I was hired some months ago by the Münchener Bach Orchester to lead the viola section during a performance of Mendelssohn’s monumental Elias. I’m suffering from dysthymia these days and being as I barely made it Munich with clean laundry and a packed suitcase, I started preparing this juicy work the night before the first rehearsal. I found myself in a chic budget hotel that I booked myself with some of the last morsels of bank credit that I have left, my credit card already maxed out to the tee. After being forced to pay four years of taxes in one year after handing in my 2021 taxes on time according to a deadline given by German the government, I’m currently a starving artist to say the least.
I opened my computer and began practicing with a recording from Spotify in the comforts of my peaceful, air-conditioned room. The references to Israel began increasing as the tracks went on. After some time, my heart started racing and I felt as though I was going to have a panic attack. It turns out I had been hired to play a seemingly endless and majestic ode to Israel, one which the German government surely funded and paid for. The sponsors of the Münchener Bach Orchester include the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München and the Landeshauptstadt München Kulurreferat.
Had I not invested nearly 300€ in a hotel and been dependent on this very gig to pay my rent in a few days, I would certainly have been the first person on a train back to Cologne. My heart was clearly beholden to my rebellious, rule-smashing nature and to my lifelong misdiagnosed ADHD, because I was ready to flee and will always be ready to flee such situations, my life circumstances be as they may. The only thing I could do at this point was to reattach my Socialist Worker’s Party “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” button to my handbag.
The location for the rehearsals could not have been more surreal. The gaping, humid mouth of the cathedral that we rehearsed in, the painfully Catholic St. Jakob am Anger, is located in the vicinity of both the Jewish Museum and the Ohel Jakob Synagogue, the latter donned with two proud and imposing Israeli flags on either side of the entrance. I innocently sat next to the Sinai-Ganztagiges-Grundschule playground during a break to escape the pelting rays of the sun and set my keffiyeh on the back of a bench, only taking in the full breadth of the vicinity after I spotted Restaurant Einstein a few feet away. My resolve to wear my keffiyeh to the workplace in the name of “never again for anyone” had never felt more urgent, particularly during one of the most brutal and indescribably dehumanizing weeks for Palestinians. Eight schools had been bombed in Gaza and the Poliovirus had been found in water supplies. Hundreds of people had been brutally exterminated.
As Mendelssohn’s Biblical references to Israel carried on during our rehearsals, the physical weight of the viola hung heavily on my arm. My decision to wrap my keffiyeh around my neck during the dress rehearsal felt like a massive mistake as buckets of sweat poured onto my instrument inside of the steamy cathedral, but its resistance offered me strength. It provided me emotional support as my body was tugged to the ground and my childhood trauma was deposited into my viola’s wooden weight, my ears wincing through earplugs at the sound of Mendelssohn’s monstrous work. I can’t help but wonder if my hyperacusis and permanent over-sensitivity to sound is not only a result of working in major symphony orchestras, but also from being beholden to the caustic sounds of a career that I never wanted and I was never given a voice to fight against as a child, as gorgeous and profound as the music itself can be.
Our buses for the concert in Ottobeuren left aptly from HMTM München, Hitler’s old headquarters that have been converted into the central building of the Munich Music Conservatory. It’s the building from which I received a master’s degree in historical performance practice as well as a sponsor of the Münchener Bach Orchester. A #niewiederistjetzt flag currently flaps silently before the genocidal, life-sucking stare of Hitler’s former outpost. Just a few feet away, a rainbow pinkwashing flag dons the right entrance of the building, all of it serving as a revolting illustration of the evil glibness of Germany’s state-sponsored, performative guiltwashing narrative and its continued failure at denazification.
In Netanyahu’s bone-chilling speech before US Congress this week, he exclaimed “After October 7th never again is now!” It is no small coincidence that this very same appropriated slogan which is being used to persecute and arrest Palestinians, Jews and their allies in this country stands peacefully against the backdrop of a building that used to house Hitler’s stolen art, much of it looted from Jewish collectors over the course of WWII. With the NRS Holocaust Memorial Center situated just behind this old Gestapo garrison, it is indeed hard to fathom the insane absurdity that Wagner, a known antisemite and Hitler’s favorite darling composer, is still allowed to resonate from rehearsal rooms within the Nazi bowels of the Führerbau, even if it is banned from being performed there.
Felix Mendelssohn and his family were certainly no strangers to antisemitism. Though they converted to Christianity, they were of Jewish heritage and Moses Mendelssohn, Felix’s grandfather, was one of Germany’s greatest thinkers of the Jewish enlightenment. Felix converted at a time when many Jews did so to circumvent racism. The problem is indeed not that his music is being performed in Germany. The problem is that Elias is being programmed at a time when Germany has decided who is a good Jew and who is a bad Jew, the latter facing widespread cancellations, discrimination and police violence. Choosing to program Felix’s monumental work about Israel in this current moment and in the context of German state funding is a political decision to place him in the ahistorical framework of Zionism before a concept of Jewish Zionism even existed. It is precisely this reductionist, narcissistic lack of self-awareness that prevents Germany from seeing that “never again” means “never again for anyone.”
As we arrived in Ottobeuren amid this farcical repetition of history, it felt as though we were descending upon a fairytale from the hills beyond. The monastery’s stupendous Baroque facade and breathtaking inner ornamentation were erected in the eighteenth century. Ottobeuren itself, however, was once a self-ruling imperial abbey of the Holy Roman Empire and I couldn’t help but envision the genocidal, colonialist blood that stained its parochial, rampart-like towers. After walking around in this phantasmagorical, white colonial landscape and receiving some accusatory, panicky looks from a small group of concertgoers after placing a keffiyeh over my head to protect it from the burning sun, there was a short dress rehearsal. I subsequently found myself unpacking my things upstairs in a binary gendered dressing room before the concert. As one of my colleagues was brought dark tights to cover her immodest legs peaking out from under her short dress and everyone was concerned about covering their elbows and bare shoulders, I forced myself to pull on my concert clothes in a bathroom stall. I didn’t even bother with makeup. I just wanted to survive.
