Intermezzo Doloroso. On the Art and Resistance, and Meaning of Music... and Death

A Tribute to Yuriy Kerpatenko: A Ukrainian Hero

Ukrainian conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko. Copyright: Ukraine Culture Ministry via Facebook

This paper is perhaps a little different from the others published here. It is a personal and painful tribute. But maybe you will also find in it a strategic resonance— for there are realities of life and death that finally open up its possibility.

He was 46 years old. Yuriy Kerpatenko, main conductor or Kherson’s Mykola Kulish Music and Drama Theatre , was murdered by Russian criminals in his home on October 13, 2022. In cold blood. Deliberately. Because he was great and noble. Because his spirit was higher than theirs. Because he embodied fortitude and right. Because his very existence was unbearable for the Russian state, for Putin and his cronies.

He was a hero and an immense artist, in fact indissolubly one and the other. For an artist worthy of the name, as well as a philosopher or a person of faith, can only be a hero when circumstances lead him to be something other than a nutter. And a hero, in a way, expresses in front of tragedy what no so-called artist or philosopher could ever mean. It says a form of ultimate truth of art, the necessity of an enjoyment of our senses before the destiny that is death, and the absolute conscience of it. It expresses what philosophy also carries in the end: that of the ultimate freedom that can only be conceived on the horizon of death.

I am thinking at this moment of the eulogy pronounced by the philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem in homage to his friend Jean Cavaillès, one of the most brilliant philosophers and mathematicians of the twentieth century, a commander of the Resistance who was shot by the Nazis on April 4, 1944 when he was 41 years old. He said of Cavaillès that he was a “resistant by logic”. For him, he wrote, the fight against the Nazis and the Resistance, of which he was one of the leaders in France, were as necessary as “mathematical sequences”. Yuriy Kerpatenko’s resistance to the oppressor undoubtedly followed the same logic: that expressed by his being a musician. One cannot be a musician, authentically, and tolerate absolute barbarity, in this case that of the Russians, which is in radical opposition to the very existence of music.

Yuriy Kerpatenko, like all resisters, those to Nazism, Fascism, Francoism, like the Iranian women resisting the regime of the Pasdarans, like the saboteurs in Belarus, and therefore like the Ukrainian resisters to the Russian occupiers, knew exactly what he was doing. He refused to play for the occupier; he rejected any collaboration; he spat in the face of the cowardly and spineless occupier his contempt; he told him that he would always be the strongest; that the Ukrainians would not surrender. In doing so, Kerpatenko knew the risks he was taking; he acted with full knowledge of the facts; he was aware of the reality: that of enemies always ready to commit any crime, even against children. He may not have known the time of his death, but he perfectly assumed that the enemy could act and strike. But that was not to change anything.

The lesson of the artist as well as the philosopher—the one that so many of our leaders have forgotten—is that it is not the enemy who sets the law. It is us.

The resistance that Kerpatenko embodied brings shame to the cowards and infamy to the traitors. These people without conscience will be even smaller in death than they were in life.

Of course, you will say, and rightly so, that it is not only philosophers and artists who offer this terrible lesson to the world through their supreme sacrifice. Every day, it is the simplest of Ukrainians, and their brothers and sisters from Belarus and Georgia who fight with them, who offer us, through their struggle and, alas, often through their death, the ultimate lesson of freedom, the one that cannot be written, but only shown—not as a final tragedy (since we could have avoided it and it was not written in the stars), but as a final will.

All of them will always be infinitely greater than us—and here I don’t even want to mention the bastards, the murderers and the traitors, because they don't even deserve the comparison.

To compare is always to sully the memory of the most worthy. To compare is not to allow for the infinite difference. It is like trying to create an improbable proximity between bastards and heroes who do not live in the same universe, even if it is in our world that the traitors kill the heroes as if by an encounter as fatal as absurd. But the heroes don’t live in the same world as us, the people we often call normal; they are already, and for eternity, in a universe that no longer belongs to the common world. Moreover, those who have survived and who therefore come back to live in our world, are in fact strangers to it.

Without doubt, I have also experienced this directly: the heroes I have known lived in our world, seemingly normally, and they spent their lives in a series of very banal and common occupations, those that are also ours, from daily stewardship and its small, tiresome and futile constraints, to work that is sometimes as soul-destroying and vain as it is hopeless. It was necessary to possess a form of intimacy, which would never have tolerated explicitness, in order to understand not only the secret brokenness that would never offer peace—need we only recall the suicide of Primo Levi?—but also a form of total strangeness to the smallness of the world that could sometimes be accompanied by a form of fatalism in front of the events of the current life.

In parentheses, it is so striking in these times of war to note this futility of those who can never be heroes, where the lowest concerns of life erase the conscience of crime. Perhaps this is why Ukrainians will be the first nation in Europe now with a historical consciousness and a unique soul that comes from being close to the victims of crime. They will also know how to bear the meaning of each life taken while the rest of the Western world has lost the power to do so.

The hero, having done its work on earth, never returns to it even when he or she survives. Perhaps this is also why no one has ever learned the lessons. These are forever untransferable. The imitation of the hero is as impossible as the imitatio Christi which imagined that the mortal could reach God by imitating the Lord’s gestures. Heroes are not in the exact sense of the word inspirational, even if we would have liked them to be. They are sacred stones which we admire on our way, but which do not enlighten us—not because they are not, as they say, lighthouses, but because we cannot be enlightened.

In reality, he or she who acts as a hero is always alone and never follows a model. It is without precedent and therefore without successor.

But undoubtedly in the remoteness of the world which characterizes the hero there is an exception. Among the heroes, moreover most often heroines, that I knew enough to glimpse something in them, music remained the moment when everything managed to express itself. It was through music that the entire memory of death came to light, the vision of fellow prisoners being tortured and then thrown into the crematoria, the desolate landscape of the camps and of the death they thought would be theirs.

