andy bell

Originally posted online 24 January 2022

Holocaust Memorial Day falls this week, and the BBC’s contribution, yesterday, was an extraordinary day of music at the Barbican Centre, music written in Nazi camps and wartime ghettos by Jewish composers.

Most were held in Terezin, or Theresienstadt as the Nazis called it, just north of Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia. It was a constructed ghetto designed to hold mainly Czech Jews pending their “transportation” to Auschwitz and, usually, death. Hundreds of thousands passed through it. It was a day that was at once distressing and uplifting, depressing and inspiring.

It began in the morning with Simon Broughton’s film, “The Music of Terezin” made for the BBC in 1993, and ended late in the evening with Messiaen’s “Quartet For The End of Time” played with finesse and, I thought, a commendable intuition of where this music had come from, by students from the Guildhall School of Music. In between we had music from Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein and Hans Krasa, Erwin Schulhoff’s remarkable 5th symphony, all rage and impending catastrophe, the BBC Singers performing songs from the camps accompanied beautifully by more young musicians from the Guildhall School, and Victor Ullman’s opera “The Emperor of Atlantis”.

Messiaen, a medical orderly in the French army, wrote the quartet when he was a prisoner of war at Stalag V111-A, where it was premiered. Schulhoff died of tuberculosis in Wulzburg prison camp in 1941. The BBC Singers performance was enriched, heartbreakingly, by readings from the ghetto, selected and read by Simon Wallfisch, whose mother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, is a survivor of the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra. “The Emperor of Atlantis” reached dress rehearsal stage in Terezin until the SS realised that the Emperor was based on Hitler, at which point it was banned. It was not performed after that till 1975.

When the nazis realised they were losing the war they actually increased the rate of “transports” from Terezin to Auschwitz. And it was on one of the last trains, in October 1944, that most of the musicians, conductors and composers were sent eastwards. Few survived.

A harrowing day, but also one of beauty and reaffirmation.

This is why we are anti-fascists.

Stage photos: The cast of “Emperor of Atlantis” with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; the BBC Singers, Guildhall students and Simon Wallfisch; the Guildhall students who performed “Quartet For The End Of Time”.

You can see the film, The Music of Terezin, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3kLw-ov7I