned, leaving Yeltsin as president of the newly independent Russian Federation.Eva takes up the story: “Once the Russian Season, a well-known company connected to the famous French publishing house, Chant du Monde, and the record lable, Harmonia Mundi, asked me to record the whole opera, I knew we’d made it. So I returned home to Ramat Gan and I recorded it with a brilliant pianist accompanying me and I sent them the cassette, and they approved it. Imagine, the Russians working with the French, and with an Israeli opera singer.“It was recorded in Moscow at Mosfilm studios in November 1991 with the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra conducted by Andrei Tchistiakov – and the rest, as they say, is history!”Shmuel makes a point of noting: “I would like to give special thanks to the artistic director of the Russian Season, Evgeny Barankin, who is also chairman of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. He was key to the success of the whole project.”Shmuel and Eva Ben-Zvi today (Courtesy)Appearing with the Bolshoi and singing Anne Frank was, perhaps, the highlight of her life, Eva says.“Before performing Anne Frank that first time in Moscow, I also sang “Mizmor LeDavid” in Hebrew by the Israeli composer, Ami Maayani,” she says. “Don’t forget, the whole audience had come to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.”Eva says Anne Frank’s story struck her as particularly pertinent that night.“Anne says it herself in her diary. Everyone sat by their radio and wanted to know what the situation was on the Russian front. Don’t forget it was the Russians who liberated several concentration camps, including Dachau. So her story had a special meaning for Russians.”Shmuel comments, “As a newsman, I should add that it was at this time in history that the Russian Federation and Israel began a period of warm relations. There was an order from the top of the Russian regime to move toward rapprochement with the US via Israel. That’s why it was legitimate to organize the whole thing officially, and not underground. It was the first time we could openly do something like this.”After creating a sensation singing “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Russian in Moscow, Eva decided that her next dream was to perform it in Hebrew, in Israel.In 1993, after she presented her one-woman show in Hebrew at Tel Aviv’s Suzanne Dellal Center accompanied by the Tel Aviv Symphony Orchestra, music critic Michael Ajzenstadt wrote under the headline, “Hebrew Anne Frank premieres,” that “the opera brings to life the world of Anne Frank with clarity and precision.” Another performance by Eva during an exhibition about the life of Anne Frank took place at Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum, and was attended by then-mayor Shlomo Lahat and the Dutch minister of culture.Shmuel says that it really was a historic process, in more ways than one. “First of all, the composer who fought in World War II worked underground in the Soviet Union, read The Diary of Anne Frank, and wrote the opera with Russian lyrics. The next stage was an Israeli singer – my wife – performing it in the Soviet Union itself, in cooperation with the Russian Season and Harmonia Mundi, and accompanied by the Bolshoi. It was a musical revolution. And finally, we decided to translate it into Hebrew, and have the premiere in Israel.”EVA BEN-ZVI was born Chaja Ermanaite in Kaunas in 1947. She has a master’s degree in piano studies, completing her vocal training at Tel Aviv’s Rubin Academy and the Staatliche Hochschule fur Musik in Detmold, Germany.“After getting my graduate degree, I began to work at the Academy as a pianist with a variety of singers,” she says. “I advanced my vocal studies in Germany and then with Prof. Tamar Rachum in Israel, who really helped me open up and develop myself as an artist. I began to sing and perform and travel, and taught vocal studies for more than 20 years at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Music, where I really feel at home. I enjoyed the fact that it combined teaching young students with various traditions of music, and enabled me to attend all kinds of music festivals around the world, from Nigeria and the Ivory Coast to Italy, Belgium, France and Switzerland.”Among her many operatic roles are Suzanne in “The Marriage of Figaro,” Rosina in “The Barber of Seville,” Zerlina in “Don Giovanni,” Norina in “Don Pasquale” and Gilda in “Rigoletto.” She has had many notable performances, including Gabriel Iranyi’s “The Hymns of Job” in 1993 (with pianist Natasha Tadson) and the leading role in Op79a, the Yiddish version of Dmitri Shostakovich’s songs, “From Jewish Folk Poetry.”Ben-Zvi performing the role of Anne Frank (Courtesy)She has performed extensively as a soloist with orchestras and chamber ensembles in Israel, Europe and the former Soviet Union, and was the first Israeli singer to perform at the Kremlin in a special concert to celebrate Moscow’s 850th Anniversary Pageant in 1997. In addition to the operatic, classical, Baroque and romantic music in her repertoire, Ben-Zvi frequently performs contemporary music, some of which has been especially composed for her.She has recorded six compact discs, including the first Israeli Music Center (IMC) recording, “Stride Between Verses – Israeli Art Songs,” and Fried’s mono-opera, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which she considers her most important work.Shmuel says, “Let me tell you something else: This CD recording was included by Russian Season at the special studios of Mosfilm (the largest and oldest film studio in Russia), which is the Russian version of Hollywood.” For Eva, he says, “The Diary of Anne Frank” will be a lasting legacy for the future.“There are fewer and fewer people who can tell us what happened during the Holocaust, and fewer and fewer people ready to hear. Our aim is to perpetuate the legacy of the Shoah from generation to generation.”ANNE FRANK was 15 when she died of illness, apparently typhus, at Bergen-Belsen in 1945, just weeks before allied forces liberated the death camp. She became the most famous of more than a million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust when her Diary of a Young Girl was published posthumously by her father, Otto Frank, and became an international bestseller.Asked how she relates to the character of the German-born Dutch diarist, Eva says with a quivering voice, “It all goes back to the terrible things my parents told me about the Shoah; about the son who was killed and the daughter who died later in the ghetto from starvation. After that, they were sent to concentration camps, my mother to Stutthof, my father to Dachau.“I connect to Anne Frank with my entire soul. If you listen to the opera, you will hear that there are times when I stop being a singer. I become Anne, telling her story, getting emotional and even screaming. There is a part that relates to a dream in which Anne actually realizes where she really is. In the beginning of the diary, she says she loves the sounds of the church bells ringing and watching the rain through the window of the Secret Annex, and doesn’t understand why her mother and father get so upset.The cover of Eva Ben-Zvi’s disc of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ (Courtesy)“Then she suddenly has this dream, in which her friend appears in torn, dirty clothes and says, ‘Anna, get me out of here! Save me!’ And Anne says, ‘I know I can’t save her. I can just pray: God, help her! God, help her!’ And this means that she understands her predicament for the first time. When I sing this, it’s really powerful, and I really scream. Then I lose my singing voice, from all the shouting, and I softly relate the story of her tragic fate. ‘Where is the Anna who I was before 1942? I am now another Anna. How will I survive? If God can only give me the strength to survive, I will do all I can to help humanity: ‘Waiting for that day without fear, let us look at the sky!’ And that’s when the lights fade, the music strikes a final chord and the opera ends.”
