An oratorio about the Jews in Shanghai opens at a difficult time in China

“Emigré,” a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese port.

“Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent coast,” they sing. “Shanghai, answer these desperate cries.”

The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s – and their survival of the Holocaust – is one of the most dramatic but little-known chapters of World War II.

In “Emigré,” a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will do so come to the New York Philharmonic in February In 2024, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build a new life in war-torn China take center stage.

The piece, composed by Aaron Zigman, with lyrics by Mark Campbell and Brock Walsh, has been in the works for a number of years, commissioned by the Philharmonic, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and its music director Long Yu. But it starts at a delicate time, with high tensions between China and the United States and with the war between Israel and Hamas giving rise to heated debates in the cultural field.

The war in the Middle East is a sensitive topic in China, which has sought to position itself as a neutral mediator in the conflict, although state-controlled media have emphasized the damage suffered by civilians in Gaza, while little attention has been paid to Hamas’s initial attack. Israel has expressed “deep disappointment” about China’s muted response to Hamas’ attack. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, called on Tuesday for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for “the restoration of the legitimate national rights of Palestine.”

In recent weeks, promotional materials in China for ‘Emigré’ rarely mentioned the plot, with the Chinese title becoming ‘Shanghai! Shanghai!” However, the main Chinese state news media did not report on the premiere this month an English-language television channel for foreign audiences did.

The makers of “Emigré,” set during the Second Sino-Japanese War, said they hoped the play would help underscore a shared sense of humanity at a time of renewed strife. “I don’t think music and politics really belong in the same sentence,” Zigman said. “I just want people to be human and kind, and there are certain parts of this piece that support that vision.”

In 2019, Yu, worried that the stories of Jewish refugees in his hometown would be forgotten, came up with the idea for the play. He approached the New York Philharmonic, which has had a collaboration with the Shanghai Symphony since 2014, to have the work performed together.

Yu said he never expected the oratorio to premiere during wartime, but hoped its message would still resonate.

“We always make the same mistakes in our lives, and we have to learn from history,” he said. “We can be inspired by the kindness and support that Shanghai showed in this moment.”

To shape the music and plot, Yu turned to Zigman, a classically trained film and television composer who has returned to classical music in recent years, including with “Tango Manos” (2019), a piano concerto he wrote for pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Yu has long known Zigman, who has composed more than 60 Hollywood scores, including “The Notebook,” and he and Thibaudet suggested the idea for a tango concert.

For “Emigré,” Zigman said he was keen to create a “multicultural love story” that drew attention to the violent struggles taking place in Asia and Europe at the time. These include the 1937 massacre in Nanjing, a city in eastern China, in which tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese occupation forces; and Kristallnacht, the wave of anti-Semitic violence caused by the Nazis in 1938.

“Our project is really about bridging cultures and humanity and love and hope and loss and tragedy,” Zigman said.

“Emigré” tells the story of Otto, a rabbinical student, and Josef, a doctor, who leave Berlin for the port city of Trieste, Italy, and board a boat bound for Shanghai.

The brothers are concerned about leaving their parents and their homeland, but try to settle into life in China. Interested in traditional Chinese medicine, Josef visits a herbal medicine shop, where he meets Lina, the owner’s daughter, who is struggling with the death of her mother in Nanjing. They fall in love, but their cross-cultural union provokes contempt from their families.

Shanghai’s role as a refuge for Jews was a historical fluke. Britain, France and the United States insisted that Beijing let them build settlements there in the 1840s. By the 1930s the settlements had grown into a sprawling city. But the Chinese government controlled who was granted visas to enter mainland China, including before arriving at the port of Shanghai.

When Japan seized east-central China, including the area around Shanghai, in 1937, the Nationalist Chinese government could no longer inspect visas at the city’s riverfront ports. But the Japanese military only began controlling access to the area shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

The result? No one checked who entered China in Shanghai. During those four years it became an open port: foreign travelers were welcomed and could stay in the western settlements.

Campbell, who has written librettos for more than 40 operas, said he hoped the refugee stories in “Emigré” could provide a modern lesson.

“It is very important that the audience comes away remembering that there was a time in this world when one country embraced the refugees of another country,” he said.

In Shanghai, the stories of Jewish residents are preserved in the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. The core block of China’s legally designated Jewish ghetto, where the Japanese forced Shanghai’s Jews to live during the last three years of the war, has been preserved. The Central European-style mansions and house-sized synagogue still stand.

But much of the surrounding area has been bulldozed by rapid growth in recent decades, raising concerns among conservationists. Two gigantic office buildings, each fifty stories high, cast enormous shadows on the small synagogue around noon.

During the war, at least 14,000 Jews lived in the ghetto, and possibly several thousand more. Another 1,000 to 10,000 lived secretly elsewhere in the city. (Almost all Jews in Shanghai left after the war, many settling in the United States.)

Shanghai was a very restless place in the years in which ‘Emigré’ took place: full of both Chinese and Jewish refugees, often short of food and drinking water, and plagued by disease epidemics. Opium was smoked openly and prostitutes gathered on street corners.

Among the ghetto residents was Michael Blumenthal, who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 at the age of 13 and much later became Treasury Secretary under President Jimmy Carter. Blumenthal said in an interview with The New York Times in 2017 that when he was a teenager, there was a Japanese police station near the synagogue. He and others had to ask permission at the station during the war to leave the ghetto, and by the last year it was almost impossible to get permission.

Trucks patrolled Shanghai, not just the ghetto, picking up those who had succumbed to illness. “I used to see them driving around town, picking up dead bodies,” Blumenthal said. “The city was extremely overpopulated, it was dangerous, there were constant fighting between factions and shootings.”

“Emigré” received widespread attention in China when it was announced in the summer. Featuring a Chinese and American cast, the work was hailed as a sign of the power of cultural exchange between China and the United States at a time of rising tensions. Yu joined Zigman, Campbell, Walsh and Gary Ginstling, the president and CEO of the New York Philharmonic, for a press conference at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum to celebrate the dedication.

“Emigré” will have its U.S. premiere in February with the same cast, and Ginstling said in a recent interview that he did not expect the war between Israel and Hamas to lead to changes in the work, which Deutsche Grammophon recorded in Shanghai for release next year. .

“Things are changing quickly in the world,” he said. “We are committed to our role as cultural ambassadors.”

The Philharmonic’s version, directed by Mary Birnbaum, will be semi-staged and include some visual elements, including images of destruction from World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The Shanghai premiere featured several New York Philharmonic musicians, and the New York premiere will feature a group of Chinese musicians.

At a recent rehearsal for “Emigré” at the Jaguar Shanghai Symphony Hall, choir members sang Jewish, Christian and Buddhist prayers, opening the work.

“Give peace on high,” they sang in Hebrew.

“Holy presence blooms,” they sang in Chinese.

The cast includes tenor Arnold Livingston Geis as Josef; the tenor Matthew White as Otto; the soprano Zhang Meigui as Lina; the mezzo-soprano Zhu Huiling as her sister Li; and the bass-baritone Shenyang as their father, Wei Song.

Between rehearsals, Zhang said she tried to stay focused on the music, and hoped “Emigré” could provide some relief from the war.

“We are going through a very difficult time in this world,” she said, “but I think music should be apart of this.”

Zhang added that she had found some solace in a song at the end of the first act called “In a Perfect World.” In that piece Josef sings:

If I ruled the world,

Mine to redesign,

I would stop every gunshot, every war.

Now, forever.

Li you contributed research from Shanghai.