Fighting the Devil
This is a rock opera about Hitler. This is the terrifying story of the most evil man who has ever lived. Stalin, Mao and Genghis Khan were evil men, too. But none of them committed their disgusting crimes for the sake of killing people; they all had political reasons. Hitler caused the death of 55 million people, and his only reason was to kill every Jew, Gypsy, Negro, Russian, Handicapped, Homosexual in the world; anyone who was not blond and German.
Swastika tells the story of the victims; the murdered politicians, the Jews in the Concentration Camps, the ordinary, good-hearted Germans, the factory girls with their boys in the war, the nurses, the children. We witness the fight against Hitler, from Rudolf Steiner, the Jewish partisans in Warsaw, and the Russian soldiers in Stalingrad to the Cherub, who finally kills Hitler. It is a modern legend of the struggle between the Good and Evil forces. It is the fight against the racism of the last century and the racism of the present times. The Nazis did not die with Hitler; the monsters are still with us.
A Gothic rock opera with large choir and haunting songs on the dark side of the human nature. But a light is shining in the dark.
I have always considered Swastika one of my major works, although it has never been staged at all, unlike all my other operas and musicals. But with the final release as a complete score and libretto in 1999, the opera is ready for any production, professional or amateur. Musically, it can be performed with the MIDI files and guitars only or with a full rock orchestra with three guitars, bass, drums, piano, organ and flute. The 3 soloists and a choir of 16 (SATB voicing) make it an ideal work for small opera companies or amateur theatre groups.
It has been a long, cumbersome road to this release, the longest ever in my career. Originally written in a dark but extremely creative period of my youth, the opera Swastika has been accepted and then refused for professional production twice (1980 and 1990). It has been released as a vocal score (1985), but not until the age of the musical computer programs, it was possible to release the final version with the complete orchestra score including MIDI files, enabling the theatre groups to use the full orchestra score for extended rock band. And not the least; in 1999 I could finish the loose ends of its dramatic form, replacing scenes 12, 13 and 14 with more realistic and properly researched pictures of the evil Hitler and Nazi Germany.
In the new Millennium, there will be an increasing need for the message of Swastika: Peace, Respect for your fellow humans and Love. There will still be terrible wars going on, still children and minority groups will be persecuted and slaughtered. Hitler is long dead, but the infamous evilness of his racist ideas still pervades Nazi supporters and racists all over the Western World. We need to take God: Christian, Jewish or the Allah of Islam, serious if we want to stop the violent oppression of Jews, Roma, Muslims, Handicapped, Homosexuals and members of political opposition, all groups who were murdered in millions during the evil days of Hitler. Be humble and tolerant, pray to God for the persecuted. And do not hesitate to fight the evil racism, wherever you find it.
Let the Light of God shine through the Dark of human evil. Let us not be devils to one another, let us be God’s children and live in Peace and Love.
"Mik" Henrik Wilhelm Gade
Copenhagen the 24 December 1999.
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The "Crystal Night" 1938 |
The Making of Swastika
In 1974, I decided to write an opera, but hesitated, primarily because I found the very idea of actors singing "spoken" lines ridiculous and antiquated, opposed to singing straight songs which was what we rock musicians normally did! I was to change my mind completely, many years later!
My closest role model was actually Pete Townshend and his "Tommy", but it turned out to be the Choir work "The Elf King’s Daughter" (1853) by my great grandfather Niels W. Gade that finally convinced me about the richness of the Danish language, properly employed. I spent the whole of June and July 1974 in a "Medieval rapture". Every day, I heard "The Elf King’s Daughter" on the gramophone; again and again, I found fantastic details and seductive phrases in the text and music. This zenith in the production of the old Gade in 1853 was eventually to inspire the "young" Gade’s 1970’ies main work, the opera Swastika. Another important musical source to Swastika, was the jazz rock band Mahavisnu Orchestra and their advanced rhythms.
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The Concentration Camp |
I found the subject of Swastika, on one of my countless student jobs, where I meet a guy, who was interested in occult themes, which were very popular in the early 70’ies. He had read the book "The Spear of Destiny", released in 1973 (see the later description in this document) and we talked about it for hours, while moving luxury furniture for international embassies. It was the strange story of Longinus, the Roman soldier who stuck a spear into the side of Jesus Christ on the cross to make sure our Lord was dead. This "magic" spear has been preserved until today in Austria, where Adolf Hitler stole it in 1938, believing that the spear would make him rule the world. Rudolf Steiner, the world famous school founder, formerly a part of the early occult movement himself, was to be Hitler’s first serious opponent.
