Composers with miserable lives

[emrysmerlin]

I know that a lot of composers had pretty harsh lives, but are there any particular ones whose story you would want to share?

[49410enrique]

not an exhaustive survey but life for these people was unbelievably cruel....

Kasriel Broydo was an author and director of theater revues and concerts in the Vilno ghetto. He was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to a Latvian concentration camp. He was drowned by the Germans in the Baltic Sea in 1945.



Mordecai Gebirtig was born in 1877 in Kraków. He worked all his life as a carpenter in Kraków, and became one of the most popular folk balladeers in Poland. He was deported to the Kraków Ghetto under the German occupation and was killed there in 1942. His poem, "Our Town Is Burning," written in 1938, became one of the most popular songs in the ghettos and concentration camps.

 

Hirsh Glick was born in 1920 in Vilna. When the ghetto was liquidated, he was sent to a concentration camp in Estonia. He escaped from the camp and joined the partisans, and died while fighting as a partisan. His partisan song, "Zog Nit Kainmol," (Song of the Partisans) became the hymn of the underground organization.

Pavel Haas was born in Brno in 1899. Haas belonged to a group of Czech avant-garde composers. After the German occupation, he spent three years in Theresienstadt. He died in Auschwitz October 17, 1944.

 

Peysakh Kaplan was a writer, composer and music critic. He wrote the words to a song commemorating the death of 5,000 Jews who were shot to death on the Sabbath of July 12, 1942. The women whose husbands were killed that day were called "shabesdike," or the Sabbath Ones. He died in the Bialystok ghetto in 1943.

Hans Krasa was a prisoner of the Terezín ghetto. He wrote the children's opera Brundibar, The Organ Grinder before the war in 1938. It was used in the Nazi propaganda film "The Führer gives the Jews a City," filmed in Terezín in 1944. It was performed in Israel in 1988.

hisPassacaglia and Fugue for String Trio was his last work, before being killed in Auschwitz.

Shmerke Kaczerginski was a poet and ghetto partisan fighter of the Vilna ghetto. He collected and preserved many of the ghetto songs, which have survived today.


Gideon Klein was a composer who was a prisoner of the Terezín ghetto.

Aleksander Kulisiewicz was born in Kraków in 1918; he aspired to become a musician, but ended as a prisoner of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Even while in the camp, he continued to collect, compose, and perform songs illegally. When an informant told the Gestapo, they injected him three different times with diphtheria. Each time, fellow prisoners managed to smuggle in the antidote. Though his voiced was damaged from the repeated dosages of the disease, his collected songs were recorded to preserve the memory of people who were joined together by having been victims of the Nazi camp.

Olivier Messian wrote Quartet for the End of Time, a 49-minute instrumental for the piano, clarinet, violin, and violoncello. These instruments are an unusual combination, chosen because they were the only ones available in the Silesian internment camp where Olivier was a prisoner of war. The French composer wrote, "Never had I been listened to with such attention and understanding."

Leyb Rozental wrote a number of plays and several songs in the ghettos. He was drowned by the Germans in the Baltic Sea near Könisburg in January 1945.

Martin Rosenberg was a professional conductor before the war; he was arrested in 1939 and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was tortured. While at the camp he organized a secret chorus of Jewish prisoners. They would perform for other prisoners in some of the less guarded barracks for political prisoners. Rosenberg and the chorus were deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where they all died in the gas chambers. Before he died, Rosenberg wrote a parody of an old Yiddish folk song called Tsen Brider (Ten Brothers). In the parody, all ten brothers are murdered in the gas chambers, one by one.

Ervin Schulhoff came from a Prague German-Jewish family. After serving in World War I, Schulhoff spent four years in Germany where he was influenced by the Dada movement. His jazz music was an attempt to distance himself from bourgeois tastes. Schulhoff was arrested and died of tuberculosis after about a one-year imprisonment in the Wulzburg camp.
 

Hannah Sennesh was a Hungarian partisan who was captured and executed by the Nazis in Budapest. She wrote the famous poem, "Eli, Eli," which was later turned into music. Her poem states, "May these things never cease: the sand and the sea, the sound of the water, the thunder in heaven, the prayer of Man."

Victor Ullman was deported to the Terezín ghetto on September 8, 1942. While there, he composed twenty-two works, as well as a libretto for an opera about Joan of Arc. His most famous piece was the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Der Tod dankt ab (The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Abdicated). Just before its premiere, most of the musicians of the ghetto were deported to Auschwitz. He was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in October of 1944. Several years after the war, the opera was finally performed.

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[49410enrique]

szpilman didn't have it so great either. hard to imagine, like w many of the others in the previous post, how they could compose things of such beauty in the midst of such misery

it's my understanding he did this while in the ghetto

[thesixthsensemusic]

szpilman didn't have it so great either. hard to imagine, like w many of the others in the previous post, how they could compose things of such beauty in the midst of such misery

it's my understanding he did this while in the ghetto

First of all, thanks for posting that video, I did not know about Szpilman or his concertino at all but it's amazingly beautiful, I like it as much as any Rachmaninoff concerto for that matter...

Actually it's not very hard to believe. Music is possibly the best self-therapy that one can use to deal with the messed up side of your life. From classical music to the blues, and from negro spirituals sung by slaves on plantations to Bryan Adams, music has always been a way to put things into perspective, however difficult and harsh your situation is, and reflect on them. Humour is another one, and combined these two can help people even to overcome fear of death.

[redrobin62]

I've recently acquired music from Decca of music from composers that were banned during the Third Reich. These include music by Rathaus, Hindemith and Max von Schreker. I don't know if those composers suffered, but their music sure is worth exploring.