“Annelies,” contemporary British composer James Whitbourn’s full-length choral work inspired by the diary of Anne Frank, will be performed by the Princeton Pro Musica on Sunday, March 13, at 4 p.m., at Richardson Auditorium on the Princeton University campus.
The presentation is the realization of a performance that had originally been set for March 15, 2020, and was canceled because of the pandemic.
“Annelies” sports a libretto by Melanie Challenger, who distilled the text from “Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl.” (Annelies was Frank’s birth name.) The diary was published for the first time in 1947. It has been translated into more than 65 languages, making it one of the world’s most-read books. Seventy-seven years after Frank’s death, it continues to be taught in public schools.
Frank was 13 when she began her diary. Over the next two years she would confide her innermost thoughts while documenting her family’s experiences and interactions as they lived in hiding in their “Secret Annex” overlooking Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Her last entry was made on August 1, 1944, three days before the family’s discovery and arrest. Having survived Auschwitz, Anne and her sister, Margot, died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. Her mother, Edith Frank, died of starvation. Her father, Otto, miraculously survived. It is he who edited Anne’s diary for publication. In more recent years an unexpurgated version has also been made available.
The diary continues to resonate because it puts a human face on unfathomable statistics — the murder of 17 million people, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, six million of them Jews; also, Roma, Black people, Slavs, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, clergy, artists, Communists, and other religious and political undesirables. Anne’s light is only one of millions to have been snuffed out, but her diary makes the Holocaust tangible in a cumulatively powerful way.
Frank herself had literary ambitions. After listening to a 1944 radio broadcast from London, in which exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art, and Science Gerritt Bolkestein called for civilians to preserve their diaries and letters as evidence of the atrocities wrought by the Nazis, Frank decided to redraft her diary, for clarity and consistency, with future readers in mind.
Whitbourn’s “Annelies” has Princeton connections. The work was given its U.S. premiere at Westminster Choir College in April, 2007, in a version for choir and chamber orchestra. The performance was directed by Westminster Choir College conductor and composer James Jordan, with Whitbourn in attendance.
Jordan recorded “Annelies” with his Westminster Williamson Voices for the Naxos label. It was nominated for a 2014 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance.
Lily Arbisser, Princeton Pro Musica’s scheduled soloist, is a 2008 Princeton University graduate. She received her bachelor of arts degree in art and archeology and a certificate in vocal performance. She earned her master’s from Mannes College of Music in New York. She divides her time between operatic, choral, and recital performances. With Princeton Pro Musica, she has performed Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music.”
Princeton Pro Musica artistic director and conductor Ryan James Brandau is also a Princeton alumnus. He received a B.A. in music in 2003 before heading to Yale for his master’s and a doctorate. He also attended Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar, earning an MPhil in historical musicology.
In addition to his duties as artistic director of Princeton Pro Musica, he is director of Monmouth Civic Chorus and Amor Artis in New York City. He is on the faculty of Westminster Choir College.
Whitbourn, who is on the faculty of music at Oxford University, has served as composer-in-residence at Westminster and enjoys a special relationship with the college.
Of the work, the 58-year-old British composer says, “Rarely have I found a text so compelling and the inspiration for so much thought, simply as a document in its own right. But as time went on, and as I worked on the score, I became more aware of Anne Frank as a contemporary person.”
Annelies, Princeton Pro Musica, Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University. Sunday, March 13, 4 p.m. $10 to $60. For tickets and more information, including the “Annelies” libretto, go to www.princetonpromusica.org. For tickets only, call 609-683-5122.
