Composed By: Lawrence Siegel

Purchase sheet music here

Voicing: SATB

Keyword: Holocaust

Language: Hebrew, English, German, Yiddish

Difficulty: challenging (and emotionally very challenging)

Country: America

Solos: soprano, alto, tenor, bass

Instruments: orchestra (chamber or full)

Lyrics: various sources

Year Composed/Published: 2008

Timing: 60:00

Tempo: various

First Line: Oyfn Pripachok

 The composer writes: KADDISH is an evening-length work for chorus, soloists, and chamber ensemble, a cycle of fifteen original songs. Its intention is to make common cause with those who survived the Holocaust, by giving its audience the empathic capacity to feel some shadow of what the survivors felt and feel, and to carry in our hearts, and, metaphorically, on our backs, those who perished. The libretto for KADDISH is fashioned largely from testimonies of survivors, primarily first-hand interviews which I conducted over several years. Because of the verbatim use of testimony, the messages are a true reading of the feelings and thoughts of some of the survivors of the Holocaust. A few lines were taken from materials in the public domain, including the recitation of names which makes up the Litany movement. A few lines come from or are adapted from the Bible (Book of Job, a Psalm.) A few lines are the direct, unmediated creation of the composer. The full symphonic edition of KADDISH was commissioned by the Houston Symphony, Hans Graf, Music Director, in partnership with Holocaust Museum Houston. It premiered at Jones Hall, Houston, Texas, on November 23, 2010.