The Terezin Music Foundation’s 2024 Gala Concert Event “In the Joyous Light,”” featuring world-renowned pianist Jonathan Biss will take place at Symphony Hall at 5:00 on October 21^st.  The concert  features  a potent lyric from Terezín composer Viktor Ullmann’s last songs set to poems by Friedrich Hölderlin plus the Symphony Hall premiere of two exciting new TMF commissions. Jonathan Biss caps the evening with  Schubert’s sublime and life-affirming Piano Sonata No. 22 in A Major, D.959. Tickets HERE.

As a prequel, I offer an essay on the  Terezin Foundation Artistic Director Mark Ludwig’s summer lectures.

In the summer of 2023, Mark Ludwig, a retired violist from the Boston Symphony, presented a two-part lecture at the Tanglewood Learning Institute in Studio E of the Institute. That lecture dealt with a topic that has become central to his focus since 1988, while he was still playing in the BSO. Having encountered some intriguing reports of music in and around Prague during the Second World War, he traveled there to find information about the cultural life of Terezin, a fortified city north of Prague that the Nazis converted into a concentration camp they called Theresienstadt. There they housed Czech Jews intended ultimately for the death camps in Poland, most frequently Auschwitz.

Following visits to a library in Prague devoted to documents and resources on the history of Terezin in the Nazi era, visits to the fortress town itself, and interviews with survivors of those years, he founded the Terezin Music Foundation to ensure that the history of the extraordinary composers, singers, and instrumentalists who were imprisoned there—a great many of whom did not survive—would be appropriately remembered. The Foundation has promoted performances and recordings of largely forgotten works by gifted composers whose lives were cut short through violence and hatred.

One of the first concrete results of his research came when he showed Seiji Ozawa the score of Study for String Orchestra by Pavel Haas, not at first telling him the history of the piece—that its first performance by prisoners in Terezin occurred only weeks before Haas was sent to Auschwitz and murdered—but only that it was a work by one of Janàček’s favorite students. Once the conductor had agreed that it was worth performing, he learned the full story. That Boston Symphony performance in the early 1990s was the first performance that Haas’s work had received by a professional orchestra. It has since been recorded and become one of his best-known pieces, a powerful assertion of hope in a hopeless situation. (Since then, a Pavel Haas Quartet has been founded in the Czech Republic; it tours internationally with programs including his work and the standard quartet repertory.)

Mark Ludwig himself played in the Hawthorne String Quartet, which consisted of BSO colleagues who recorded CDs devoted to composers who were in Terezin, among other things.

He continues to lead the Terezin Music Foundation, which, in recent years, has included further support of performances and publications. Of the latter, he has edited a richly illustrated book, “Our Will to Live: The Terezin Music Critiques of Viktor Ullmann,” one of the leading Terezin composers who also proved to be a distinguished music critic. His essays give a vivid sense of the rich cultural life that the Jews held in captivity maintained during those terrible years. The title of the book is drawn from Ullmann’s 1944 essay “Goethe and Ghetto”: “We in no way sat around lamenting.  …  Our desire for culture was equal to our will to live.”

In August 2023, Mark Ludwig offered a pair of lectures on consecutive days in which he spoke of the general circumstances of the thousands of Jews imprisoned in Terezin who came from one of the richest cultural centers in Europe. A large percentage of them brought “contraband” in the form of forbidden musical instruments because they were determined not to be without them, even though they were allowed only one suitcase to carry their belongings. One cellist boldly disassembled his instrument to fit it into his suitcase, putting it together again after arrival.

The music offered in Terezin for the performers’ satisfaction and for the pleasure of fellow prisoners ranged widely from folk music and cabaret performances, which were often jazz-inflected, to chamber and choral music in classical traditions. Since little printed music was available, performance parts had to be written out by hand.

One of the musicians in Terezin was the conductor Karel Ančerl (1898-1973), who led the first performance of Haas’s Study. He survived the war and returned to Terezin to search for the work. The score was lost, but he located the parts played in the first performance in Terezin. He conducted in Czechoslovakia after the war until the Soviet takeover induced him to move to the West, where he followed Seiji Ozawa in Toronto.

Karel Berman was not yet 23 when he arrived in Terezin in March 1943, at the start of a distinguished singing career. He wrote several songs and a suite for piano, which he completed on his birthday the following April 14. And he gave the first performance of Pavel Haas’s Four Songs to the Text of Chinese Poetry, which had been written for him.  In September 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz, but then onward to a camp in Kauffering. After liberation in 1945, he completed studies at the Prague Conservatory and became a leading basso in the National Theater there, retiring in 1991.

Another significant musician who survived in Terezin as a young girl was the harpsichordist Zuzana Ružičková (1927-2017); this experience delayed progress in her career, but after the war she became a significant harpsichordist, the first to record all of J.S. Bach’s keyboard works. Christopher Hogwood was among her harpsichord students.

