The horrors of the Holocaust are well documented, but one aspect that is often overlooked is the role of music.
A collection of musical scores discovered in Auschwitz will be played for the first time next week after being painstakingly restored by a composer.
Leo Geyer, 31, who is also a conductor, came across the collection of musical manuscripts by accident during a visit to Auschwitz in 2015. He was visiting the former Nazi concentration camp after being commissioned to compose a musical score in memory of Martin Gilbert. , the British historian and Holocaust expert who died earlier that year.
While there, he met with an archivist at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and memorial, who said they had remnants of musical scores arranged and performed by camp orchestras. Geyer was surprised to learn that something like this had gone largely unnoticed for nearly 80 years.
A month later, Geyer returned to Poland to inspect the results. He said the music had been mostly destroyed and what remains is incomplete.
Geyer, who is doing a PhD in music and composition at Oxford University, was determined to recreate the pieces and bring them to life. He has done extensive research on Auschwitz witnesses and the history of music in the camps.
He told us that most concentration camps had some form of orchestra made up of prisoners who played whatever instruments were available to them.
Orchestras sometimes played for other prisoners in secret. Many people were very grateful for the music they heard, it gave them some sense of normalcy in an otherwise unimaginable place – a crack of daylight in the darkness.
There were also occasions when music was used to get up. A lot of the musicians started to rebel with what we call musical cryptograms, which is where you have messages in some way in the music.
Four of the restored pieces will be performed by Constella Music, Geyer’s creative powerhouse whose work spans opera, dance, film and concert music, at Sadler’s Wells.
It will be played as it might have been at that time, with accordions and saxophones and no woodwind instruments.
We are holding this event to raise awareness and funds so that we can finish the rest of the work and present the full series so people can hear this music all over the world.
the mail Auschwitz musical scores restored after 80 years appeared first NewsGPT.ai.
Español de Venezuela 
English 