I chose to write the opera as a static icon-like series of "pictures", 2 times 9, each with a solo song and sometimes a short dialogue without music. This way, I completely escaped the problem of actors singing to one another, and it gave the original 1974 Swastika its solemn, half ceremonial character.
Through the years 1973 to 1975, I wrote in a hardcore archaic Danish with old phrases and the clear-cut, simple style of the medieval Danish folk ballads. This is an important part of Swastika, adding to the symbolic, “Byzantine” character of the opera.
Actually writing the lyrics of Swastika was a frightening experience. Especially Hitler’s lines were terrifying, and in their devilish evilness, they affected me both physically and mentally, as I wrote them. Afterwards, it was a relief to write the songs of Steiner, as he was the good guy! Unfortunately, I quickly took a hefty dislike to the Steiner devotees’ saint-like worship of their idol. So I let the 1st Act end with his bitter death. Hitler had gained the victory in the first round.
It was quite obvious to me that the 2nd Act should begin with a text by the Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, whom I had admired since the late 60’ies. I chose the moving and grim "O, these chimneys". The music to this poem was not only the culmination of Swastika, but also one of the best songs in my whole catalogue.
The rest of the lyrics was written fast as lightning. I introduced Milena, the lover of Franz Kafka, as a character, giving me the opportunity to make the only love song in Swastika. The Choir of the Dead is my apotheoses, and the Refugees’ Song in the shattered Poland is also moving in its deep longing for the salvation. The final scene shows Hitler’s death in the bombed out Berlin, and the atomic bomb as a sign of the new times.
Swastika was my 1974 vision of redemption through pain and destruction. The destruction part was to be replaced in 1999 with the vision of the fighting Jewish partisans and the Russian victory over Hitler in the new scenes, I added in the final version of Swastika. That is the mature writer, not the young desperado, I used to be. Lucky fellow - poor bastard! And what talent one had in these terrible days. Woe to the talent!
The rock opera Swastika was written, composed and arranged in a tempo furioso: A score of 300 pages and a playing time of 3 hours. All finished in 6 weeks, full stop! I have never written anything so perfect and so fast in my 30 years of writing. Amazing and irritating.
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In the late medieval psalm "The Blooming Rose", Swastika contains the theme of hope, as a sign that God has not left us to death and the evil of darkness. Thus the important message of Swastika are not the horror and the darkness, but the belief in God’s invincible Light and the true Goodness hidden deep in all of his creation.
25 years after the making of Swastika, I wanted a complete, totally revised version of my old opera. This meant that I had to revise or possibly rewrite the whole opera. I started to rewrite Swastika, a task that was to last for over 8 months, fulltime.
It is a genuine problem to rewrite a piece in a style, long dead. The musical style of the early 70’ies was typical Rock’n’roll with straight 1/8 notes all the way, no funk please! And my music of today leans heavily towards funk / modern jazz. What should I do, change the whole score to a funky version of "Les Miserables"? No way! Let the kid from 1974 have his will! So I decided to do a sober restoration of Swastika, in the original style, i.e. classical rock. Nevertheless, I sometimes could not withstand putting in small fragments of my modern style (the three new scenes are all in my 1999 style), but as a whole, I hope I have managed to preserve the original feeling of the music.
The old rock style of the 60’ies / 70’ies is dead, although hordes of young copycat bands play Beatles and Led Zeppelin to satisfy the nostalgia of the kids (or my generation). But Swastika is not a copy. It is an original work, which could have been written in the 1600th century or in year 3714 for that matter! Even if you have written the piece yourself, you have to respect the creation of the young kid you once were.
More Respect for the Young Talent!
H.W. Gade October 1974 Photo: Passport Automat
The original score was written on A4 standard notepaper with 12 systems. The order of the voices is a total mess. The instruments come and go, as it pleases the composer, and reappear a couple of pages later in another position, totally confusing the reader. They are professional, though, in spite of my lack of professional training at the time. All notes, symbols, keys, meter symbols, effect signs etc. are ok. So as long as I ignored the complete chaos in the instruments’ order, it was perfectly possible to use the notes as a basis of my transcription into the new world of MIDI.
