Precious things, according to the old anonymous proverb,
come in small packages. That certainly applies to the Society
for the Promotion and Rediscovery of Composers Persecuted by
the Nazi Regime and Their Works - the unwieldy official English
name of the small, struggling, impecunious, but especially
precious Berlin-based organization *musica reanimata*, to give
it its actual lower-case logo. On May 19 and 20 it presented
three "discussion concerts" exemplary of the uniquely valuable
work it has done since its founding in 1990.
The first of those most recent concerts brought back to
Berlin from her home in London Anita Lasker Wallfisch, who
survived the Nazis' Auschwitz extermination camp by playing her
cello in Alma Rose's meanwhile well known *Madchenorchester*,
the ragtag assemblage of female musicians drilled to the
highest possible degree of excellence by an amazing woman named
Alma Rose.
The second program presented works by Poland's Szymon Laks
(1901-83), a member of the non-French group that called itself
the "*Ecole de Paris*", who survived two years in Auschwitz - as
an indispensable music copyist and conductor! - plus further
imprisonment in the Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration
camps, with his son Andre Laks on hand in Berlin to intersperse
reminiscences about his father with the chamber works
performed.
The third focussed on Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-born
piano pupil of Artur Schnabel and composition pupil of Franz
Schreker, both in pre-Hitler Berlin, whose almost incredible
story of concealment and rescue by an anti-Nazi German
*Wehrmacht* captain in the infamous Warsaw ghetto has provided
Roman Polanski with the material for the film he currently has
in production in Warsaw.
Anita Lasker Wallfisch's impressive intelligence and strong
personality would stand out in any setting. In her adopted
England she became a founding member of the English Chamber
Orchestra organized by Benjamin Britten - whom she had first
encountered while still an occupant of the recently liberated
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (where Anne Frank died), when
Britten played piano for Yehudi Menuhin at one of the first
such concerts given in newly defeated Germany.
To listen to such an extraordinary woman factually
recounting her own experiences in Auschwitz - almost off-
handedly she dropped a remark that Dr. Joseph Mengele, the
anti-human physician subsequently infamous for his barbarous
medical experiments on twins delivered to him in Auschwitz, had
once requested her to play Schumann's "*Traumerei*" for him -
has an impact one can hardly put into words.
*musica reanimata* does musicological work unique in the
world, in close cooperation with the Pro Musica Viva Maria
Strecker-Daelen Foundation in Mainz, which concentrates
entirely on promoting the still unknown works of Jewish
composers sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in
Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. *musica reanimata* also works
closely with Dresden's Center for Contemporary Music, Berlin's
*Konzerthaus*, the Cologne-based DeutschlandRadio [repeat:
DeutschlandRadio] and Deutschlandfunk [repeat:
Deutschlandfunk], and the Berlin Institute of Technology's
Center for Research in Anti-Semitism.
The regular publications of *musica reanimata* include
works dealing with such composers as Joseph Achron, Paul Arma,
Tzvi Avni, Max Brand, George Dreyfus, Berthold Goldschmidt,
Alfred Goodman, Pavel Haas, Hans Helfritz, Philip Herschkowitz,
William Hilsley, Wolfgang Jacobi, Jaroslav Jezek, Erich Itor-
Kahn, Robert Kahn, Gideon Klein, Hans-Joachim Koellreutter,
Jozef Koffler, Max Kowalski, Hans Krasa, Alexander Krein, Ernst
Krenek, Rene Leibowitz, Arthur Lourie, Ursula Mamlok, Gnter
Raphael, Karol Rathaus, Louis Saguer, Hanning Schroder, Erwin
Schulhoff, Leo Smit, Erich Walter Sternberg, Ignace Strasfogel,
Viktor Ullmann, Wladimir Vogel, Kurt Weill, Imre Weisshaus, and
Alexander Weprik. If you fail to recognize most of those
names, consider the probable reason.
This admirable organization subsists on the kindness of
strangers - at least many of them - who contribute membership
dues amounting to about $5 a month. To learn more about
*musica reanimata* and how it manages to function, you can log
on to its website <www.musica-reanimata.de> and if German
presents a problem, just scroll down the left side to
"Information in English". If ever a musical organization
deserved the most possible help, *musica reanimata* does.
- Paul Moor
{DIACRITICALS: The 3d letter in "Krasa" requires an acute
accent <ASCII 160>; the 2d letter in "Jozef" requires an acute
accent <ASCII 162>; the 4th letter in "Rose", the 5th letter in
"Andre", the 4th letter in "Rene", and the 6th letter in
"Lourie" all require an acute accent <ASCII 130>; the 2d letter
in "Madchenorchester" and the 3d letter in "Traumerei" require
an umlaut <ASCII 132>; the 5th letter in "Schroder" requires an
umlaut <ASCII 148>
Paul Moor (Berlin)
<Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
Telefon: (030) 8639-5784
Telefax: (030) 8639-5785
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 07 2001 - 06:52:40 PDT