Program Notes

On March 29, 1944, Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl living in the secret Annexe of a warehouse in Amsterdam, heard a radio broadcast from London by the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art and Science Gerrit Bolkestein, announcing his intention to collect diaries, letters, and other firsthand accounts of the suffering of people under the German occupation. This was the spark that ignited Anne’s nascent desire to become a writer. Inspired by the possibility, she began editing for publication the diary of her life in hiding she had been keeping during the two years since her 13th birthday. 

On March 30, 2014, almost exactly 70 years later, Coro Allegro first performed Annelies by James Whitbourn, the first authorized setting of the diary of Anne Frank, reprising it later that year with Chorus Pro Musica at a local conference of the American Choral Directors Association. Today in March 2026, we perform it again with a renewed sense of its importance as a personal record of the specific historical experience of the Holocaust, as well as painful awareness of its relevance to our own unfolding histories and the urgency of listening as Anne bears witness.

At the 2005 world premiere of Annelies, Anne Frank’s cousin Bernd (Buddy) Elias, who introduced the work said: “...if Anne could be with us tonight, I know she would shed tears of joy and pride, and she would be so happy—happy the way I remember when I saw her last.” As the composer notes: 

This is the kind of comment that pulls you up short. Such is her place in the world today that it is easy to forget that Annelies (Anne’s full name) was a real person, with friends and family. She was a happy person and a hugely talented human being. She concerned herself with unimportant things, just as we all do, and she would still be only in her 80s had she lived. 

Annelies is the product of a collaboration between Whitbourn and lyricist Melanie Challenger, who had been working on a music project with children from war-torn Bosnia when she had the idea to write a work based on Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.” Such an idea may sound simple, says Whitbourn, but “the responsibility is huge”:

In all my travels, I have never met anyone who, on hearing the name Anne Frank, has asked “who?” If you stop and think what it takes to achieve this level of familiarity, it is extraordinary. But when you start to work with the text, it becomes clear why this book is known all around the globe. The writing is brilliant. It is a seamless fusion of the everyday musings of a young girl with the most penetrating observations of the human soul seen through apparently much older and wiser eyes...No one had been permitted to use the diary in this way before, and permission was not granted lightly. It is too important a text for that. It was a careful, thoughtful, and ultimately loving process that led to the agreement to make a new work of art from this extraordinary and personal diary text.

How does one create a musical setting of such a document? Though the writing in Anne Franks’ diary is moving and vibrant, the diary form itself is wordy and episodic by its nature, with quick shifts of incident and mood. The form has no overarching structure or organization, save for the passing of days. And as prose, rather than as poetry or a liturgy, its phrases lack the internal cadences of meter and repetition that make texts easier to set to music and to sing.

Challenger’s libretto takes us through the narrative arc of Anne’s story, from the decision of the Franks and their friends to go into hiding in the Annexe of Otto Frank’s warehouse on the Prinsengracht canal, through their years of confinement, improvisation and want, punctuated by moments of terror. It goes beyond the last entry of Anne’s diary dated August 1, 1944 to tell of the arrest of the Annexe’s occupants three days later, and their deportation via the terrible transit camp Westerbork to the concentration camps, from which only Otto Frank would return alive.

But in telling this story, Challenger forgoes chronology, choosing instead to weave together excerpts of some of the most poignant passages in the diary, taken from different points in time. The fragments of Anne’s observations mesh with the limited perspectives her confinement in the Annexe gave her regarding the world outside: a peek of peaceful blue sky from the attic skylight, or the sight of people being rounded up in the streets below through the crack of an open window. Annelies juxtaposes these scenes in ways that highlight Anne’s insights on the people and the suffering she describes.

In doing so, the libretto skips over the everyday tensions that existed between the eight people cooped up together for two years in the Annexe. It focuses instead on what Anne herself called her “purer, deeper, finer” self, the one she hid from her parents and confided only to her diary. Per Whitbourn, “squabbles within the Annexe, teenage romantic encounters and the like were all put aside, and the diary distilled into this sequence of beautiful and mature, spiritually charged texts.”

These texts are supplemented by information from contemporary reports, as well as by quotations from folk songs, psalms, and prayers for mercy from multiple traditions. But most of the text is drawn from Anne’s diary entries translated into English. We do hear the opening address to “Kitty,“ the name Anne gave her diary, in the original Dutch: “Ik zal, hoop ik, aan jou alles kunnen toevertrouwen, zoals it het nog aan niemand gekund heb, en ik hoop dat je een grote steun voor me zult zijn.” (I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support to me.) And we hear in the German that after all was her mother tongue, what Anne records as her nightly prayer: “Ich danke dir für all das Gute und Liebe und Schöne.“ (Thank you God for all that is good and dear and beautiful.)

