Two days after our conversation at the piano in his Greenwich Village loft, Botkin is at a piano in a vast rehearsal hall on Eleventh Avenue (he says it’s the largest rehearsal space in the city) in preparation for the debut of the Triangle Oratorio, his most ambitious project to date, which will premiere on the ninety-fifth anniversary of the fire, March 25, in the Isaac Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall. Today is the first run-through with the full chorus of 158, which includes a dozen children.

The Triangle Waist Company fire of March 25, 1911, was the most devastating and infamous disaster in New York City before the attacks of September 11 more than ninety years later. In just a few minutes, at least 146 people are known to have died in the conflagration. The Triangle Oratorio was inspired by Botkin’s close personal relationship with his wife’s grandmother, Esther Gottesfeld, who at 106 was the last living survivor of the Triangle fire when she died, on September 7, 2001. He says the Oratorio was not directly influenced by the events of September 11, despite the obvious connections.

“I think that anything we do or make or create in the aftermath of September 11 has that inevitable context,” Botkin says, sipping coffee during a break. He is relaxed and expansive despite the demands of the rehearsal. “How can it not? Especially for those of us who were in New York City that day. But everyone has his own September 11 experience, and I am not sure that any single depiction of the events of that day in any form can ever be truly adequate. At the same time, there is a striking parallelity between the two events and the horrific dilemma that so many people faced on both of those terrible days. By various estimates, a third or even half of those who died as a consequence of the Triangle fire jumped from the top stories of the Asch building. And while nobody can ever say for sure, something like two hundred people jumped from the World Trade Center towers. Is it a choice? Is that what we call it? Or is it just human nature, a primitive impulse to preserve the body a few seconds longer? When Esther talked about the Triangle fire and how her sister died, and her fiancé, she would always say the same thing. She would say ‘You jump because you want to save yourself. Maybe a miracle will occur and you’ll survive. It’s human nature. You hope. You jump.’”

Botkin has funded a concert program at the West Village Jewish Home, where Esther Gottesfeld lived for twenty years, and since its inception three years ago the Esther Gottesfeld Memorial Concert Series has brought a variety of performers of all kinds of music to the neighborhood for free concerts each month. On March 25 there are special arrangements for a bus that will travel from the West Village Jewish Home to Carnegie Hall for the Triangle Oratorio premiere, and there will be front-row seats reserved for staff as well as residents.