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Brundibar – a Concert at the Oświęcim Music School
An event in the concert hall at the Karol Szymanowski State Music School First Degree in Oświęcim featured a performance of Brundibar, an opera for children by Hans Krasa, a Czech composer of Jewish origins, with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister.
A choir of students from the Oświęcim music school performed the vocal parts. The young performers were accompanied by the French chamber orchestra Ensemble Voix Étouffées under the baton of Amaury du Closel. The concert also included Władysław Szpilman’s Life of Machines, Erwin Schulhoff’s Jazz Etudes, and several Kurt Weill songs.
Brundibar is the story of children who go onto the street and perform a modest artistic repertoire to earn money to buy milk for their sick mother. They represent a threat to the organ grinder Brundibar, who decides to eliminate the competition. Krasa and Hoffmeister finished the opera in 1938 but the first rehearsals, at a Jewish orphanage in Prague, began only in 1941. By the time of the premiere in the winter of 1942, the composer and stage designer Frantisek Zelenka were both in the Theresienstadt ghetto.
The Germans deported almost all the children from the Prague orphanage to the ghetto by the summer of 1943. Krasa reconstructed his score from memory and adapted it for the instruments available in the sealed ghetto. The opera had its Theresienstadt premiere on September 23, 1943. Zelenka again designed the scenery and Camilla Rosenbaum choreographed. The piece was played 55 times in the ghetto. The majority of the performers were subsequently murdered in Auschwitz and the composer also died in the camp.
The concert was the third cooperative project by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Karol Szymanowski State Music School First Degree, and the Forum Voix Étouffées. The stage decorations, costumes, and video projection were prepared by students of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d'Art — Olivier de Serres of Paris. The project was also financed by the European Union through the Europe for Citizens Program. Brundibar will also be performed in the capital of France in late May.
The Ensemble Voix Étouffées is a chamber orchestra directed by Amaury du Closel, and is part of Forum Voix Étouffées, an organization that has been involved for years in commemorating the work of composers persecuted by the Nazi regime from 1933-1945. Together with a team of international experts, they encourage professional musicians and students of music academies to enlarge the concert programs to include the works of people the Third Reich tried to silence forever. The FVE Project also features seminars and lectures presenting the historical context of the persecution of artists in Nazi Germany.
The concert at the music school was preceded by an educational session on Theresienstadt: From the Ghetto to the Family Camp in Birkenau, organized by the International Center for Education on Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
