I’d like not to fall into a deep despair again by going into detail about the wide range of unintentionally disturbing responses, but let’s just say the consensus from this selectively edited sampling of young Americans was “not much.”
The rise of misinformation, the slump of our education system, the persistent push of revisionism and the general destabilization of fact are all contributing factors to a growing and concerning collective ignorance about the catastrophe of the Holocaust, even as survivors walk among us.
But chief among the challenges in keeping the Holocaust in the public consciousness is not just how to do it, but what form those remembrances should take.
One potential solution can be seen in “Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín,” which comes to the Music Center at Strathmore on April 20 for its 20th-anniversary performance.
The elaborate stage show combines an orchestra and chorus with a large multimedia component. It aims, through enhanced re-creation, to relate the tale of a prisoners’ chorus at Theresienstadt concentration camp — a.k.a. Terezín — which between September 1943 and June 1944 learned Verdi’s “Requiem” by rote and performed it 16 times. Sections of the “Requiem” are interspersed with historical footage, testimony from survivors and narration.
For the Strathmore performance, the Orchestra of Terezín Remembrance will be joined by members of regional ensembles, including the American University Chamber Singers, the Catholic University of America Verdi Choir, the Longwood University Camerata & Chamber Singers, the University of Virginia Chamber Singers, the Virginia Commonwealth University Commonwealth Singers and the Virginia State University Concert Choir. Featured vocalists will include soprano Jennifer Check, mezzo-soprano Ann McMahon Quintero, tenor Cooper Nolan and bass-baritone Nathan Stark.
“Defiant Requiem” was the brainchild of Murry Sidlin, 81, a conductor and educator who started his career at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and as resident conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra. For eight years he was resident conductor of the Oregon Symphony and, from 2002 to 2010, was dean of Catholic University’s School of Music, where he now teaches music of the Holocaust era as well as graduate conducting.
Since its premiere in Portland, Ore., in 2002, “Defiant Requiem” has been performed more than 40 times around the world, including at Terezín in 2006. It has inspired a documentary, lectures and an educational initiative, and led to Sidlin’s creation of the Defiant Requiem Foundation, which, according to its vision statement, “strives to promote awareness and understanding of the dangers of antisemitism, Holocaust ignorance and denial” through arts and music.
Sidlin was struck by inspiration after coming across Joza Karas’s 1985 book “Music at Terezín: 1941-1945” at a bookstore in Minneapolis. He said in a recent phone interview that he stood in the street and read the entire chapter on the Bucharest-born conductor Rafael Schächter. Sidlin couldn’t fathom its last paragraph — that Schächter taught and led a chorus of starving prisoners in 16 full performances of the “Requiem.”
“Nonsense. … It can’t be,” Sidlin recalls thinking. “If it’s a concentration camp then it’s got the amenities of a concentration camp: no food, nothing nutritious, no medical attention, no protection from the elements.”
Sidlin became obsessed with determining the veracity of the story — if true, it needed to be told; if false, it was propaganda that needed to be smothered.
While teaching at Pacific University in Oregon in 2001, Sidlin contacted two Holocaust scholars on campus, who inspired a wave of (early) Internet research, combing message boards and newsgroups for anyone who could provide more details about the performances. An anonymous reply (Sidlin could determine only that it came from Israel) arrived with a single question: “What do you want them for?”
Advised to come clean about his intentions — which at this point, were singularly concerned with the truth of the tale — Sidlin explained his interest. Another email arrived weeks later, this time from Schächter’s niece, who confirmed the story.
From here, Sidlin’s fascination with the details behind Schächter’s endeavor grew — the grim conditions faced by the prisoners; the impossible-seeming process of training up to 150 singers (men one night, women the next) in clandestine rehearsals; the cynical tolerance of the commandant, who allowed for outbreaks of intellectual activity to spread across the camp as a way to keep the prisoners’ minds off their suffering.
But what inspired Sidlin most was the gesture of hope represented by such an undertaking under such harsh conditions. This was not just hope against the unknown, but also against the ongoing horrors of the camp.
