This haunting concert is part of our Reclaimed Voices Series and takes a  look at the Jewish  opera composers that time has forgotten.  Before 1933, some of Central Europe’s most prominent composers were Jewish. The systematic eradication of  Jewish composers, along with the Nazis’ branding of modernist music as “Degenerate,”  forever altered the cultural landscape.

Some Jewish composers, including Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krasa, Erwin Schulhoff, and Pavel Haas, would perish in the Holocaust. The more fortunate ones (Ernst Toch, Hans Gál, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Egon Wellesz and Erich Wolfgang Korngold) would ply their craft in their newly adopted homelands. For all of these composers, whether they survived the war or not, the post-war years inflicted a further indignity; there was no one to champion their music after the war.

Forbidden Opera features the works of the Jewish opera composers Egon Wellesz, Hans Gal, Franz Schreker, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Jaromir Weinberger and Kurt Weill.  We will tell their stories through four singers, a narrator and a small chamber ensemble. The show will also feature video projections of works by Jewish painters of the time.

This  concert was inspired by Michael Haas’s book Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers banned by the Nazis.