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Joza Karas died; found and revived music composed by Jews in Nazi camp
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Jews being deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp, 1942.
Joza Karas, a violinist and music teacher who spent almost 40 years finding and reviving music composed by Jews in a Nazi concentration camp, has died.
Karas died of a heart ailment at age 82 in his Bloomfield, CT home, his family announced.
The musician had dedicated the last half of his life to tracking down, publishing, conducting, and recording works composed by Jews imprisoned in Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp in the Czech Republic.
In his book, “Music in Terezin, 1941-1945”, Karas wrote, “An idea struck me like lightning” upon reading that eight short compositions and fragments of music had been discovered and deposited in Prague’s Jewish Museum. He added that he was Christian, but “I felt attracted to the project because I am a Czech musician, and this was a subject dealing with the music of Czechoslovak Jews.”
Karas wrote that in 1970 in Prague, he met with a survivor of Theresienstadt who gave him six original musical manuscripts composed at the camp by her brother, Gideon Klein, and five scores by another inmate Hans Krása including his children’s opera “Brundibar” ("Bumblebee").
A performance of "Brundibar" was featured in an infamous Nazi propaganda film known as “The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews”, made to convince the world that Theresienstadt was a sort of Jewish arts village instead of a concentration camp. Soon after the film was made in 1944, Krása, along with almost all the child performers of "Brundibar", Gideon Klein, and other Jewish composers including Viktor Ullmann, were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps.
Karas, a violinist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and a teacher at University of Hartford for more than half a century, had managed to salvage some 50 musical works created or re-created at Theresienstadt.
The impact of his efforts to revive that music increased in the 1990s with Channel Classics' "Composers from Theresienstadt" series. Karas conducted one of the three recordings.
Interest has gained momentum in recent years. For “Brundibar”, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”) wrote a new English libretto, and an illustrated children's book “Brundibar” in 2003. The Vocal Arts Society in its 2008-2009 season will have presented two recitals of works by composers at Nazi camps: “Music from Theresienstadt” on April 30, 2009 at Strathmore Hall in Bethesda, MD, and The New York Festival of Song’s “Fugitives” concert at Kennedy Center in Washington, DC last November. The New York Festival of Song presented its "Fugitives" concert two additional times last November, in New York City.
“Music from Theresienstadt” will feature soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, violinist Daniel Hope, and pianist Bengt Forsberg who can be heard also on the CD “Terezin/Theresienstadt” released last year by Deutsche Grammophon. In the CD's liner notes, von Otter writes that the “project reflects my sincere wish to commemorate those who created music under conditions of unthinkable misery and who so tragically lost their lives."
All of these performances glorify what Karas described as “the role the active musical life played in the struggle for hope in these darkest of times.”
To hear one of these composers' hauntingly beautiful creations, click here for the "Finale" of Viktor Ullmann’s “Sonata no. 6” --played by fellow inmate Edith Kraus at the work’s 1943 premiere at Theresienstadt.
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