German Jewish poet and Nobel laureate Nelly Sachs created a unique body of work commemorating the Holocaust. She and her mother managed to flee Germany on the last flight allowed out of Germany to Sweden and lived there for the rest of her life.

In Night of Nights/Nacht der Nächte, Sachs manages in a few lines to express an enormous depth of loss and desolation with the hope of eventual redemption. I have made my own translation of the poem and included some German from the poem because of the unique vividness of the poet’s language. The musical language of the piece veers towards and away tonality and exploits many pianistic colors. Julia Fox, soprano, and Sandrine Erdely-Sayo premiered Night of Nights at the Piano on the Rocks Festival, Sedona, in 2021.

White Serpent/Weisse Schlange contains a wild conflation of images – emptiness and the anger of a grenade, fire, and ice along with the strange images of a white snake and ice. All these images roll into the final image of time and eternity on the back of a snail. The relentless quality of that last image governs the pulse that governs the piece, against which brief melodies flare.