The Forbidden Sounds of the Holocaust

I had never expected to have a college course that would challenge me intellectually and open my eyes to a whole new way to look at one of the most horrific events in human history. Holocaust music researcher and Ball State professor, Dr. Galit Gertsenzon's honors colloquium "Forbidden Sounds: Music of the Holocaust" did just that, and I was so intrigued by the material that I took it twice. The thoughts below are my musings at the end of my first time through the course.

There is a kind of beauty that music brings to this world that no one seems to be able to stop. Even in the face of the most tragic and horrific events of the 20th century, there was still music being made. The fact that people living in these situations still had enough of their humanity to create such beautiful, if not always pleasant to listen to, art is an incredible testimony to the strength and endurance of the human spirit and the power of music and the arts in maintaining it. As a theatre educator, I firmly believe that the fine arts are the things that remind us that we are human. There’s a reason the arts are considered part of the humanities. They touch us in ways that science and math don’t usually (no offense meant toward those who work in STEM).

Throughout this course, I was particularly moved by the operas and the folk songs we studied. I would have loved to have really dug into the story of Kaiser von Atlantis or

learned more about the camp choirs. These stories were dear to my heart because they touched on the particular way that I enjoy telling stories and making music. Stories that have been silenced by history are always intriguing to me as I wonder what the world might look like if those stories had been told. My biggest confusion regarding the operas we studied was that Brundibar was never banned or even temporarily shut down at Theresienstadt due to its blatant political overtones, but Kaiser von Atlantis was stopped while still in the rehearsal process.

Characters from a modern production of "Der Kaiser von Atlantis" by Victor Ullmann

There were a greater number of more overt political messages and accusations in Kaiser von Atlantis than Brundibar, but I have a feeling that the use of children in Brudibar was the thing that saved it from cancellation. Children playing the characters tend to make a story that may not actually be as innocent as it seems feel like less of a threat.

This class also reminded me of my love of classical music! However, despite our many encounters with it, the class has not changed my opinion of atonal music. I think I might understand it a bit better now though. Atonal music was probably a reaction to the environment in which it was created. We have no way to actually prove that, but after studying this music in the context of its history I cannot seem to separate the music from the time in which it began. That is what I think the power of this course is. There is a power in knowing the context in which art was created. No one can look at Wagner the same way again after learning about his anti-Semitic beliefs, and the music of Pavel Haas is changed forever when you realize it was written in a concentration camp. Context is quite literally everything.

Although I am not a historian by any stretch of the imagination, I am fascinated by history. I am always curious to learn about the chain of events in history, trying to identify recurring patterns or themes that we can learn from to potentially avoid those same pitfalls as we create our own histories. After studying the music of the Holocaust,

The original cast of "Brundibar" at Theresiendstadt

both what was banned and what was composed during and in response to this tragedy, I no longer think of the Holocaust merely as the genocide of an often overlooked people but rather as a spiritual battle between those that would break the Jewish people’s humanity and the incredibly strong spirit of the Jewish people. The music that was created, although sometimes melancholy, angry, or even filled with grief, proves to me that although the Nazis managed to kill so many, many people, they did not win. They did not win in their fight for a perfect race, one that eliminates those that were not up to “their standards,” and they will not win as long as the human spirit is willing to fight.

There are thousands of ways to examine history, but I think that music is a particularly powerful tool. The study of history through the examination of theatre works in much the same way. I took Dr. Michael O’Hara’s colloquium entitled “Theatre, Sex, Politics, and Religion: A Class You Can’t Talk About at the Dinner Table” in the spring of the previous school year, and we used theatre to study humanity, from the Ancient Greeks to contemporary times. I loved that course because I learned, in a very intimate way, that theatre is a duality. It is both a reflection to us, the contemporary readers, of the society that created it, as well as a mirror, to the society that created it, showing them what might be a problem in their community.

“Forbidden Sounds: Music of the Holocaust” was a very similar experience, and as an arts educator, that makes sense to me. Art is not created in a vacuum. It is created by people living through any particular part of history at any given time. It reflects the artist and their thoughts and feelings about their life and their world, even if the art is not explicitly about the events happening at the time. A study of the history of any society would be remiss to not also pay attention to the art created throughout its history, because it reveals not only the values and thoughts of the mainstream culture but also those of the subcultures that emerge during times of change or political unrest.

A sketch of Ilse Weber, a composer who wrote lullabies for the children of Theresienstadt.

Our concert in May 2020 was not held in person due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, but we all recorded our work here.