The 21C Music Festival presents The Journal of Hélène Berr, a work for soprano, piano and string quartet in its North American premiere.
Soprano Elena Howard-Scott, who recently took the stage in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, performs with pianist Stéphane Mayer, and The Glenn Gould School Quartet (Byungchan Lee, violin; Daria Schibitcaia, violin; Hezekiah Leung, viola; Peter Eom, cello).
It’s a unique work that brings a tragic story to life.
Hélène Berr
On April 7, 1942, Parisian student Hélène Berr began a journal, dedicated to her lover Jean Morawiecki. The 21-year-old studied English literature at the Sorbonne. She was also Jewish, and her two-year diary documents her life under the increasingly oppressive Nazi Occupation.
The journal ends in early 1944, shortly before Berr and her family were deported to Auschwitz. They were among the last of the Jews to be taken from Paris. Hélène would die in April 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen camp, a victim of typhoid and a brutal beating by prison guards because she could not get up for morning call.
It was five days before the liberation of the camp by Allied forces.
Hélène’s brother sent the pages she’d written, and kept safe by entrusting them to the family’s cook, to Jean Morawiecki. Heartbroken, Jean held on to the document for almost a half century before family members convinced him it should be published.
LvT spoke to Belgian composer Bernard Foccroulle about the project.
From the original French production with soprano Adèle Charvet, pianist Jeanne Bleuse et le Quatuor Béla:
Composer Bernard Foccroulle: The Interview
The road to composing The Journal of Hélène Berr was a winding path for composer Bernard Foccroulle. Back in 2018, he was General Director of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and was approached by Le Quatuor Béla to write a piece for them. “A full evening piece,” Foccroulle recalls.
“A full evening piece for a string quartet — it’s not easy to do.” He’d already considered the idea of adding a vocalist. “A friend of mine sent me this book.” The book, of course, being The Journal of Hélène Berr. “I started reading it with no special idea,” he adds.
“In the middle of it, it became to me obvious that this was the kind of material that would make sense with a string quartet.”
Hélène wrote the journal to her boyfriend, but, as he points out, also to her future, one that she hoped to live out. “It was a testimony of the life of Jews in Paris during those terrible years.”
Hélène was a violinist, and wrote a great deal about music. “Music was probably the first link between her and her love,” Bernard believes. Hélène’s sister, a pianist, survived the camp. “I never met her sister, but I met her niece, who is the person who published this manuscript.”
Berr wrote poetry along with her diary entries. “Her quotations of English poetry are just amazing,” Foccroulle says.
His decision to use the material was immediate, but he realized, in requesting the rights, that the outcome was not at all certain. At first, the family was divided on whether or not to grant him the rights to use her diary in a musical project.
“In the end, I received the rights,” he says. The whole family made it to the premiere in France in 2023, which made him happy.
After about 20 performances in France, the Koerner Hall presentation will be a North American premiere. “It’s the first time out of France,” he says. “It’s the first time it’s made with a new ensemble of artists.”
The cast is now a full Canadian version, as he points out. “It’s the first time it’s done in a second language.” The spoken portions of the text will be in English, but sung in French.
“It’s also a very well written language,” he says of the Journal. Berr was a gifted writer. He notes that there were almost no corrections to the original manuscript.
“What attracted me at the time, there were several things,” Foccroulle says. He noticed, among other elements, her attraction to the natural world. “This speaks to me very, very much.”
As a composer of a vocal work, the story has a kind of fixed arc, but one with nuance due to Berr’s writing and observations. “The priority is the drama,” he explains. “There is a lot of light, and a lot of darkness.” A main feature of her journal, however, is that those moments of light and darkness are mixed into each other.
“I made the libretto just from her own texts,” he says. Her thoughts and observations offer a mirror into her world. Storms become a kind of recurring image. “Each storm in her diary becomes a sort of a mirror of her own feelings, her anxiety and fear.”
Like any young 20-something, her knowledge of the outside world is limited in the beginning, but grows as the Occupation drags on. “You have a young beautiful woman walking in Paris, enjoying the life […] but at the same time, you have someone who is aware of the tragedy.”
The story necessarily becomes darker and darker as the forces of the outside world close in on Hélène and her family. “But, even very close to the end, there are moments of pure joy,” Foccroulle says. “It’s not unidimensional. It’s more than that.”
Very early in the book, Foccroulle notes, she talks of her premonitions of tragedy. But, in the end, she still decides to stay in Paris. “For a musician, it’s very interesting to have such a portrait of such quality, with this association of light and darkness,” he says.
The timing of the project was apt, the composer feels. “One of the first reasons why I decided to do this, of course, I am very much aware that we are living in a period where antisemitism and racism are growing at a very fast speed.”
The Production
Foccroulle has been Zooming in on rehearsals with director Matthew Jocelyn. Jocelyn is also General Director of the Koffler Arts Centre, who were instrumental in bringing the production to Toronto.
“I’m very touched that he made a lot of efforts to make this possible,” Bernard says. “I’m very curious to hear what the Toronto audience will take from it.”
- Find details and tickets for the performances January 21, 22, and 23 [HERE].
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