stateless (2019) 6'

program note

I got very happy at the thought of writing a piece that would premiere in Barcelona. Barcelona has always meant a lot to me – my mother was a child in Barcelona, which saved her life. My mother was born in Germany, in 1927. When Hitler came to power it was clear to many Jews that they would need to leave but there were few places they could go. In 1935 my Mother and her parents managed to get to Barcelona and they stayed until 1939. My childhood was full of her stories – hiding from the civil war, hiding that they were Jews. We visited several times when I was a boy and my mother would take us to the places she remembered, so we got to see Barcelona change in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It changed a lot – the broken down, one room storefront where her family lived is now a very fancy apartment building.

As a refugee, my mother was stateless, and the loss of belonging to a place stayed with her for her entire life. But she loved Barcelona and she would remind us of the long history of Jews in the region. In fact, one of the most famous medieval Jewish scholars – Rabbi Moses ben Nachman – was from nearby Girona. Like my mother, he also became stateless, when he was exiled from Spain in 1267. The text for my piece ‘stateless’ is a paraphrase of a letter that Rabbi Moses ben Nachman wrote to his children in Girona, from his exile in Jerusalem, describing his new life, blessing them, and wishing them well.

Libretto

stateless
words by david lang
(after rabbi moses ben nachman)

I left my family
I left my house
I left my sons and daughters
my heart and my eyes will dwell with them forever
and so I came to this land

what can I tell you about this land?
the more sacred the space
the greater the devastation
even in its destruction
it is a good land

we are all refugees here
we found some ruins of a house
built on pillars of marble
with a marble dome
we volunteered to fix the house
we built a temple there

many people come
from all across the land
they come to see what happened here
those of us who have seen the land destroyed
let us see the land restored

and you, my children
may you deserve all that is good in this world

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