Song of Defiance They confronted the Nazis with the only weapon they had: their voices

Between 1943 and 1944, 150 prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Terezin performed Verdi's "Requiem" 16 times. In April 2002 Murry Sidlin, Resident Conductor of the Oregon Symphony, lead a performance of "Defiant Requiem" in Portland, Oregon -- a moving blend of Verdi' s masterpiece, images of Terezin, narratives from surviving members of the chorus and a stunning performance by the Oregon Symphony and Portland Opera Chorus.

Large Version

The story of Raphael Schaechter, the conductor who directed 16 performances of Verdi's Requiem in Terezin during 1943-44, inspired Murry Sidlin to  research and write the concert/drama, The Defiant Requiem: Verdi in Terezin..

Sidlin maintains that the Requiem saved thousands of Jews from insanity and from capitulation to the certainty of emotional and physical slavery.

As resident conductor of the Oregon Symphony, Sidlin was on the podium for the world premiere of this powerful work. Performances took place April 20 and 21 in the stark ambiance of Portlandıs Exposition Hall.

"Raphael Schaechter was like a crazed man on a mission," recalled a
Holocaust survivor who sang in his 150-voice choir at the nazis' showplace
concentration camp at Terezin. When brought there, the Bucharest-born
Schaechter, recognizing the power of music to lift up the spirits of the
downtrodden, used his skills to lead singing, to present operas and,
finally, to train 150 vocalists to sing Verdeıs Requiem. The charismatic
conductor provided hope by predicting that someday the Terezin singers would be performing this music in Prague, in freedom.

Despite the difficulties of teaching all the parts by rote from a single
score and of two deportations that decimated the ranks of his choir, he
continued to train new singers and to perform. One of the performances was attended by Adolph Eichmann and officials of the Red Cross.

Under Sidlinıs direction, The Defiant Requiem was beautifully sung by four outstanding soloists and the Portland Opera Chorus. It was accompanied by the Oregon Symphony. Verdi's dramatic music was introduced and interspersed with television clips of survivors, footage from a nazi propaganda film on Terezin, and live narration. Several of the movements began with an out-of-tune piano accompaniment, suggesting the reality of the Terezin performances, then continued with full orchestra, the ideal envisioned by the singers.

Although the Requiem successfully bolstered the spirits of singers and
listeners at Terezin, the tragic reality of their final doom was felt. Of
the 140,000 inmates, including 17,000 children, most did not survive.
The Defiant Requiem was the centerpiece of Portland's Human Dignity Month.

During the weeks preceding the Requiem performance, a variety of activities included lectures and panel discussions at Pacific University, Oregon State University, Portland State University, Reed College and Lewis and Clark College. There were chamber music concerts featuring music by Terezin composers, films and a production of Hans Krasa's children's opera Brundibar at the Jewish Community Center.

Schaechter's niece Katia Manor flew in from Jerusalem, Dr. Jan Munk,
director of the Terezin Memorial, came from the Czech Republic, and Edgar Krasa, who roomed with Schaechter in Terezin, traveled from Boston. Defiant Requiem was taped by the Public Broadcasting System for airing next fall. On June 14 and 15, it will be performed in New York and the Jerusalem Symphony will present the work on a future date.

We have in San Diego a survivor of Terezin, Eve Gerstle, who sang in
Schaechterıs choir.

With Murry Sidlin returning to conduct San Diego's four-concert Light Bulb Series next season, perhaps we can garner sufficient community support to have Sidlin present in San Diego this remarkable tribute to human courage, Defiant Requiem: Verdi in Terezin.

Edgar Krasa, with Marianka May, holds the Verdi score that conductor Murry Sidlin, at left, took to the site of their suffering

On August 27, PBS will telecast an inspiring and heartbreaking program about a chorus of Jews in a German concentration camp singing a Catholic Requiem Mass. It is a World War II memory as significant as the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto.

There is a touch of schizophrenia in the ancient Latin text of the Requiem Mass - perhaps the text that has been set to music more often than any other in history. In its original form, dating from the early centuries of Christianity, the Requiem embodies a message of peace and tranquility. Along with prayers for the dead ("eternal rest grant unto them, o Lord"), it contains a message of comfort for the survivors, an assurance that death is an illusion, that "vita mutatur, non tollitur" ("life is changed, not taken away").