There were four significant Czech composers in Terezin, all of whom had their lives cut tragically short before the end of the war.

I have already mentioned Pavel Haas (1899-1944), who was Janáček’s most important pupil. He composed a wide range of orchestral, chamber, and theatrical works, including a highly regarded opera, The Charlatan, in 1938. In Terezin he wrote about 18 pieces, but most don’t survive. He arrived in Auschwitz on the same transport as Ančerl, who later told Haas’s brother Paul that he had been marked for immediate death upon arrival, but that the weakened Haas began coughing and was sent to the gas chamber in his place.

In many ways the most tragic figure of the four composers was Gideon Klein (1919-1945) because a life filled with extraordinary musical promise was cut off in his mid-20s. Mark Ludwig noted that he could have become the Czech Leonard Bernstein of his day. Born just 15 months after Bernstein, Klein was a brilliant pianist from early on, and, at 19, was the prize pupil of Vilém Kurz at the Prague Conservatory. At the University of Prague, he studied ethnomusicology and composition with the advanced composer Alois Hába (notorious for his use of quarter tones), but he was soon expelled as a Jew. He was awarded a scholarship from the Royal Academy of Music in London but was denied permission to travel and was deported to Terezin. Once there, he became exceptionally active in promoting a wide range of musical activities in which he composed, conducted, and gave piano recitals. He also encouraged his older composer comrades to continue their creative work. Before Terezin, his scores featured the modern musical language of 12-tone and quarter-tone writing. Once in Terezin, however, he worked more often to create music for specific purposes to serve the community. He was sent to Auschwitz in October 1944 and moved on to a work camp in Fürstengrab soon after (probably because of his youth), where he died under unclear circumstances.

Hans Krása (1899-1944) studied with Alexander Zemlinsky and later Albert Roussel. His compositions of the early 1920s include a Symphony for Small Orchestra, which received several performances, one by Koussevitzky in Boston, making him the only one of these four composers to have had a work performed in the United States before their deaths. As both conductor and composer, opera was a major interest. His first opera, Verlobung in Traum (Betrothal in a Dream) was based on a Dostoevsky story. In 1938, he composed a children’s opera, Brundibar. His death came, like the others, in late 1944.

Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) studied with Arnold Schoenberg. One of his early works was Variations, Fantasy, and Double Fugue on a Little Piano Piece by A. Schoenberg, which, when he orchestrated it in 1933, received the Emil Hertzka Prize, created in honor of a significant Austrian music publisher. He studied with Alois Hába for two years. In 1936 he again won the Hertzka Prize, this time for an opera, Der Sturz des Antichrist (“The Fall of the Antichrist”). By then he had already written on opera on Peer Gynt (now lost), and he followed it with a comic opera, Der zerbrochene Krug (“The Broken Jar” ((a sly reference to lost virginity)) ) based on a much-loved 19^th-century German play by Heinrich von Kleist. However, the opera that has gained the most lasting attention is his last, Der Kaiser von Atlantis (“The Emperor of Atlantis,” subtitled “Death Retires”); I will return to it later in this essay. In Terezin he remained active as composer and conductor, but also as a serious music critic, as registered in some 26 performance critiques, collected and annotated in Mark Ludwig’s book. Like his composer colleagues, Ullmann was transported to Auschwitz in the middle of October 1944; two days after his arrival he was sent to the gas chambers.

In his pair of lectures in 2023, Ludwig laid out a description of the history of Terezin/Theresienstadt and of the remarkable cultural life within the compound, including not only the composers named above, who wrote in the classical genres, but also Zikmunt Schul (1916-1944), who was born in Kassel, but moved to Prague in 1931. He studied with Hába and befriended Ullmann. There he began a collection of songs from the Prague synagogue; he continued his interest in Jewish liturgical music even after deportation to Terezin in 1941. He died there of tuberculosis.

As the background for the musical culture of Terezin, Ludwig discussed the contemporary musical world in which the Terezin composers (especially Haas and Krása) grew up, their familiarity with the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, as well as with the work of their contemporary Kurt Weill (1900-1950), who has been described as “No. 2 on Hitler’s hate list” (after Schoenberg), both because of his advanced concert music and because of the satirical Threepenny Opera and other works he composed in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht. Weill escaped to France just as Hitler took over in 1933. Later he moved to England and the USA, where he became an important figure in American musical theater.

Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) was encouraged in his early compositional studies by Dvořák. He studied at the Prague Conservatory and later with Debussy and Reger, among others. He was one of the first composers to find inspiration from jazz rhythms, which the Nazis labeled entartete Kunst (degenerate art) because it grew out of the work of black musicians. His radical politics (leaning toward Russian Communism) and his Jewish heritage made him exceptionally unpopular among leaders of the Third Reich. In his last years in Prague, he consistently performed under a pseudonym. The Soviets approved his application for citizenship, but he was captured and imprisoned by the Germans before he could get away. He died of tuberculosis in Wülzberg, a German prison in Bavaria.

Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, the first to adopt his 12-tone style. By the late 1920s and into the early ‘30s, he began to work with the socialist playwright Bertolt Brecht (who turned to the openly political Eisler after his hugely successful collaborations with Weill ended, in large part, because Weill was less committedly political in ways that interested Brecht). With Brecht, he went into exile in 1933, after the Nazi party banned their works. He received a permanent visa to the United States in 1938 and spent the next decade here, first teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York, then resettling in Hollywood, where he received nominations of Academy Awards for film scores in 1944 and 1945. The House Unamerican Activities Committee accused him of being a Communist and expelled him from the country in 1948. He spent his last years in East Berlin, where he worked with Brecht until the latter’s death in 1956; he passed away in 1962.

In his pair of lectures at Tanglewood in August 2023, Mark Ludwig described the cultural background of the period and the way so much suffered attacks from Nazis even before Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, but far more between that year and the end of World War II in 1945. He discussed the influence of such vital composers as Stravinsky and Schoenberg on the composers who ultimately ended in Terezin. His talk was enriched throughout with recorded musical examples and photographs and drawings from the period. Finally, he invited BSO members to perform compositions live: Zikmunt Schul’s Two Chassidic Dances and Hans Krása’s Passacaglia and Fugue for String Trio. (Both of these works were composed in Terezin.)

Mark Ludwig is a first-rate lecturer—direct, down-to-earth, utterly unstuffy as he presents information and situations about people, events, and music that clearly mean a great deal to him. It was therefore exciting to learn that in 2024 he had been booked at the Tanglewood Learning Center for another Friday-Saturday pair of August lectures. This time, the topic was listed as “Trauma, Memory, and Transcendence in Music.” For this talk, he continued dealing with the Terezin composers he had introduced in 2023, this time emphasizing Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann.

But in 2024, he broadened the approach to deal with music and musicians of widely scattered countries and different ethnicities. But first, he asked the audience to think of a musical experience in which a specific piece of music, in performance or in memory, to think about how that experience shaped or echoed an especially painful or traumatic event in our lives.

Having begun thus, he talked about several musicians from different cultures and ethnicities who found music a helpful path out of pain. These included Bosba Panh, a female composer in Cambodia; Milad Yousufi, a pianist and composer from Afghanistan, now studying in the United States; and a Namibian tribe, the Ovaherero, that uses traditional music sung en masse to reflect on and heal from catastrophe.

Having made this general worldwide point, he returned to Terezin in the early 1940s to penetrate again the musical energy and drive that Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann exhibited in their dark circumstances.

Klein was just 22 when he arrived at Terezin, but already had a range of talent and an energy that made him a central figure in the musical life of the place, whether as composer, pianist (he gave some 15 recitals) and participation in chamber music performances, or conductor, he seemed tireless. When he realized he would be “sent east” he left his musical scores with his girlfriend, who gave them to his sister Eliska Kleinova. One of the signal events of Mark Ludwig’s research interviews with survivors of Terezin was his visit to Kleinova in Prague in 1990. While he was there, she received a telephone call that seemed to portend good news. When she hung up, Kleinova told him that a trunk carrying her brother’s pre-war manuscripts, lost for decades, had just been found.

 Viktor Ullmann’s activities in Terezin were as wide-ranging as Klein’s, and included, in addition to composition and performance, the writing of 26 remarkable concert reviews to capture the amazing variety of musical life, even under exceptionally restricted conditions. This short period represented the most active period of composition in his life, including three piano sonatas, song cycles, his third string quartet, and a truly gutsy one-act opera, Der Kaiser von Atlantis (“The Emperor of Atlantis,” which originally bore the subtitle “Death Resigns”).

The opera (libretto by Peter Kien) was rehearsed in Terezin, but never performed there, ostensibly because the Jewish council that was allowed by the Nazi overlords decided that it would simply be too risky. Mark Ludwig described the secret element of the rehearsals: score and parts were marked with blue pencil to indicate passages that were not to be rehearsed if any guards happened into the rehearsal space. At a signal from the conductor, everyone jumped ahead to the next “safe” passage. (The opera was not publicly performed until 1975, though in the last 50 years it has had many performances and recordings.