The only instrument missing in the original score were the drums. I did not really know how to write drum notation in 1974, so in 1999 I wrote the percussion parts from scratch, although in the style of Billy Cobham, my fantasy drummer of 1974!
Of the old arrangement, I did keep a lot of the original details. The guitars are almost the same as in 1974, but the bass was totally rewritten. The pianos and organ are partly the same, but much more complicated and lighter, more transparent, than the heavy style I used then. The choir parts were jokes, so I rewrote nearly all of them. The solo vocals were changed, too, sometimes very drastically.
The rest was ok.
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H.W. Gade December 1999, Photo
© Ulla Haastrup 1999 |
In the final version of Swastika, I threw away scenes 12, 13 and 14. The lyrics of scene 12 were a dull repetition of Hitler’s demonic solos from the 1st Act. The 13th scene was already scrapped due to problems with Nelly Sachs’ heirs over my use of one of her texts in this scene ("We are gardeners"). They were right! Scene 14 used to be a boring instrumental organ piece.
I replaced the old scenes with:
Scene 12, My Brother, My Killer
The story of daily life in Nazi Germany; four antagonistic characters, two good guys and two evil guys, share the same melody, but with "slightly" different texts. The good nurse help the patients, the evil nurses kill the patients, etc. I use the nurses, doctors, priests and some ordinary neighbours as spokespersons for the common people under their evil dictator Hitler. The music is modern funk, in my 1999 style. This goes for all three new scenes.
Scene 13, Do you want the Total War?
Scene 13 includes a calculated falsification of the actual historical facts concerning Göbbels’ (in)famous speech at the Berlin Sportspalatz in 1943. First of all, I placed the speech before the defeat at Stalingrad, secondly, I replaced Göbbels with Hitler. The latter was decided in order to sharpen the picture of the evil Hitler, the first in order to make the original aftermath of Stalingrad a foreplay to the eventual total war, which ironically mainly hit the Germans themselves in Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin etc.
This is my version of the final defeat of Hitler, the heroic Russian defenders of the "tractor factory " in industrial city of Stalingrad in 1942-43. I focus on General Paulus and Hitler in the last phases of the siege of Stalingrad. General Paulus, who later went over to the Russians, begs Hitler to stop the futile attacks with over 200,000 German casualties. Hitler, who had taken over the military leadership of the German army with disastrous results for the army, blankly refuses to listen to reason or humanity. So the German army looses and Hitler eventually looses the war.
The music is funk rock with some strange elements of Rackmaninov piano style and icy organ / flute sounds in the frozen Russia Winter of January 1943, one of the coldest in the 20th century!
Some Special Songs in Swastika
German composer Prätorius based his wonderful psalm from 1606 on a German catholic text from about year 1500. It was originally printed in the lied collection "altkatholischen Trierschen Christliedlein", and found its way to the official Danish Psalm Book in the 1930’ies (protestants we are, in cold Denmark!). I chose the psalm as the first and last song of Swastika to stress the hope of Jesus and mother Mary, symbolised by the allegory of the Rose Bush and its flower, the Holy Child.
The Jewish poet Nelly Sachs is one of my favourite poets, in my opinion, the greatest poet in the 20th century. She was born in Germany in 1891, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer. Her early poems were highly romantic, inspired by Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf, who later helped Nelly Sachs and her mother escape Nazi Germany in 1940.
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Nelly Sachs |
For the rest of her life, Nelly Sachs lived as a writer and translator in Sweden. Her poems, after the arrival in her new country, were almost entirely about the Holocaust, now in a modernistic and tight style, filled with mythological visions from the Bible and the Jewish tradition. I use two of her major poems in Swastika, "O, these chimneys" and "You’re drawing me upwards", both from the collection Fahrt ins Staublose (Journey to the Beyond) published in 1961. Nelly Sachs has received the Nobel price in Literature and many other international rewards. She died in 1970.
