Music of the holocaust

Transcript

[background music]

Phillip Silver: My research is to find music by composers who, because they were Jewish, had their works banned. If any works were published, attempts were made to destroy any known copies of them. The desire was put into place by the Nazis to write these figures out of history.

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Phillip:  My work is to undo that.

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Phillip:  In the 1930s, James Simon, who went to the Netherlands to escape from the oppression of the Nazis … And, while there, he composed a great deal of music, some of which is still being discovered now.

[pause]

Phillip:  He was a human being. He was a human being, a very creative human being. He had all the strengths and weaknesses of human beings, and he could express them in sound. And he could make us understand him. He speaks to us directly. He doesn’t drive us away. He doesn’t try to be interesting for the sake of being interesting. He’s honest and the music is honest.

[pause]

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Phillip:  Usually, these things are incremental. There isn’t a great explosion of, “Oh my God look what we’ve just discovered.” It’s just piece by piece falls into place. And sometimes, it falls into place very unexpectedly.

All music by various different composers who were involved with the Holocaust, in one way or the other. For example, the composer Leone Sinigaglia.

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Phillip:  An Italian composer, a victim of the Holocaust. And I’d never heard of him, so I began to do some research. The first thing that I came up with was the fact that he was a mountain climber who wrote a book on mountain climbing in the Dolomites in 1896.

Another thing I came up with was the fact that he was a student of Dvořak in composition. He was part of Brahms’ circle in Vienna in the late 1890s. And I said, “Who in the world is this person? I’ve never heard a note of his music.” I began to hunt for it.

Of course, there was absolutely nothing available, nothing whatsoever. I finally managed to track down the original publisher of one of the major cello piano works. I was on the phone to them over and over again. They finally ransacked their own archives and they said, “We have found a copy of this sonata.”

[pause]

Phillip:  It came and I was shocked by just how accessible and how beautiful it was. It immediately became the core of my discovery of this composer and this interest in finding other works by him.

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Phillip:  It is possible, though we cannot prove it, that the entire history of the second half of the 20th century musical development was altered artificially by the suppression of the music of these composers.

We have various elements that make up a musical language, a musical direction. And if you remove a huge body of work from that, then you’re left with something else and you no longer have an influence.

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[pause]

Phillip:  As Because their music is banned, there’s a severance of the direct connection between the composer, the creator, and the audience.

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Phillip:  And when that is severed, it’s a gaping wound to the composer. This is what happened to all of these composers. Their music was completely eradicated from the performing canon. They were literally wiped out of history. It was only by fortune that some of these works actually come back.

To reclaim music, to undo a travesty, something which denies justice, and to create justice for it.