The Washington Post’s María Luisa Paúl reports on the work of Leo Geyer, a British composer and conductor who has spent the past eight years reconstructing music created by prisoners at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland. On a visit to the site in 2015, Geyer was shown a collection of scores by members of the orchestras organized at the camp.
“Prisoners at Auschwitz and other camps were made to march to forced-labor sites or gas chambers to the beat of the orchestras’ music,” Paúl writes. “The sound would drown out the noise of executions, according to ORT, the global Jewish education network. Nazi officers also assembled prisoner orchestras for their own entertainment.”
The Auschwitz collection had “fragments of different songs, each with ‘varying levels of completion,’ Geyer said. Some were unfinished. Much of the sheet music had burn marks along the edges. Most scores were incomplete.”
Geyer was especially taken by “Futile Regrets,” a piece composed in secret by an unknown composer, which he reconstructed as the centerpiece of a Nov. 27 concert organized by his publisher to raise funds for an opera-ballet on the camp’s orchestras.
“I’m not Jewish, Romani, Polish, Russian or disabled, or descended from any person from Auschwitz, but I do stand by those who are persecuted for no reason other than who they are,” Geyer told Paúl. “And I hope to live in a world where no evil could rise again.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/11/29/sheet-music-holocaust-auschwitz-composer/
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