Future Memories: Lotoro's journey in search of music written in concentration camps continues in Italy

Fondazione ILMC
May 16
2 min read

Francesco Lotoro a Trieste con Luciano Roiaz

Francesco Lotoro 's journey in search of music composed in concentration camps and other places of civilian and military captivity around the world continues in Italy. The project "Future Memories: Lotoro's Journey to Save the Lost Music," of which this journey is also part, is promoted by the Fondazione Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria ETS and supported by the Claims Conference (New York), the Puglia Region, the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe (London), the Righteous Persons Foundation (Los Angeles), and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Paris) . The journey was undertaken together with Grazia Tiritiello, vice president of the ILMC Foundation.

The first stop on the journey was Trieste , with the primary aim of recovering as much musical and bibliographical material as possible on several persecuted Jewish composers and musicians from Trieste : Vittorio Menassè (deported and killed in Auschwitz), Emilio Russi, Giulio Venezian, Davide Nacamulli and Lionello Morpurgo (emigrated to Argentina and Brazil respectively), Lionello Levi and Vito Levi (both expelled from the Conservatory in 1938), Davide Gentilli and Alberto Levi (both deported to Auschwitz).

Lotoro and Tiritiello then visited the Risiera di San Sabba , the only concentration and extermination camp opened by the Reich in Italy and a transit camp for numerous Italian, Croatian, and Slovenian Jews, later deported to concentration camps opened in Germany. The visit proved very useful for more accurately reconstructing the dynamics of the deportations between 1944 and 1945.

The trip to Trieste also offered the opportunity to meet Luciano Roiaz , son of the musician Giuseppe Roiaz, taken prisoner by German troops after the armistice of 8 September 1943 and interned in Stalag VIC/Z in Fullen; upon his repatriation, Roiaz fled with his family from Monte di Capodistria to Trieste.

They then reached Bologna where they browsed the last remaining antique booksellers in search of some scores by deported Italian Jewish composers.

Finally, they went to Milan where they met Giovanni and Deborah Frisone again to update them on the progress of the Ferruccio Francesco Frisone collection (113 drawings and the manuscript of the diary) that they donated to us and to recover some important Jewish musical materials that had mistakenly not been sent to the ILMC Foundation but had been left in Milan during a previous trip.