Whitbourn’s writing in Annelies complements the fragmentary nature of its libretto’s texts. Although there is a compositional arc to the piece, his text setting is less focused on constructing a coherent musical architecture than in finding musical colors to realize the impact of each passing moment. While he weaves these together beautifully, the piece also explodes with dramatic contrasts and dislocating shifts. These echo the displacements and deportations that the Franks suffered, and underline the precariousness of their situation at the time.

Whitbourn’s musical language is intentionally tonal: “Anne’s diary is absolutely direct and the music had to be too. In the early weeks, I wrestled with many ideas but always came back to a musical language that could be understood by many and which might reflect the life of a young girl.” To set Anne’s story, Whitbourn draws on a pastiche of musical styles. We hear plainchant, ‘part writing’ that resembles Machaut, the echo of a Bach chorale, a Kyrie that evokes the Mozart that Anne enjoyed on the radio, the cadences of a traditional Schubertian tenor and bass chorus, along with Viennese waltzes. The popular culture that Anne loved to collect and paste to her walls is represented by quotations from the music hall, Klezmer bands, and ‘30s torch songs. As Whitbourn explains: “although there are no specific quotations from Jewish melodies, their contours and cadences inform much of my writing and can be clearly heard.”

Annelies exists in two versions, the first a larger orchestral work that premiered on National Holocaust Memorial Day 2005, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The second is the chamber version from 2009 that Coro performs today. The chamber version allowed Whitbourn to bring a new “intimacy and an intensity to the text”:

All the instruments used are capable both of great beauty and of great passion. It is also a nice synergy that the final ensemble of piano, violin, cello, and clarinet is the same group for which Messiaen wrote his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time)—a work written within a prisoner of war camp and first performed by Messiaen and three other prisoners of war. All these instruments are also associated with Jewish tradition and culture.

The clarinet and the violin in particular sing with the virtuosic flourishes of the Klezmorim and Hungarian café music. But the relationship between all the instruments and the soprano soloist and choir is more like chamber music than accompaniment. Whitbourn’s writing is extraordinarily flexible in its textures, employing all sorts of pairings and doublings to create expressive colors. Spare sonorities give way in a flash to flurried and richly symphonic writing. Likewise, while the soloist is clearly the direct voice of Anne, so is the choir. Sometimes the choir adds depth or complexity to Anne’s words. At other times, choral a cappella sections lay bare the vulnerability of her human voice. 

As well as the musical traditions evoked, the score is, in Whitbourn’s words, “permeated with sounds which reflect Anne’s wider life.” We hear the chiming of the church bells, doors slamming, a rattling on the bookcase, the keening of children and air raid sirens, and the rhythm of people being marched towards their deaths. Even more powerful is Whitbourn’s ability to set the enforced silence of the secret Annexe—the heartbeats of fear, the sharp intake of breath, the whispers, the claustrophobia, the having to sit still all day and not say a word. “You can imagine,” says Anne, “how hard that is for me.” Whitbourn’s score evokes the strain of that stillness. But it also lets Anne and her companions in hiding sing the cries of desperation that they dare not utter aloud: Let me out, where’s there’s fresh air and laughter, a voice within me cries, let me out!

Listening notes:

Annelies is made up of 14 movements: from the wordless No. 1 “Introit – Prelude” to the benediction of No. 14, “Anne’s meditation” which closes the work. The movements in between unfold Anne’s story, by focusing in turn on different aspects of her life in hiding. No. 2, “The capture foretold,” begins in medias res, thrusting us right into the terror the residents of the secret Annexe lived with for over two years, through soundscapes of physical fear versus imagined shouts of discovery. This movement establishes the central tension in the diary between the inner refuge of peace and beauty Anne creates and the ring of menace closing in on the Annexe’s occupants. 

No. 3 explores the experience of a world turned upside down in a whirlwind of destabilizing modulations. In No. 4, Whitbourn isolates the lonely moment of transition to the netherworld of the Annexe through twisting passages of increasingly exposed vocal lines. Then he depicts the suffering of the whole Jewish community through an increasingly powerful homophonic repetition of the line, “We’re Jews in chains.” 