The concertmaster approached me just before we were about to go on stage. I’ve clearly never been very good at hiding my emotions and my struggle the last days had been visible. She asked, “Macht es dir Spaß? Ich finde was du machst wirklich toll!” Just the day before, she had yelled at me harshly for not paying attention to the conductor while answering my stand partner’s bowing questions. I answered, “Willst du eine ehrliche Antwort bekommen?” After beating around the bush, I eventually got right to the point. My interest in politics had already started making the rounds and I felt she might be onto my escape plan. “Ich habe diesen Beruf nicht ausgewählt. Ich habe nur Musik mein ganzes Leben gemacht. Ich habe auch viel Trauma von der Musik erlebt. Ich war auch nie in der Schule vor 19 Jahre Alt, also konnte ich wirklich nicht anderes machen.” I pause for a second and think I’ve made a terrible mistake. She tried to convince me to keep my career options open, but as the concert raged on endlessly, I knew this would be the last time I would ever play such a loud, grandiose piece in my life—a piece about the Biblical Israel that the antisemetic, evangelical right-wing Christians of my childhood are using to justify the first life-streamed genocide in history, no less.
The words of the concertmaster, one the leaders of a world-famous Baroque orchestra in Germany, were once my dream. They fell on my increasingly deaf ears and an emotionally dead body. Emotional deafness is the only thing that allows me to survive such performances now. I performed with so many kind people that day, including old classmates and a former professor who can only be described as one of the best in the bizz, but the silence of the church after the performance while the bell tower clamored proudly and repressively confirmed my resolve to quickly phase out my music career of over thirty years, my eyes having unsuccessfully grazed the audience to find a single Person of Color.
My mind wandered in this moment to when I was a soloist on the Disney Channel with the Disney Young Musicians’ Symphony Orchestra when I was just ten years old. I thought of the time I played through an entire violin concerto from memory for my teacher, Robert Lipsett, in the sweltering heat in Hudson, Ohio and he said nothing afterwards excepts that I’d swiped a fly off of my leg while performing it and I should never, ever do anything like that ever again. My crystal clear actualizations relived the emotional imprint of Emanuel Borok, my childhood teacher in Dallas, TX, who “discovered” me when I was seven. Once his favorite pet student, he coldly dismissed me decades later after I was no longer able to serve his narcissistic narrative. I was reminded of the vile Jascha Brodsky, of the sexual abuse stories that I had personally heard from his former students and of Lara St. John’s harrowing account of rape that led to her attempted suicide. My family moved to Philadelphia for me to study with this very pedophile when I was twelve years old. Luckily, he died a month later. I recalled the email my alma mater, the Curtis Institute of Music, sent us in response to Lara St. John’s report, urging us to remain silent and to not discuss this topic with anyone.
Most importantly, I remembered my classmates from Curtis, Chris Falzone and Rachel Serber, both of whom have tragically committed suicide. Chris had been a soloist with the DYMSO orchestra just one year before me. When we wandered the halls of Curtis together his pallid, gray, pimply complexion caused him to look like a frail ghost of his former vibrant child prodigy self. We all attended the same conservatory that is tuition-free, has a student body of ca. 160 students, hired a tax advisor for us every year and had a psychiatrist on site, but offered me no substantive emotional or psychological support after my mother tried to commit suicide during my first year of studies. When Lara St. John approached Dean Fitzpatrick after her completely dehumanizing sexual abuse as a minor, she was told “Oh, for God’s sake, who do you think they’re going to believe? Some 15-year-old kid or someone who has been here for decades?” This very same school later hired me to play a concert for one of the worst war criminals of all time, Henry Kissinger, at the American Academy in Berlin.
As I continue to have flashbacks of the Encore School for Strings that I attended with Hillary Hahn, Brodsky the pedophile’s world-renowned student, and I think of Kit Armstrong, who was both a music and math prodigy and was just ten years old when we attended Curtis together, I wonder how many careers of horribly abusive and self-serving pedagogues we have all built up with our talent, served graciously on a platter of genius on a banquet table busying itself beneath the sword of Damocles. The story of Jaqueline du Pre, one of the most legendary cellists of all time, is one that Dr. Gabor Mate always recalls fondly. He is convinced she developed MS because, just like me, she never wanted to be a musician. She was so afraid of being a disappointment she became a willing human sacrifice to the cello. Jacqueline told her sister when she was just nine years old “Don’t tell Mum but … when I grow up, I won’t be able to walk or move.” She died paralyzed from MS when she was just just forty-two. It was completely self-evident to me as a young girl that I would eventually be free from the relentless practicing and emotional isolation and pain that I endured every day, but that deep thorns would have to be removed from my body and soul.
Midway through the concert, a wave of emotions flashed over me as I envisioned the liberation on other end of this journey. I will be forever grateful to Palestine because it broke the final chains of an illusory, propagandized world, a world I instinctively knew I needed to be freed from before I had ever heard of Palestine. It liberated me from a heteronormative, colonized existence and will continue to demand that I fully explore what the music and fundamentalist Christian homeschooling industries have hidden from me all of these years. Perhaps my optimism is also an illusion, perhaps it’s not. Maybe I will end up in the Twilight Zone, alone and eternally weeping over my broken glasses in the midst of apocalyptic piles of books like Henry Bemis, but the light at the other end of the tunnel doesn’t feel like a train. I feel full of great hope.