The Yiddish poet Mordecai Gebirtig (1877-1942) lived in Krakow, where he in 1938 became famous for his poem known as "Unzer shtetl brent" or "S' Brent" (Our city is burning). The poem was inspired by the Pogrom in the Polish town Przytyk. Gebirtig urged the Jews to fight the Nazis, and the song quickly became extremely popular among the young Jews in the ghetto and later in the concentration camps. Mordecai Gebirtig was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. About 15 poems of Gebirtig were published after the War in 1946 in the collection S'Brent (1939 - 1942). He is translated into Polish, Hebrew and other languages. The tune in Swastika is composed by me.
It was obvious to begin the story of the "Spear of Destiny" with
the beginning, Golgotha. But as a believing Christian, I found the very idea of
connecting an occult spear with the suffering of Jesus Christ appalling. I soon
began questioning the whole concept. Golgotha is the focal point of Christian
conscience, and the death of Jesus, the man, is the rise of Jesus Christ, our
Lord. A spear stabbing the dead Jesus in the side cannot be anything but evil.
Thus, to make sense of the concept, I had to focus on Jesus instead of the
bloody spear, the instrument of the killers.
So I leave the 2nd Scene with the vision of the
Light (of Jesus Christ), a hope to mankind. After this lesson in the basic
values of Christian life, Compassion and Love, I moved on to the first picture
of the thief and liar, who wanted to own the world.
My main problem, the last months of the 20th century, was to figure out, how my symbolic opera about Hitler as the ultimate devil, could unite the Christian faith with the overwhelming sufferings of the Jews. I know that many of the survivors from the death camps did not think much of the Christians, especially in Poland. True, there has always been a degree of anti-Semitism in Poland including the recent madmen placing crosses in the Ausschwitz memorial park. But please remember that the Germans killed the Polish bishops and priests, too*)! And even in Germany, the only attempt to make a Nazi dominated protestant church failed, as the German Protestants chose to establish their own alternative church. And in 1944, the Protestant leaders, among them Martin Niemüller, were sent to the concentration camps together with many Catholics. There are no true examples of hateful Christians supporting Hitler!
In my research in 1999, I found many evidences of the Nazis’ hatred against the mild and tolerant Christian God. There were serious plans of replacing the Christian churches with a pagan Wotan belief, including a public execution of the Pope, when the war had been won. This was actually the core of Hitler’s occult plan (see the later section on Occultism). The Christians were definitively the enemies of Hitler. Love and Compassion, in the Nazi Ideology, were completely incompatible with the heartless, Arian macho world of Hitler Germany.
A religion hated by Hitler cannot be that bad. I keep my own faith with a deep respected for the Jewish religion, the fathers of my faith. In the poets Nelly Sachs and Mordecai Gebirtig, the Jews have their spokespersons, as the Christians have theirs in "The Blooming Rose" psalm and Golgotha.
*) Over 12 million civil Poles died during the war
To replace the suspect Rudolf Steiner as "the good guy", I chose one of the archangels, the Cherub to destroy the devil Hitler. I also included Mother Mary as a young Jewish mother among the refugees in Poland, to finally unite our two religious perspectives, the Jewish and the Christian.
The Czech-Jewish author Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who is one of the greatest novelists ever, had a problem with women (and fathers!). He was engaged three times and never married. While engaged for the third time, he fell in love with his 20-year old Czech translator, Milena Jesnská (1896-1944). Their love story, documented through a heartbreaking collection of Kafka’s letters to Milena*), was a great inspiration to me in my most insecure and sensible youth. The letters show the fragile love between Kafka and the (married) young woman, disturbed by the writer’s essential Angst and inability to make a choice. After Franz Kafka’s early death of Tuberculosis in 1924, Milena became a respected leftwing writer, but shortly after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, she was arrested and sent to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück, where she died in 1944 during a kidney operation.
I used the figure of "Milena" to depict the loss of a lover, the fear of death and the emptiness of the "still living". She was a hero to me; I hope she can forgive me, using her name.