Then, in the 13th century, a Franciscan friar named Thomas of Celano wrote a poem called the "Dies Irae" ("Day of Wrath") portraying in vivid terms the end of the world, the sounding of the last trumpet, the rising of the dead from their graves and the Last Judgment. It is still compelling reading and a key to understanding the medieval mind. A text and a good translation of it can be found on the Internet at http://www.globalserve.net/~bumblebee/diesirae.html

Although it differs strikingly in tone from the original Requiem text, it does mention the resurrection of the dead and it was inserted into the Requiem, where it added a note of pure terror to the basic note of peace and comfort. It is no longer used in Catholic funeral services, and Gabriel Faure left it out in his setting of the Requiem, but many composers, most notably Berlioz and Verdi, found in it an opportunity for some spectacular music. Verdi, in particular, who was a strong believer (though an anticlerical) and genuinely afraid of death and punishment, treated it with some of the most dramatic writing of his career.

Both the comfort and the terror in Verdi's Requiem had a special meaning for the people confined in the Terezin (in German, Theresienstadt) concentration camp, an anomalous institution used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes - a showcase. of the "humane" conditions in concentration camps, where visiting dignitaries, including a Red Cross committee, were brought on carefully guided tours. People in Terezin were allowed a more civilized existence than those in Auschwitz or Buchenwald; they had cultural activities, including the writing of poetry, visual arts and music. An inmate, a conductor named Rafael Schachter, organized a 150-voice choir, which (among other works) performed Verdi's Requiem 16 times in 1943-4. Actually, he organized three choirs in that period, because his choir members kept getting shipped off to the death camps.

There was opposition to his work among the Jewish prisoners, rabbis and Zionists, who did not want to see Jews singing a Catholic composition and accused him of "apologizing for being Jewish." His response, based on the violent music of Verdi's Dies Irae, was, "We can sing to them what we cannot say to them." Particularly meaningful to prisoners was a passage known as the "Libera me" ("Set me free").

The Nazis, unaware of the deeper meanings of the performance, did not interfere. Adolph Eichmann, attending one performance, joked that the Jews were "singing their own requiem."

The PBS program, titled "Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin," was taped in April, 2002. Directed by Phil Byrd, the program was written and conducted by Murry Sidlin, who was the resident conductor of the Oregon Symphony Orchestra (he is now the dean of the Benjamin A. Rome School of Music at Catholic University of America). It is a tribute to Schachter and his colleagues, nearly all of whom were ultimately murdered by the Nazis.

A combination of documentary and performance - with English subtitles throughout - it describes conditions at Terezin, with several survivors from that chorus recalling their experiences 60 years ago. One chorus member, Marianka Zadikow-May, recalls, "It's very difficult to sing when you're hungry; it's very difficult to concentrate."

The program reinforces the survivor testimony with film clips from Nazi documentaries, as well as actors who portray Schachter and his adversaries among the Terezin inmates. And it also presents Verdi's Requiem, with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, the Portland Opera Chorus and four excellent soloists, with dramatic episodes and commentaries between the music's movements. Sometimes the instrumentation is reduced to a single piano, which is all Schachter had.

"I want to make Schachter famous, as the hero he was," is Sidlin's explanation of why he devised this program. He certainly does that, and with the context he supplies, he makes it the most powerful Verdi Requiem I have ever experienced.

"In the Dies Irae, says the actor portraying Schachter, "we can sing to them of the day of wrath that is prophesied, how great the trembling will be when the Judge comes, by whose sentence all will be bound, that the trumpets shall summon them before the throne to be accountable, and nothing - nothing - shall remain un-avenged." He told the chorus, "There's the door for those who are afraid or feel that presenting the Verdi is wrong of us." Nobody left.

Soloists in the performance include soprano Lisa Wilson, tenor Philip Webb, mezzo-soprano Eleni Matos and bass baritone Gary Relyea. Also appearing in the broadcast with camp survivors Krasa and Zadikow-May is Eva Rocek, another singer in Schachter's
chorus.

The story of music at Terezin has been told in a lightly fictionalized treatment, "The Terezin Requiem" by Josef Bor. Of related interest is "Playing for Time," by Fania Fenelon, a memoir about an orchestra at Auschwitz.

