In the coming week, several events at the Bourgie Hall will bring to life the music and memory of the composers of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. These events, proposed by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with Exilarte (Vienna) and the Montreal Holocaust Museum, will culminate, next Saturday, International Day dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, with a recital of melodies proposed by the baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and the pianist Olivier Godin.
About thirty years ago, the name of Theresienstadt, or Terezín, a garrison town in northwestern Bohemia, today in the Czech Republic, had fallen relatively into oblivion. The camp, which was in fact above all a ghetto, did not have the disastrous reputation of those of Auschwitz-Birkenau or Bergen-Belsen.
The creation, at Decca, of the “Degenerated Music” collection, directed by Michael Haas in the early 1990s, one of the most important editorial initiatives in history, had the merit of bringing to the surface the names of composers Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein , Hans Krasa and Pavel Haas. Their tragic destiny led to a common crossroads, Theresienstadt, where they created their last works.
Misguided concept
In his very remarkable work The muffled voices of IIIe Reichthe author and conductor Amaury du Closel shows that the application of the term “degenerate” to art (Entartungin German) used in biology dates back, in Germany, to a period before Nazism.
Ironically, it was Max Simon Nordau, a doctor, philosopher and author, a major figure in Zionism, who conceptualized its deviation in his work Entartung (1892), aiming, in art, at the “contempt for the traditional values of customs and morality” and denouncing the decadence represented, pell-mell, by the symbolists, fashion, the “fin de siècle” atmosphere , Oscar Wilde, and so on. This idea remained in the air of the times and subsequently targeted composers such as Schoenberg for their aesthetic biases.
But by the mid-1920s, the idea was hijacked for political purposes by the Nazis, who associated it with the racial theories underlying their ideology. As Amaury du Closel writes: “The slide from mental degeneration towards racial degeneration allows a simple process of identification: it opposes the “health” of German musical feeling to the insanity of the “sick” music of musicians. Jews. »
Initially, the names of Mendelssohn, Mahler and Schreker (died in 1934) disappeared from the concert programs. Important composers such as Korngold and Schoenberg left for Hollywood. A little further east, the cream of the young guard of Czech composers, a conquered country, will be decimated in 48 hours. The marshalling yard for the planned massacre is called Theresienstadt.
Lark Mirror
Posterity will have been cruel. One would have thought that after the war, the most extreme curiosity would have surrounded those whom the Nazis wanted to deprive us of. Not even. The music of Mahler resurfaced at the turn of the 1960s, that of Schreker, barely a quarter of a century ago. The names of Haas, Klein and Krása reappeared thanks to the Decca records “Entartete Musik”. After 1945, the time was for upheavals and the promotion of the avant-garde, not the search for the cursed masterpieces of the past.
So, what was Theresienstadt? Officially, a “model camp”. There is certainly a camp, reserved in particular for the Czech resistance. But it is an annex adjoining a large ghetto well described by the historian Wolfgang Benz, former director of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin, a specialist in the place. Theresienstadt is a small town, evacuated of its inhabitants by an order from Berlin dating from February 1942. It was presented by the Nazis to certain German Jews as a sort of refuge (a scheme to dispossess them of their property by promising them a sort of of exile in medical residences, while in Austria they put forward retraining courses for Jews excluded from their professional orders). The Nazis also sent Czech Jews there, including artists whom they allowed to practice their art. Quickly, the exclusively Jewish population of Theresienstadt increased tenfold, in deplorable sanitary conditions and malnutrition.
However, through clever propaganda, the Nazis fooled a Red Cross delegation in June 1944 and two months later filmed a propaganda film on the theme “Hitler offers the Jews a city”. Excerpts from this film open a 2023 documentary, Theresienstadt, Eine Geschichte von Täuschung und Todwhich will be broadcast on January 24 on Bavarian television.
Among the famous internees of Theresienstadt, from November 16, 1942, there was the great leader Karel Ančerl, whose health always retained the scars of these years of captivity. Ancerl created an orchestra there. He was also part, with Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann, of this disastrous roundup of October 16, 1944 which deported the musicians to Auschwitz. Haas and Krása were gassed the next day, Ullmann the day after that, Klein was transferred to Füstengrube, where he died in January 1945 at the age of 25. Ancerl is the miracle of this sinister butchery. The number of deportees to Theresienstadt is estimated at 140,000. Some 33,000 of them died there of starvation or disease and 87,000 were deported to extermination camps, where only 5% survived.
Iconic works
Among the emblematic compositions of Theresienstadt, we will first mention the children’s opera Brundibár by Hans Krasa. Brundibár was composed in 1938 outside Terezín. It was first performed in a Prague orphanage in 1942, and then 50 times in the ghetto, where Krása had reconstructed the score and adapted it for the available instruments. Brundibár is the name of a villain who, with his barrel organ, tries to drown out the singing of two orphaned children who are seeking a means of subsistence in a market place. Animals will help them get rid of the villain, inspired by Hitler. As Wolfgang Benz recounts: “All the roles were duplicated; we didn’t know who would still be there the next day. »
The other immense masterpiece is The Emperor of Atlantisopera by Viktor Ullmann that we presented to you in our article “Opéra and politics” in September and which will be part of the programming of the Nouvel Opéra Métropolitain in June 2024 as part of Classica. This allegory denouncing fascism features Emperor Überall, a corrupt despot, struggling with death who has decided to go on strike.
In chamber music, the major works born in the ghetto are the Trio, there Fantasy and fugue for quartet and the Piano Sonata by Gideon Klein, the 3e Quartet by Ullmann, who also composed his Piano sonatas notbone 5 has 7sometimes sketches of symphonies.
Above all, there are many melodies which broaden the range of composers. “ Ilse Weber’s melodies are disarmingly naive. There is a kind of hope. And this text from Kopper on the last melody of Dichterliebe by Schumann, recited in a tragic way, which almost made me fall off my stool because it was so gripping,” Olivier Godin tells us. Regarding his recital Spiritual Resistance published in 2009 by Bridge, Wolfgang Holzmair has, for his concert, greatly broadened the range of composers. We even see the name of Carlo Taube appear. This student of Busoni had composed a symphony on his experience of occupation and deportation. The manuscript is, unfortunately, lost. Taube had also created the first jazz orchestra in Theresienstadt, the most reviled mode of musical expression among the “azis.” Degenerate to the end!