How music brought joy in humanity’s darkest days

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy hears about a Galway festival that will put the focus on music from captivity

Watching the news these days isn’t exactly good for the soul, given the endless accounts of atrocities and inhuman behaviour coming from all parts of the world, especially the Middle East.

But even in the most horrendous of circumstances people are capable of great resilience and acts of kindness. And resilience and decency will be among the themes explored next weekend, January 22-24, when Music for Galway hosts its annual Midwinter Festival.

The theme of this year’s festival is Captive – Music from the Abyss and it mixes Oscar Wilde’s moving poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, with songs from a Nazi concentration camp, while throwing in an extra-terrestrial alien just for good measure. There’s also a talk from one of the world’s leading experts in human rights law, William Schabas, professor emeritus at NUIG, now at the University of Middlesex in England.

Captive – Music from the Abyss is the brainchild of Music for Galway’s Artistic Director, Finghin Collins. The idea was planted when he attended a concert in at Dublin’s Royal Hospital in Kilmainham in 2011, part of the Festival of Music in Great Irish Houses.

Irish Soprano Lynda Lee sang a series of songs from the Nazis’ ‘model ghetto’, Theresienstadt, at that event and “it moved me”, Finghin says simply. He explains that many of the songs would have been sung to children in the camp at this fortress town some 30 miles from Prague, where thousands met their death.

The Theresienstadt/Terezín ghetto, set up in 1941 by the Nazis was cited in their propaganda as ‘The Fuhrer’s gift to the Jews’. It was some gift. In 1942, half of its 32,000 population died from disease and malnourishment as it served as a holding station for camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the gas chambers killed millions.

But, despite massive overcrowding, appalling sanitation, and food shortages, it had its own orchestra, theatre group and soccer teams.

As much as possible, the adults in Theresienstadt – many of them from an artistic background – tried to make life bearable for the younger residents. Among those who shone in this regard was Ilse Weber, whose songs will feature in the Music for Galway festival. Ilse, her husband and young son were sent to the camp in 1942. There the poet and musician worked as a night nurse in the children’s infirmary and did everything in her power for the young patients in a place where medicine was forbidden. She wrote around 60 poems during her imprisonment and set many of them to music.

At the 2011 concert in Kilmainham, Lynda Lee performed some of the lullabies Ilse sang to the children of Theresienstadt, as well as songs written by other composers in the camp.

Lynda will also sing at Captive – Music from the Abyss, and she and Finghin have selected material specifically for her performance next Saturday night, when she will be accompanied by Finghin and members of the US-based chamber ensemble, Decoda. While much of the music at Theresienstadt was composed under duress for Nazi propaganda, it also offered comfort to prisoners and the recital will reflect that.

As Finghin built a festival around that music, he decided to broaden its remit and have it include literature, theatre and film.  This marks a new departure for Music for Galway’s Midwinter Festival, which has been a fixture on Galway’s arts scene for several years.

Other elements in this year’s programme include the screening of a  39-minute Oscar-nominated film The Lady in No 6, about Alice Herz-Sommer, who was 110 when she died in 2014 – the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust. It will be screened on Saturday night alongside the programme of Music from Theresienstadt/Terezín.

The Lady in No 6 was made when Alice was 109 and it explored her extraordinary life. A talented concert pianist, from Prague, she was sent to Theresienstadt in 1943 with her husband and small son.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.