Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
On Sunday, the University of Maryland’s music school performed The Road of Promise, a shortened form of The Eternal Road by 20th-century composer Kurt Weill. The oratorio, which was written during the persecution that preceded the Holocaust, involves the congregation of a synagogue sheltering themselves from a pogrom and recounting the foundational stories of the Jewish people as a form of reassurance in the light of the terrible events going on outside. (Full disclosure: I was in this performance, as a member of the chorus.)
Conductor Craig Kier, director of the Maryland Opera Studio and an extraordinary talent, emphasized the current-day political significance of this work. It is precisely this political significance that I found concerning. Kier tied the work to this university’s ongoing “Year of Immigration,” writing in his program note that the story is “inextricably linked to the story of immigration and exile,” and that “through performances and conversation, [the School of Music] seek[s] to provide our community with a historical perspective that will … challenge our understanding of a topic interwoven in our past, present, and future.” There was even a pre-show discussion addressing “how this piece resonates today.”
When The Road of Promise was written, it was intended to bring awareness to the monstrous treatment Jews were suffering in Nazi Germany and promote the establishment of a Jewish state. It goes without saying that stopping the Nazis was the worthiest of worthy causes. It is also a cause of personal importance to me: I am of Jewish descent (my grandfather is Jewish), and as a practicing Catholic, I view the Jewish religion as the one and only sacred forerunner of my own faith.
But it’s not 1937 anymore, and the political significance of this work has changed, for a simple reason: The shock and horror of the Holocaust garnered sympathy for the Jewish people, and this sympathy helped ease the path to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Zionism always lurks beneath the surface in The Road of Promise, from God’s promise at the beginning of the piece to make Abraham’s descendants “a mighty nation” (nations always have borders) to the triumphant march with which the piece ends.
This matters, because even if the music school thought performing a piece about forcing immigrant populations to leave their countries would critique the Trump administration, it cannot escape notice that the Trump administration is avidly pro-Israel. The Trump administration, after all, moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, legitimizing Israel’s claim of control over land that is also claimed by Palestinians and significantly reducing the chance of any peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The behavior of the state of Israel in just the last few months has been utterly horrifying. Israeli troops gunned down protestors and shot medical personnel in the name of “border defense,” even though the Gaza fence is not a border. The Israeli legislature, the Knesset, passed a law making all non-Jews second-class citizens, a law that noted racist/alt-right figure Richard Spencer said should be looked to as a model for Europe. Despite all this, strong support for Israel is in fact one of the remaining bipartisan issues — probably because keeping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict going is good for weapons sales.
Was it worth resurrecting a mediocre piece of music just to send a political message that subsequent history has substantially darkened? Surely there are excellent works that would unambiguously support the Latinx and Palestinian populations President Trump seeks to oppress. That these works are disregarded in favor of the middling output of another dead white man speaks volumes about why classical music struggles to find relevance to most people in 2018. If you want to listen to Israeli militarism, why pay steep ticket prices to filter it through a bizarre blend of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Handel’s Messiah? You can just read any mainstream American foreign policy magazine for free online without leaving your bed.
If standing up for the marginalized means anything, it means standing up for the exact people The Road of Promise’s unabashed Zionism cuts against today. Choosing to perform it during the Year of Immigration, with the president we have now, was a mistake that sent mixed messages at best. Educating the community on the problems faced by targeted populations around the world and in our own country is a highly noble goal. It’s a shame that The Road of Promise doesn’t do it.
John-Paul Teti is a senior computer science major. He can be reached at jp@jpteti.com.