No. 5. “Life in Hiding,” delves into the interrelationship between the Annexe and the world outside. It opens with Anne dreading silence, and being reassured by the chime of the neighboring Westertoren clock. Aspects of the diary that we don’t hear much about in Annelies–Anne’s romantic infatuations and the dynamics between the residents–are hinted at in the romantic waltz and the humorous “Prospectus on the Annexe.” And Anne’s essential lightheartedness shines through in the story of bathing in the dark. Whitbourn quotes “It’s a long way to Tipperary,” the quintessential WW1 soldier’s song of longing for home. But as Anne peeks out the window to gaze at the “endlessly amusing people,” her survival strategy of humor fades before the reality of the suffering of the children of Amsterdam. Still, she is able to hold out a vision of a day when “this terrible war will be over, and we’ll be people again, and not just Jews.”

To find unsentimental ways to be true to both the undeniable horror of the Holocaust and the courage of Anne’s persistent faith is a significant compositional challenge. The sixth movement, “Courage,” quotes a popular Dutch folk song “Der Winter is vergangen” (winter is over), that was appropriated by the Germans as an anthem of the Hitler Youth movement. Whitbourn reworks the melody in a wintery minor key that seemingly belies both the hopefulness of its text and Anne’s affirmation of the redemptive power of beauty and courage. The austere beauty of the Bach-like chorale that results may make her point in the end.

In contrast, the angular disjointed harmonies of No. 7, “The fear of capture,” demand an unflinching look at the brutality of the Holocaust, and the terror of those still in hiding. The calls for mercy of No. 8 begin with the words Kyrie Eleison from the Christian liturgy. This may seem like an odd choice of text, but per Whitbourn, its inclusion was an intentional statement: “actually the Holocaust is not just a Jewish story. It’s not part of just Jewish history. It’s part of everybody’s history. And there were many sides to this particular atrocity. And this is a text which simply calls for mercy.” The movement tempers this point by transitioning back into melodies and harmonies more evocative of Jewish musical traditions in an echo of Anne’s thoughts about the Jews from movement 4. “We
must be brave and trust in God.”

Anne Frank has served so many as the one human face that allows them to approach the unthinkable scale of human destruction caused by the holocaust. In No. 9, Anne is visited by a vision of an old classmate, who for her, symbolized “the suffering of all my friends and all the Jews. When I pray for her, I pray for all those in need.” Although Anne in the diary is haunted by the thought of her fate, that friend Hannah Goslar survived. She was the last person known to have seen Anne Frank alive in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they were to meet up after the events in the diary. Unlike Anne who perished soon thereafter, probably from one of the fevers that swept Bergen-Belsen before it was liberated, Hannah survived the war. In fact, she helped introduce this work at its world premiere in London.

In No. 10, Whitbourn depicts the devastation of the outside world, through the hollow chanted description of the bombing of Amsterdam. Then he paints the desperation of those trapped in the Annexe in contrasting wild romantic textures, bringing to life a songbird “hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage.” If you listen you can hear in No. 11, a beautiful example of the subtle yet expressive ways Whitbourn divides Anne’s voice between the soloist and the choir. Anne, the soloist, looks in the mirror; Anne, the choir answers, describing what she sees. The effect is wonderful.

No. 12’s martial lines sing of the hope of liberation offered by D-Day, a terrible hope because of the fighting it will bring its wake, but so exhilarating, because of the possibility of freedom restored. Whitbourn sets this longing in a simple, peaceful Schubertian chorale whose harmonies remind us that the Frank’s original homeland was Germany. Its text is what Anne records in the diary as her nightly prayer, a moving expression of her quintessential faith in spite of everything: “Ich danke dir für all das Gute und Liebe und Schöne,” (Thank you God for all that is good and dear and beautiful.)

No. 13, “The capture and the concentration camp,” uses plainchant in the lower voices to tell of the fate of the eight residents of the Annexe with harrowing simplicity. The haunting choral passages that follow transport Anne to the underworld, mourning her and the millions who perished with her. Yet the psalm that concludes the movement reminds us how the words of Anne Frank’s diary— translated into dozens of languages, read by tens of millions, and now set to this music—will live forever: “There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their sound is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.”

In No. 14, “Anne’s meditation,” Whitbourn closes with the voice of Anne herself. The uneasy diminished fifths and destabilized harmonies of the movement’s opening reveal her vision of “the world being slowly turned into a wilderness.” We hear in the rumble of “the approaching thunder that one day will destroy us,” her fear. Yet what we are left with at the work’s end is the enduring hopefulness of Annelies Frank, a person who could write “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” while hiding from the Gestapo in an attic: “As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you’ll know you are pure within.”

— Program notes © Yoshi Campbell