Carnegie Hall

In his 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, author and philosopher Elie Wiesel spoke of the “mutilated dreams and visions” of Holocaust victims. The murder of more than 6 million Jews by the Nazis unfolded on a hideous scale, with victims from every social stratum: children and the elderly, shop owners and bank owners, artists and laborers, and countless more. The five composers highlighted in this article were vibrant musical voices—while their lives were lost, their music lives on.

Theresienstadt

One of the more despicable tools used by the Nazi propaganda machine was Theresienstadt. Located in the city of Terezín, just northwest of Prague, Theresienstadt was a ghetto and concentration camp. Nazi propaganda claimed the camp was a haven for Jews built by Hitler, but in reality it was a way station where prisoners were pressed into forced labor before being shipped to death camps. Hunger and disease also took its toll, with thousands dying in Theresienstadt.

Despite all odds, Theresienstadt was a thriving cultural center. Jewish artists painted, writers and professors gave lectures, musicians performed concerts, and children attended school. Almost all of these children perished in death camps. An October 1944 visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross became part of an elaborate Nazi hoax. Days before the visit, selected streets were cleaned, shops on those streets were filled with food, and prisoners in new clothes were strategically placed to give the impression that they were healthy and happy. In this surreal setting, the composers we are looking at continued to use their music to rise above the brutality of their situation.

Pavel Haas

Moravian composer Pavel Haas (1899–1944) was born in Brno and entered the Brno Conservatory after World War I, where he studied with Leoš Janáček between 1920 and 1922. Though Janáček made a tremendous impression on him, Haas had his own original voice, infusing his music with elements of Moravian folk song, Hebrew chant, and jazz rhythms. Because he was Jewish, his music was banned during the Nazi occupation, and he and his wife were not permitted to work. In 1941, he was sent to Theresienstadt, where he miraculously continued to compose. His Study for Strings, one of the works he wrote in the camp, was callously used in the Nazi propaganda film Theresienstadt, also known as Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives the Jews a City). In October 1944, after the completion of the film and the Red Cross visit, Haas was transferred to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

Gideon Klein

By the time Gideon Klein (1919–1945) was 19, he was a top piano and composition student in the leading Prague conservatories. But in 1940, he was expelled from all higher learning academies because he was Jewish and refused passage to London, where he had won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. Nevertheless, he continued to compose and perform. Using the pseudonym Karel Vránek, he gave small concerts in his home and performed in Prague’s avant-garde clubs. Klein’s music, before his 1941 deportation to Theresienstadt, was quite modernist, drawing on current styles, including the daring innovations of Arnold Schoenberg. Klein was energetic and active in the camp; he arranged and conducted concerts, played the piano, tutored children, and encouraged fellow composers Pavel Haas, Hans Krása, Sigmund Schul, and Viktor Ullmann to continue creating music. The music he composed in Theresienstadt is remarkable, including choral works, chamber music, and a brilliant piano sonata that roils with passion and inner turmoil. In 1945, he was transferred to Auschwitz and then a labor camp, where he died.

Hans Krása

Hans Krása’s (1899–1944) story is one of the most heartbreaking to come out of Theresienstadt. His unique musical voice was initially inspired by Alexander Zemlinsky (his teacher), Gustav Mahler (whose influence sharpened his talent for musical grotesquerie), and the early work of Schoenberg. Through the 1920s, he had a number of successes, including his Symphony for Small Orchestra, which was conducted by Serge Koussevitzky in Boston and New York. He is best remembered for his 1938 children’s opera Brundibár (Bumblebee). He was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942.

Krása was a leader of the camp’s Freizeitgestaltung (Administration of Leisure Activities, another propaganda tool). After the score of Brundibár was smuggled into Theresienstadt, he arranged the opera for the artists in the camp, including child performers. Rehearsals were frequently interrupted as many of the children were deported to other concentration camps. The opera premiered in 1943 in Theresienstadt, where it was performed 55 times. The defeat of a tyrant in the opera likely resonated. The final scene from the production was included in the propaganda film Theresienstadt. After filming was completed, Krása and many of the children in the production were transferred to Auschwitz.

Viktor Ullmann

Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944) entered Vienna University to study law, but eventually transferred to Schoenberg’s composition seminar. He never completed his university studies, and through the 1920s continued his music career in various German theaters as a chorus master and conductor, all the while composing songs, chamber music, and piano works. His voice was eclectic and characterized by daring explorations of tonality.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, Ullmann worked as a freelance musician in Prague. His Schoenberg-Variationen and the opera Der Sturz des Antichrist (The Fall of the Antichrist) both captured the prestigious Emil Hertzka Memorial Prize, but negotiations to have the opera performed in Vienna and Prague failed. Despite successful premieres of his works in Prague throughout the 1930s, there were no public performances of his music after 1938.

Deported to Theresienstadt in 1942, Ullmann—along with Krása—led the Freizeitgestaltung, where he composed prolifically, aided his fellow composers, and wrote music criticism. He composed his opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis) while in the camp. This allegory about war and death and a dictator losing his powers proved too pointed for the Nazis, and was therefore not allowed to be performed. Ullmann was murdered in Auschwitz, along with Haas and Krása, in 1944.

Ilse Weber

Ilse Weber (1903–1944) was chiefly a poet, writer of children’s books, and a radio producer, although she did compose a few songs. She, along with her husband, were sent to Theresienstadt in 1942. In the camp, she worked as a nurse in the children’s ward. Weber followed her husband to Auschwitz in 1944. Her lullaby “Wiegala” might have been sung to the young of Theresienstadt as they began their final journey.

We mourn the millions of lives lost and the generations that never came to be. Yet, in the face of the Holocaust’s lies and horror, brave composers and other artists aspired to create what’s good and true, leaving a legacy of beauty.

In one of Ullmann’s final essays, he wrote, “It must be emphasized that Theresienstadt has served to enhance—not to impede—my musical activities, that by no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon, and that our endeavor with respect to the arts were commensurate with our will to live. And I am convinced that all those who, in life and in art, were fighting to force form upon resisting matter, will agree with me.”