‘We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say’
How musician Rafael Schachter led Terezin prisoners in performing Verdi’s mass for the dead, giving them solace and courage from its rebellious texts
June 25, 2013
PRAGUE (AP) — In a concentration camp designed by the Nazis to eradicate Jewish cultural life, among 120,000 of its inmates who would ultimately be murdered, a rising young musician named Rafael Schachter managed one of the miracles of the Holocaust.
Assembling hundreds of sick and hungry singers, he led them in 16 performances learned by rote from a single smuggled score of one of the most monumental and moving works of religious music — Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass.
“These crazy Jews are singing their own requiem,” Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the genocide, was heard to remark after attending one of the performances at the unique and surreal camp of Terezin, in what was then German-occupied Czechoslovakia.
But for Schachter and his fellow prisoners, this Mass for the dead became not an act of meek submission to their fate, but rather one of defiance of their captors, as well as a therapy against the enveloping terror.
For Schachter would tell the singers: “Whatever we do here is just a rehearsal for when we will play Verdi in a grand concert hall in Prague in freedom.”
Assembling hundreds of sick and hungry singers, he led them in 16 performances learned by rote from a single smuggled score of one of the most monumental and moving works of religious music — Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem Mass.
“These crazy Jews are singing their own requiem,” Adolf Eichmann, a principal architect of the genocide, was heard to remark after attending one of the performances at the unique and surreal camp of Terezin, in what was then German-occupied Czechoslovakia.
But for Schachter and his fellow prisoners, this Mass for the dead became not an act of meek submission to their fate, but rather one of defiance of their captors, as well as a therapy against the enveloping terror.
For Schachter would tell the singers: “Whatever we do here is just a rehearsal for when we will play Verdi in a grand concert hall in Prague in freedom.”
‘Whatever we do here is just a rehearsal for when we will play Verdi in a grand concert hall in Prague in freedom’...............(CONTINUED)
FULL ARTICLE HERE: 'We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say' | The Times of Israel
No comments:
Post a Comment
Feel free to comment but keep it civil or your comment will be exiled to the voids of cyberspace.