Festival Honors Composer Victims of the Holocaust

How would classical music have evolved in the last century had not the Holocaust robbed us of some of our greatest composers? That is but one of the questions that preoccupied Susan Waterfall, cofounder of the Mendocino Music Festival, as she prepared for the festival’s July 16 evening program, They Left a Light: Masterpieces From Nazi Prison Camps. Performed by Waterfall (piano and narration), Jeremy Cohen (violin), Burke Schuchmann (cello), Emily

Onderdonk (viola), Art Austin (clarinet), Erin Neff (mezzo-soprano/soprano), and Igor Vieira (baritone), the concert will feature Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time along with works written in the Nazi’s “model concentration camp,” Terezín.

Waterfall, who cofounded the festival with her husband, Allan Pollack, 23 years ago, explained by phone that she chose the title They Left a Light because the “light” is “the certainty that the creations of the incarcerated artists, their loves, and their lives were more significant than the enormous acts of evil perpetrated against them.”

Last year, Waterfall produced a program on the artistic creations of German Jews such as Weill, Brecht, and Eisler who escaped Nazi persecution in Europe and dispersed the “Weimar musical consciousness” around the world. Many fled to Hollywood, where they worked in the film industry. This year she turns her sights on those who never got out, as well as the music of a devout Catholic (Messiaen) who wrote one of his great early works while incarcerated in a World War II prison camp.

“There’s always this feeling of dissatisfaction with music in the 20th century,” says Waterfall. “The Holocaust stopped maybe 50 percent of the natural evolution of music from the ’20s. If you look at Bartók and Janáček, two composers who were mining the Eastern European folk tradition and developing new techniques to express this profound music that conveys so much human history and emotion, you don’t find it continuing, because the natural heirs of that tradition, such as Gideon Klein and Hans Krasa, all died.”

Inside the festival’s acoustically engineered tent, which is perched by the coast on the picturesque headlands of Mendocino, attendees at the evening of chamber music will discover projections of photographs of the camps, the composers, and original performers, as well as translations of the songs performed in the second half. Some of the music will be familiar to those who have heard mezzo-soprano Anne Sophie Von Otter’s award-winning recording Terezín | Theresienstadt or other recordings of music written in Terezín by artists who perished.

“That human beings, even under the most terrible circumstances of starvation, filth, and terror of death, can still connect with their artistic urge is so extraordinary,” says Waterfall. “Even the audiences in the concentration camp were begging people to play, because it enabled them to experience their full humanity. ‘Please play for us,’ they cried, ‘so we won’t feel like we’re just dying like cattle.’ For both performers and composers, making music was an active resistance amidst the catastrophe of Nazi darkness. It enabled them to connect to the highest aspirations and goals of European tradition and culture.”