Nash Ensemble: TerezínTheresienstadt
WIGMORE HALL, LONDON
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When the Nazis turned the Czech fortress at Terezín into a concentration camp for Jews, they had not planned it to be a cultural haven, but that’s what it turned into. The inhabitants seized on the freedom their gaolers gave them to create and stage their own events – even if this meant, in the words of a young Czech actress who survived, singing and dancing under the gallows.
Hundreds of selected victims were taken by train every day to be gassed in Auschwitz. The Nazis made a propaganda film about Terezín in which they depicted its sick and starving residents as enjoying a life of civilised luxury. And the centrepiece of this exercise was a rousing children’s opera entitled Brundibár.
Thanks to Simon Broughton’s classic documentary, The Music of Terezín, we can still see images from that Nazi film. In it, a fictional tyrant was played by a 14-year-old boy who was evidently a promising actor. But being very small for his age, he was one of the first to be chosen for gassing, when his age group was taken to Auschwitz a week later.
Last weekend, Broughton’s film was the springboard for a series of Terezín-related events at the Wigmore Hall in London, and the day was punctuated by moments of almost unbearable poignancy.
Much of the music written in Terezín perished with its composers, but enough has been preserved for us to realise that this defiant explosion of communal creativity was one of history’s most miraculous moments.
And to label Hans Krása, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein and the august Viktor Ullmann as “Terezín composers” is to belittle them: these were the pre-eminent voices of Czech music in the 1920s and 30s, and their abrupt disappearance left a gaping void in musical history. The presiding musical genius was the composer, conductor and critic Ullmann, whose reviews of the nightly prison camp concerts were as eruditely astringent as any in civilian life. To hear his music played and sung by the Nash Ensemble was to realise the greatness that was lost.
One quartet we heard had been premiered in a Terezín attic, but most powerful of all were the defiantly upbeat songs of Ilse Weber, who volunteered to die in the gas chamber, alongside her son and the sick children she had been caring for.
Broughton’s film was commissioned by the BBC and was accompanied on its release in 1993 by a major series of Terezín concerts. Thank goodness we have the Nash Ensemble to do the same now, because the new-look BBC and the new-look Arts Council would write off this music as a hopelessly elitist effusion by dead, middle-class white men.
MICHAEL CHURCH
Simon Broughton’s film ‘The Music of Terezín’ is streaming on holocaustmusic.org