*) 1967, S. Fischer Verlag, edited by Willy Haas
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1909 |
Hitler lives as a tramp in Vienna. He sees the spear of Longinus for the first time. |
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1914 |
The First World War breaks out. Hitler joins the German army. |
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1918 |
Germany and its allies loose the war. The hard conditions of peace for the Germans are one of the main reasons for Hitler’s later rise to power. The Russian Revolution. |
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1922 |
The newly established Nazi party plans to murder Rudolf Steiner. The plan fails. |
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1923 |
The Munich coup d’état. Hitler is imprisoned, and while in prison he writes "Mein Kampf", the book, which was to rule the Germans from 1933 to 1945. |
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1925 |
Rudolf Steiner dies. |
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1933 |
Hitler is made Reichskansler by the senile president Hindenburg and immediately imprisons or murders all political party leaders. Germany becomes a totalitarian state. |
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1934 |
Increasing pressure on Jews, who are denied jobs as teachers or public servants. Marriage between "Aryans" and Jews is forbidden. Handicapped and mentally ill patients are secretly murdered. Homosexuals are persecuted together with Roma Gypsies. |
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1938 |
The "Crystal Night": Synagogues are burnt down all over Germany and Jewish property is being stolen or destroyed everywhere. Thousands of Jews are murdered during the "Progrom". Austria "returns" to the Reich. Hitler steals the spear. Chamberlain: "Peace in our time". |
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1939 |
Poland occupied by Hitler. The Second World War breaks out. |
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1941 |
Hitler attacks Russia. The decision of the "Entlösung", the murder of all Jews and other unwanted groups. Death camps all over Eastern Europe. 11 million innocent people are murdered in Hitler’s concentration camps between 1933 and 1945. |
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1943 |
The defeat at Stalingrad is the turning point of the war. Hitler is loosing his power. |
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1945 |
The Russians are approaching Berlin. Hitler shoots himself. The first atomic bombs are used against Japan. |
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1948 |
The Cold War "breaks out". NATO is established. The spear is back in the Vienna museum. |
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1953 |
Stalin dies. |
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1962 |
The Cuba Crisis. The world is close to Atomic War. |
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1967 |
The Yom Kippur war in Israel. Important archaeological findings are made near Jerusalem. |
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1968 |
The "Summer of Love". The baby boom generation of 1945 conquers the world. Man lands on the Moon. |
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1973 |
Egypt attacks Israel. The Oil Crisis. Unemployment and social problems everywhere. |
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1979 |
Soviet invades Afghanistan. |
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1981 |
The PC is invented. |
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1982 |
Reagan starts the Star War project. The Falkland war. |
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1989 |
The Berlin Wall falls. The communist system collapses. |
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1990 |
The Golf war. Growing support to Neo Nazis in Germany and the rest of the Western world. |
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1992 |
The Balkan wars break out. |
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1994 |
The first planets are discovered outside the solar system. The Internet becomes popular. |
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1996 |
Racism is common in most European countries. Emigrants are persecuted and murdered. |
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1999 |
The Kosovo war and the Millennium. Nazism is back, the Ghost has returned. |
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2002 |
Racist supporters in ultra
rightwing governments rule Denmark, Austria and Italy. The granddaughter of
Musolini is a leading politician in Italy. |
Rudolf Steiner and Hitler in the "Real" Life
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher, originally a member of the occultists led by the movement’s founder, Madame Blavatsky. He later abandoned the movement and founded his own, the Anthroposophists. He was, however, still involved with the occult, including clairvoyance when he became one of Hitler’s archenemies.
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Rudolf Steiner 1925 |
In 1922, Hitler claimed that Rudolf Steiner had mesmerised General von Moltke before the battle of Marne in 1914, thus rendering the old man incapable of directing the battle, thus causing Germany to loose the war four years later. Eckhart claimed that Steiner was the leader of a Grail searchers group, who was spying on the nazis on the astral plane. On top of that, Steiner could see everything with his mental powers, and nothing could be hidden from him. They decided to kill him.
In December 1922, Steiner’s Goetheannum school in Switzerland, burned down, yet Steiner survived, apperently through his clairvoyant abillities. He was at that moment an old, sick man, and he died a few years later in 1925.
Today, Rudolf Steiner is world famous for his school system, the Steiner Schools, known for their teaching methods – and Christmas plays (6th Scene in 1st Act).
The author and "mystic" Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923) was the first official nazi philosopher. He started publishing an anti-Semite magazine in 1918, and the same year he met Alfred Rosenberg (of the "Thule Society", see below) – and Hitler.
