.Joseph Dorfman, who lived in Tel Aviv, has for long established himself as one of the leading composers in Israel. His music is performed frequently in Israel and abroad, and a number of his students have already passed his influence to a newer generation of musicians. Joseph Dorfman has also been a "voice of Israel" in that his compositions deal with the fate of the Jewish people, its culture and its music. Many of his compositions present traditional Jewish music in a new face. They show us a modern composer in a new and unforeseeable encounter with the old Eastern-European Jewish musical tradition. This ranges from his Treatment of the sacred melody of KolNidrei, to his infatuation with the secular melodies of the Jewish instrumental musicians, the Klezmer. In his novel treatment of these melodies, Dorfman does not use mere quotations, or simple harmonizations of the melodies, but he takes the old motifs and uses them as fuel for his new compositions. In a way, Dorfman does to Jewish music what Chagall did to the old figures of the Eastern-European Shtetl. He casts them anew and creates new forms out of them. To be sure, Dorfman's musical language is removed half a century or more from that of Chagalls pictorial language; it is more abstract and uses newer techniques. But the basic idea of giving the old tradition a new soul is common
to both artists.
In his art, Dorfman is influenced by three major experiences of his life, which he seems to re-live time and again, namely the Shoah, the repression of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union and the joy of partaking in the life of the reborn Israel. While not a direct survivor of the Holocaust, Dorfman has witnessed its devastating results, both in Russia and in Israel. This great tragedy is not translated in Dorfman's mind as a cause to depression, but an the contrary a great urge to survive and rebuild.
The cantata, with it's rich melodic and harmonic easy to understand, using four languages (German, Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish) was first performed 2003 in Berlin in combination with an exhibition of works by Gero Hellmuth, partly shown in the booklet.