MUSIC FROM EXILE, Daedalus Quartet with Charles Abramovic and Randall Scarlata

In “Music from Exile,” which debuts at the Penn Humanities Forum on Violence, the Daedalus Quartet explores the music of composers forced into various states of exile by the Third Reich.

Taking center stage is Arnold Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon,” a musical melodrama based on a poem by Lord Byron for string quartet, piano, and narrator. In the poem, Byron took aim not only at Napoleon, but at all dictatorship. Likewise Schoenberg, in composing this work at the height of the Second World War (1942), meant to express “the moral duty of intelligentsia to take a stand against tyranny.” The program begins with Erwin Schulhoff ’s Five Pieces for String Quartet and closes with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s String Quartet No. 3.

Cosponsored by Penn's Department of Music and Jewish Studies Program.