Music was the last contact with eternity.

I remember E. D., survivor of the camps, tortured almost to death, condemned to death, but finally miraculous, indomitable, one of the greatest that I have ever known and sometimes, although probably still in a small way, understood. E. D., always impassive, marked by her austere Protestant upbringing, was to break down in tears one day when—alas, I was about twenty years old, and almost foolishly blamed myself at the time for what I though was ultimately not polite (it wasn’t)—I made for her listen to the second movement of Schubert’s Trio Op. 100, which, so incredible it might be, she did not know. I knew that in that moment she was actually reliving what she had experienced there and could no longer think about.

It was through music that she could rethink the unthinkable.

M. also brought her life in the camp back to the music every time—it was the moment when the camp, so to speak, came alive in her. It could be anecdotal, but so terrible, like those Brandenburg concertos that became the necessary link of recognition with a dear friend, G. P., when, on the first occasion of their meeting in a Nazi prison that was only a stage on the way to the camp, she had continued to sing the tune that M. had started to sing. This was the movement, as if combining the relentlessness of the progression, leading to an abyss, and the elation of liberation, of the eighth and final movement in G minor of the Kreisleriana. It was, of course, for her, a Jew, the eternity expressed in Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott or in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, or in Elvira’s tragic aria as saying another type of infinite suffering. And how can we not take up here, as another Abschied, the violin solo of the third of Richard Strauss’ Last Lieder, at the same time completeness of our sensations and farewell.

So, in each case, the music was simultaneously the camp and the liberation, the self-sacrifice and the victory. I don’t think that any other art can come so close to the misery of the camps and the massacres—after all, you only have to look at Mark Rothko’s paintings to be convinced of this, not to mention the literature—but to the continuous movement from awareness of absolute evil to action. No art is as relentless as music.

This is what I thought of when I learned of Yuriy’s murder, of the intimacy of music and death, and of the heroism of this musician. It moved me. Of course, it is no less abominable than those of hundreds of Ukrainian children and babies, some deliberately killed at point-blank range by the Russians, of those inhabitants of Bucha, Izyum, Mariupol and elsewhere who were tortured, of those Crimean Tatars who were executed only because they were Tatars, as others were executed only because they were Ukrainians—just as, in another time, others killed only children, women and men because they were Jews. Each face of those murdered is literally unbearable, and it must be unbearable. In fact, I fear that it is not unbearable enough and that many Western leaders do not even care, from time to time, to look at the faces of the supplicants or of those exceptional young men and women, who went to defend their homeland, actually murdered—yes, murdered, let’s not say killed in combat (or some form of banality of war), because Putin’s own war is a crime. As if they feared that the emotion, yes, teaches them the duty that is imposed on them.

So I thought of Yuriy, not because of what he might have felt in his last moments—apparently his death must have happened on the spot—, not because it has a highly symbolic meaning to murder a musician and, even more so, a conductor, the one who gathers and creates music through an association of instruments, and literally thinks the music and hears it in his soul before he hears it with his ear. No, I thought of him because I imagined what he had done in Kherson during the seven months of occupation by the current face of barbarism.

And tomorrow, during the Liberation, we will take, again and again, the immensity of Russian crimes.

Yuriy had certainly embodied hope and the music that his orchestra had been able to play, for the oppressed inhabitants of this city of which we still know only in bits and pieces the scenes of horror that it experienced. He had certainly given them strength of soul and comfort. It is enough to see also the role that music plays in each Ukrainian city reconquered or which enjoys a frail respite in the bombardments which it undergoes. Let us also note how essential it is to share with Ukrainians the melodies played by the soldiers at the front. Music is resistance and refuge: I will always remember my first trip as a teenager to communist Czechoslovakia in 1979. One of the experiences that made the biggest impression on me then was the extraordinary contemplation the people had at the concerts M and I went to—I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a powerful feeling anywhere else. It didn’t matter whether the music was secular or religious, it transported; it relieved and it compelled.

But how can we not also recall, on a darker note, the misappropriation of music, its debasement and its cutting by that which is most contrary to it. It is enough to listen—an experience that still gives me the shivers—to the chorus of the sailors of The Flying Dutchman in the interpretation that Clemens Krauss gave in a concert in Munich in 1944. All the mortifying madness of Nazism is there. One could mention the cursed concert in early May 2016 sponsored by the Russian criminal state given in the ruins of Palmyra under the direction of conductor Valery Gergiev, one of Putin’s minions. We should also mention all those Russian conductors or musicians who have spoken out in support of the war of extermination against Ukraine or who, for that matter, have not lifted a finger. What “music” are they really representing? Are they even artists or just servants in jackets who mime music for the sake of power alone? I don’t believe that a musician can be neutral.

How many Russian conductors will stand up tomorrow to honor the memory of Yuriy Kerpatenko and denounce his murderers? We don’t make music in the chamber. It also obliges us. I will not enter here into the tumultuous debate these days about the guilty and complicit silence of certain Russian artists. But let’s stop exonerating artists in the name of art—writers in the name of writing, musicians in the name of music, directors in the name of theater—because by claiming such innocence, they seal not only their guilt, but also the unworthiness of belonging to the world they claim to belong to.

One does not play Bach’s Chaconne before the open graves of one’s own victims.

Music was, in those atrociously dark times, the only element that often tied the world to beauty and, finally, to a hope that spring would bloom again.

Yuriy Kerpatenko was courage; he embodied beauty; he promised hope; he announced the future. That is why he was murdered. We owe it to him that the music continues and that the absolute evil that killed him does not win.