In 1919, Steiner and his Anthroposophs became involved in a direct confrontation with the Eckart and through him, Hitler. Some of Steiner’s pupils contacted Eckhart, believing that the well-known philosopher would be interested in Steiner’s social theories. Instead, Steiner and his ideas were faced with viperous attacks in Eckerhart’s magazine. Steiner was described as a Spanish Jew and agent for the "Jewish freemason communistic conspiracy". The attacks harmed the Anthroposophic movement badly, and this was another reason for Steiner and Hitler to hate one another.
The Occult Secrets of the Nazi
It has long been a proven fact that the nazi party’s ideology was based on obscure and even occult ideas. Much of the anti-Semitism did not come from German alone, but also to a great extent from France and England, and among the occult societies in the 19th Century, a hardcore hatred against the Jews were common. One of these occult clubs or movements was the so-called "Thule Society" which Hitler joined. Both the nazi "prophet" Dietrich Eckhart and the agitator Alfred Rosenberg were members of the Thule Society when it was founded in München 1918 as part of the secret anti-Semitic "Germanen Orden" in Berlin. The Swastika symbol and the "Sieg heil" greeting were part of the Thule Society, and the later nazi party inherited many of the "values" of the Society.
Himmler, the cruel leader of the SS corps, was the "brain" behind the occult side of the nazi regime. The SS corps was the magic empire of the black order. He founded a special organisation "Ahnenerbe" ("Heritage of the Forefathers"). Its main purpose was to inform the public about the Indo German race. This work should be carried out in a strictly scientific way (1/4 of the SS officers had a doctor’s degree!). So the idea of designing a human race of supermen was not an idea of our genetic times!
Hitler and his Nazi Mob in the early 1930’es
Hitler was fiercely interested in the occult. He was well trained and, for the same reason, feared the occult societies outside the nazi party. Among many other, the following societies / movements were forbidden, sent to concentration camps or both: Astrology, Jehova’s Witnesses The Theosophists, The Anthroposophs the Freemasons and the Rosenkreuzers. Gestapo agents spied on the societies and the nazi ideology began to influence them all.
Alfred Rosenberg (hanged for his crimes in Nürnberg 1946) was responsible for the permanent extermination of Christianity. Outside Germany, the churches were suppressed relentlessly, like in the Czech churches where a prayer, that called upon Michael the archangel to destroy Satan and the evil spirits, was forbidden.
The Interplanetary Ice of Hörbiger
The mad nazi scientist Hörbiger claimed that the planets were made from a block of ice that fell into the sun millions of years ago, Behind the planets, he thought, was a giant layer of ice dimming the stars of the milky way. During the development of the V2 rocket, Hitler suddenly demanded that the budget was cut down drastically. He had erroneously believed that the rockets would tear down the cosmic ice, thereby ending the present epoque in a cosmic apocalypse. When this could not be done he was not interested in the weapon anymore!
The Nazis firmly believed that the Earth was hollow. Below the surface, there were the remains of ancient cities with the last of the original Aryans. Immediately after the nazi take-over, Hitler sent out expeditions to Tibet and Antarctica to find the secret openings.
According to the legends, the Roman soldier (Centurion) who pierced the side of Christ with the spear, gave up his military life after the Crucifixion to be a Christian and when he died as a martyr, he became a saint with the name St. Longinus.
The spear was – and is – in the Hofburg Museum in Vienna, Austria. It has been owned, the legend goes, by Constantine the Great, Theodosius, Alaric, Charles Martel, Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa. The House of the Habsburgs has owned the spear for centuries, though Napolean did try to steal the spear without any luck.
After stealing the spear from Austria, Hitler sent the murderous weapon to Nürnberg where it was kept in the St. Catherines Church and later in a specially build bunker. When the Allied forces seized the spear on the 30th of April 1945 at 2:10 PM, Hitler died 80 minutes later in his bunker in Berlin, far away from the spear.
The Great Patriotic War in the USSR
Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941 with a massive surprise attack. The Soviet army at first secured the vital industries by moving the factories to the safe side of the Ural Mountains and used the scorched earth policy when retreating from the invaders. Stalin chose to stay in Moscow, and soon launched a Soviet counter-offensive. Hitler tried, without any success, to conquer both Moscow and Leningrad. In 1942, the Germans attacked Stalingrad in order to get to the Russian oil fields in Baku. After several months of severe fighting from house to house in Stalingrad, the surviving Germans in the 6th army surrendered to Russian Marshal Zhukov in January 1943.