What made Der Kaiser von Atlantis so dangerous was that the principal character, Emperor Overall, whose name suggests a German ruler. Mark Ludwig played recorded excerpts of the serene C-major theme from the second movement of Haydn’s “Emperor” quartet (Opus 76, No. 3), composed after his visits to London where he was impressed by the ubiquity of the national anthem “God save the King.” His own tribute to the Austrian Emperor was later taken over as the German national anthem with the additions of the words “Deutschland über alles.” The name, character, and personality of King Overall are represented in Ullmann’s opera by a dissonant, chromatically twisted version of Haydn’s theme. To assert his universal power, King Overall commands Death to widespread killing. But the character of Death in the opera is an old soldier of remarkable calmness and noble mien who becomes so tired of the emperor’s demands that he simply goes on strike, so that no one—aged, or ill, or shattered in war—can die. When a man and a woman on opposite armies are unable to kill one another, they fall in love. The emperor is unnerved by this unexpected result and demands Death to let mortality recommence. Death refuses to obey unless the emperor agrees to die first. Ullmann died without hearing the full score; it was first recorded in 1994 on one of a series of London Decca CDs labeled “Entartete Musik: music suppressed by the Third Reich.”

Ullmann’s opera may be the most obvious example of the imagination and courage with which the composers and performers of Terezin faced what proved to be a hopeless situation, but the other scores by the composers mentioned here also found ways of using music to turn the trauma of their situation in a different direction and to achieve a kind of transcendence both in their own lives and for survivors and generations coming after who hear their music.

For his final lecture in 2024, Mark Ludwig arranged to speak to Osvaldo Golijov, an Argentine-Jewish composer educated in the land of his birth, then in Israel, and finally at the University of Pennsylvania with George Crumb and as a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. He could not be at Tanglewood for the lecture (Ludwig joked that he was stuck on a train in Holland). But the two men filmed an interview in which Golijov talked about how he came across a source of inspiration—a profound expression of sadness—that helped him overcome several years in which he felt blocked as a composer.

Golijov encountered a book by Israeli novelist David Grossman, “Falling Out of Time,” in which he sought to come to grips with the death of his son Uri in his country’s war with Lebanon. At the time, Golijov was himself in the middle of a period in which he started many pieces, including significant commissions, that he was unable to complete. In Grossman’s book he discovered the basis for an 80-minute song cycle that he composed for the Silk Road ensemble, finding in it the impetus to blend musical ideas, vocal and instrumental, from many cultures, a frequent element of his work.

These sounds, these responses to trauma in different times and places, ultimately bring memories that become transcendent and healing, as Mark Ludwig demonstrated in this extraordinary series of lectures and live performances.

See related review HERE

Where to hear some of the music mentioned here:

CDs:

The Hawthorne String Quartet (Ronan Lefkowitz, Si Jing Huang, Mark Ludwig, and Sato Knudsen), with Virginia Eskin, piano, recorded four works by Gideon Klein (Trio, Fantasie & Fugue, Sonata for piano, Quartet No. 2) and Ullmann’s Quartet No. 3 on Channel Classics CCS 1691

The Hawthorne String Quartet recorded Haas (String Quartet No. 2 [From the Monkey Mountains] and No. 3) and Krása (String Quartet) on London 440-853 2

Karel Berman sings Haas’s Four Songs to the Text of Chinese Poetry (written for him) as well as his own Four Songs for Bass and Piano, and his Suite for Piano Solo on Channel Classics CCS 3191 (from a 1985 recorded performance)

Klein: Divertimento for woodwind octet; Krása: Three Songs for baritone, clarinet, viola, and cello on poems of Rimbaud; Haas: Suite for oboe and piano; Klein: Piano Sonata; Krása: Five Songs, opus 4), Schulhoff: Concertino for flute, viola, and bass on Ars Musica AM 1104-2

Ullmann: Der Kaiser von Atlantis (London 440 854 2)

YouTube:

OSVALDO GOLIJOV

Falling Out of Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar7G0qqAfg0&t=283s (music and conversation with the composer)

PAVEL HAAS

 Study for String Orchestra

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxNSZ47DYA8 (with many photographs)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpJfAITucvw (with score)

String Quartet No. 2 (From the Monkey Mountains)

GIDEON KLEIN

String Trio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QTiDqITyNg (with score)

Piano Sonata

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk79HRXK3B4 (with score)

Duo for Violin and Cello

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO6suZrOMoE

HANS KRÁSA

Brundibar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgFUqh2ZDd8&t=39s (in German, no translation)

Passacaglia and Fugue for String Trio

Dance for string trio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ0ElDDvg7c

Overture for small orchestra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqg0jFyrenY

VIKTOR ULLMANN

Der Kaiser von Atlantis

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqg0jFyrenY (Montclair State Univ, no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEapgzDdr0s (Shepherd School of Music, Rice University)

  [There are many YouTube performances of the opera, from various countries; the Shepherd School performance is the only one that offers subtitles; it was performed and filmed [with green screen effects] during the COVID pandemic]