Conductor Murry Sidlin was browsing through a table of used, tattered books when he discovered a slender book about the Terezin concentration camp that told an unusual musical story. According to the book, Terezin held a disproportionate number of artists and intellectuals. One inmate — Rafael Schachter of Prague — organized a chorus of prisoners. This chorus performed Giuseppe Verdi's Requiem 16 times between 1943 and 1944 — a feat which, for Sidlin, struck a particularly poignant chord.

After three years of research, trips to Israel, Boston, the Czech Republic and New York, interviews with survivors and rehearsals with the Oregon Symphony and the chorus of the Portland Opera, Sidlin has produced "Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin," part-concert, part-documentary, that will be airing on 150 different public broadcasting stations across the country on August 27.

"It's a concert drama," Sidlin said in an interview with the Forward. "It tells the story of Schachter... as he taught [the requiem], produced it, conducted it." In the 90-minute film, Sidlin recreates the chorus using members of the Portland Opera company and intersperses pieces of the history of Terezin in between the movements of the Verdi masterpiece.

Little had been written about the Terezin chorus when Sidlin began investigating, and he had a tough time finding survivors who remembered Schachter. He posted a message on a survivor's Web site asking for anyone who remembered the Terezin chorus. His first breakthrough came when Schachter's niece, who was living in Israel, contacted him. Her mother told Sidlin about a survivor, Edgar Krasa, who was living in the Boston area. Sidlin phoned Krasa and asked him if the name Rafael Schachter meant anything to him.

Krasa then proceeded to open up an entire world to Sidlin. He told Sidlin about the shouting matches between Schachter and the Council of Jewish Elders, the nominal Jewish governing body at the concentration camp, whose members were convinced that Schachter's chorus could only lead to trouble. After the council instructed Schachter to disband his group, Schachter assembled the chorus together. "He said, 'My intentions are to go ahead with this,'" Sidlin said, recounting the story told to him by Krasa. But Schachter offered to let chorus members opt out of the chorus if they wished. All 150 stayed.

Sidlin also spoke to Edith Steiner-Kraus, a well-known pianist who was interned in Terezin. She did not participate in the chorus but had listened to it. "I asked her when I sat with her, 'Tell me about the quality of the chorus,'" Sidlin said. "Her response was: 'You would have been proud of this chorus in any urban setting.'"

Sidlin would know. The 63-year-old dean of music at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., is also an accomplished conductor and musician. He was born in Baltimore to two Eastern European immigrants, who escaped Europe before the Holocaust — his father from Riga, and his mother from Minsk. Nevertheless, Sidlin's paternal grandmother was killed in the Holocaust. "My three sisters and I learned as much as we could" about the Holocaust, he said.

At age 6, he began studying the piano, learned trumpet at age 8, and by the time he was 12, was convinced that he would be a conductor. After attending the Peabody Conservatory and Cornell University he began his career as a professional conductor. Last year, he was named to his position at Catholic University, and Catholic University Press is publishing the book by Sidlin about Schachter.

The irony of Schachter's choice of a Catholic requiem in a Jewish ghetto was not lost on Sidlin, though he was puzzled by it at first. "Of all the things that they could be doing, why do a work so steeped in Catholic liturgy?" Sidlin asked. "I just tucked it away and wondered about this." And then it dawned on him: "It really was one of those bolt-upright-at-4 a.m. revelations: What if [Schachter] was using the text of the mass to symbolize a strong message [to the Nazis]?"

Although Verdi's lyrics were in Latin, they were the kinds of words prisoners couldn't ever say to their captors. "What Schachter was saying was, 'Sing to them what we cannot say to them,'" Sidlin said. "He said it out loud—that's one of the few quotes we have of him."

Schachter himself was finally deported from Terezin to Auschwitz in the fall of 1944. According to one account, Schachter could be seen heading toward the gas chambers with four other musicians who were all interned at Terezin: Gideon Klein, Victor Ullmann, Peter Haas and Hans Krasa (no relation to Edgar.)

Sidlin's mission is, in many ways, to change the way people listen to Verdi. "I would like everyone — whenever they hear the Verdi requiem in the future — to know" about "the royal sons of bitches who tried to wreck [Jewish] lives and [how Jewish inmates] stayed above it. It's a revelation about the requiem that Schachter provided."

top