The German troops in the rest of the USSR were now forced to withdraw. Only once, they tried a huge attack with tanks in Odessa, which they lost. In the spring 1945, the Russians conquered the whole of Germany together with England, the USA and France. In May 1945, Berlin fell and Hitler was dead.
Swastika
ISBN 87-88619-85-0
2nd Edition, 1st Issue, winter 1999
Digital Books™ is a trademark of
NORDISC Music & Text, DK-2700 Broenshoej, Denmark
WEB http://home7.inet.tele.dk/nordisc
Email nordisc@post7.tele.dk
Libretto
Original text and concept by H.W. Gade © 1974/99. Danish original text by H.W.
Gade copyright © 1974. New texts (Scene 12, 13 and 14) copyright H.W. Gade
1999. Texts by Nelly Sachs from
"Aus Fahrt uns Staublose. Die Gedichte der Nelly Sachs" copyright ©
Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1961. The Danish translations of Nelly
Sachs’ texts are by Ingeborg Buhl. The Danish translation of "The Blooming
Rose" is mostly by H.W. Gade © 1999 (verse 3 by Uffe Hansen 1935 and verse
1, lines 1-2 by Th. Laub 1920). "Unzer Shtetl brent" has lyrics by
Mordecai Gebirtig © 1938. All English translations by H.W. Gade copyright ©
1981 to 1982/1999. All texts used with permission.
Music
Original music by H.W. Gade © 1974, score is by the composer. The new music
to scene 12, 13 and 14 are copyright © H.W. Gade 1999. Music to "The
Blooming Rose" by Prätorius 1606.
Layout
Layout, MIDI score and all original drawings by the composer. © 1999.
Disclaimer
The text, music and plot of Swastika may under no circumstances be altered
or changed. Performance rights can only be granted directly from the Publishing
House (Digital Books™) or from the composer.
What does it take
to perform Swastika?
You will need a choir of 16 (S/A/T/B), 3 soloists (A/T/Baritone) and a band of 8 rock musicians. The technical demands are generally high, but you might use the MIDI files for a performance as long as – at least - the guitars and the bass are played live. The scenography is up to you, provided you read – and follow - the scenography notes in the libretto.
1st Act: 1 hour 10 minutes
2nd Act: 1 hour 15 minutes
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Leading Parts |
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Tenor |
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Light baritone |
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Alt |
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Boy Soprano |
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Choir (voices / parts) |
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Soprano 1 |
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Soprano 2 |
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Soprano 3 |
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Soprano 4 |
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Alto 1 |
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Alto 2 |
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Alto 3 |
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Alto 4 |
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Choir (voices / parts) |
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Tenor 1 |
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Tenor 2 |
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Tenor 3 |
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Tenor 4 |
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Bass 1 |
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Bass 2 |
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Bass 3 |
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Bass 4 |
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Guitar 1 |
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Guitar 2 |
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Acoustic Guitar |
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5-string Bass Guitar |
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Transverse Flute / Clarinet / Bassoon |
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Grand Piano |
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Organ / Electrical Piano |
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H(enrik) W(ilhelm) Gade was born in 1953 in Copenhagen. After graduating from the Metropolitan Latin School in 1972, he began pursuing a career as a rock musician. His first record with the band Nekropolis was released in 1976. A few years later, in 1979, Gade had his debut as a musical theatre composer on the Café Theatre in Copenhagen with a Baudelaire cabaret. Over the years, H.W. Gade has released over 10 records and written about 30 songbooks and music primers. He is now mostly working with musical drama and has written 8 musicals/operas, the latest work being the science fiction opera "Stella" released in the spring of 1999. H.W. Gade plays the electric bass, the guitar and the piano. He now records and tours with his new band Shepherd Moons, founded 2001. H.W. Gade is the great-grandson of world famous Danish composer Niels W. Gade (1817-90). He is the loving father of his handicapped child Lukas and married to Finnish Paula.
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H.W. Gade at a Party in Copenhagen |