The chorus worked off the single score of the “Requiem” that Schächter had brought to Terezín. (He took that and Bedrich Smetana’s “Bartered Bride.”) They gathered around a single broken-down piano to learn the parts, splitting into small groups by night to practice.
Their numbers routinely dwindled as some prisoners were deported and new ones arrived. By the final performance, given for an audience of SS officers as well as a delegation of the Red Cross in June 1944, only 60 singers remained. Rafael Krasa, the son of Terezín survivor Edgar Krasa (1924-2017) and Schächter’s namesake, will also join the performance at Strathmore.
Holocaust survivor Fred Terna, 98, clearly recalls his experience at Terezín, attending multiple performances of “Requiem.” He recalled the walled camp retaining the shape of a town — with barber shops and businesses, an illusion of autonomy suspended in an air of chaos. Terna was a roving worker, repairing drainage systems, digging ditches and taking advantage of the limited freedom he had.
“We never knew from one day to the next what would happen,” Terna said in a phone interview from his home in Brooklyn. “But because of the constant contact necessitated by the situation, there was a strange slave-to-master relationship. The guards were low-class people, but the Terezín prisoners, by and large, were educated and knowledgeable. We knew who they were. They didn’t know us.”
Terna, an artist based in New York with work at the Smithsonian, the Albertina Collection in Vienna and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, was raised in Prague after his family moved there from Vienna. He developed a love of music by learning the operas his grandparents would sing around the two pianos in their home.
He was 20 when he was sent to Terezín in 1942. He remembers hearing a friend of a friend of a friend, the renowned bass Karel Berman, in one of the final “Requiem” performances, singing accompanied by the struggling piano. He heard three full performances of the Verdi piece, but recalls mostly marveling at the vision of the singers all assembled in one room — small clusters of the group taking on whichever parts they knew best, the performance itself a demonstration of their determination.
“Schächter was perhaps aware that our main weapon against the Nazis was art and intellectual activity,” says Terna, who also found himself associating with poets such as George Kafka and Zdeněk Jelínek at Terezín. “We knew what we were doing, but not its cultural import.”
“Defiant Requiem” carried a message of hope against the gruesome conditions, but its defiance was not embraced by everyone held at Terezín. In fact, elders within the Jewish community saw nothing but trouble in the idea of the performance. (“You know how they’re going to solve this problem?” Sidlin imagines the Orthodox rabbis warning. “They’re going to shoot you. You don’t want to do this.”) Adding to their consternation was the idea of using a devout Catholic mass as a vessel for their people’s plight.
“In defense of the ‘Requiem’ at Terezín,” Sidlin says, “[Schächter]’s point was that the meaning of any great work of art is never limited to its original intent, and that, I think, is what motivated him.”
Echoes of these criticisms have also trailed the “Requiem” to its current iteration in some quarters of the Jewish community. There appears to be consensus that the story of the Terezín singers is one that deserves to be examined, preserved and treasured. But its transformation into what one critic called a “virtual multimedia extravaganza” has rubbed some the wrong way.
In a 2011 piece, Simon Wynberg called the production “manipulative and (possibly inadvertently) dishonest.” “As intelligent, compassionate beings, are our imaginations so depleted that we require an extrinsic narrative of prose and pictures to appreciate the extraordinary evil circumstances of the Terezín concerts?”
And a 2013 essay by James Loeffler criticized “Defiant Requiem” as a “tragically misconceived” distortion of Holocaust history that risks turning Jewish composers “into shadow images defined only by their status as Hitler’s victims.”
Sidlin accepts the criticisms, but asserts that however well-read he’s become on Terezín, he’s not a scholar. Most important, he says, is that the memory of Terezín lives on, and if it can do so through beauty, all the better.
“Let me put it to you this way,” he says. “Those who think that this is not scholarly enough, maybe they’re right, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter to me.
“What matters to me is the Verdi ‘Requiem’ is touching people in a way that they never dreamed. These people, dedicated to beauty, to genius, to strength, to meeting nightly to learn one of the greatest and most demanding compositions in service to mankind. This is the miracle. This is the best of mankind.”
Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín 20th-anniversary performance April 20 at 7:30 p.m. at the Music Center at Strathmore. strathmore.org.
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