Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism

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The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is presenting a special series of concerts titled, “Music in the Holocaust, Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism,” featuring music composed and performed by Jewish prisoners in Nazi territories during World War II. Three concerts will feature an introduction by a noted scholar in the field placing the music within the context of the larger social, historical and political background out of which it developed.

These events are made possible through the generosity of a grant from the Bertha Effron Fund of the Community Foundation of the Hudson Valley. 

The first concert in the series “Coercion, Collusion, and Creativity: Music of the Terezin Ghetto and the Central European Experience” takes place on Saturday, February 23, and will focus on music composed and performed in the Theresienstadt (Terezin) Ghetto, a ghetto/concentration transit camp that served as a showplace in which leading European-Jewish composers and performers were interned. Theresienstadt waspart of a vast Nazi propaganda ploy for international investigative bodies, such as the Red Cross, which provided the appearance of autonomy and privileged treatment of Jewish prisoners in the “model settlement.”  

The performance component of the evening will feature selections from the work of Victor Ullmann, Gideon Klein, and Ilse Weber, performed by  soprano Charlotte Dobbs with Renana Gutman, piano, and Liam Wood, guitar. Erwin Schulhoff’s violin sonata will be performed by Helena Baillie and Michael Bukhman. Leoš Janáček's piano sonata 1.x.1905 will be performed by Michael Bukhman.

The lecture by Amy Loewenhaar-Blauweiss will discuss the unique nature of the Theresienstadt Ghetto, the developments that led to the creation of a Jewish musical and cultural elite in interwar Central Europe, and the legacy of the music composed and produced in this ghetto.