“In the shadow of your wings”. Music written in the concentration camps comes to life again in a concert in Lecco for the Holocaust Remembrance Day

On Friday, March 8, 2019, at 9:00 pm, at the Casa dell'Economia Auditorium (Lecco Chamber of Commerce – Via Tonale 28/30) in Lecco , the concert “In the Shadow of Your Wings” will be held in commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The concert, produced by Intergea and the Foundation Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria (ILMC), is sponsored by the Municipality of Lecco and the Cariplo Foundation. Free admission. Performers: Lecco Symphony Orchestra string ensemble conducted by Maestro Francesco Lotoro; baritone: Angelo De Leonardis ; oboe: Marino Bedetti; violins: Stefano Grossi and Antonello Molteni . The program features music by Zrzavy, Schul, Goué, Coppola, Flothuis, Grunfeld, Kropinski, and Hilsley, composers who experienced the drama of the prison and extermination camps of World War II, where for many people—few of whom survived—music represented the last but powerful instrument of resistance against the total annihilation of body and mind.

Apulian musician Francesco Lotoro has already dedicated thirty years of his life to researching the music written in the concentration camps, whose documents include several masterpieces. He has assembled an archive of over 8,000 scores, 10,000 multimedia documents, and 3,000 university publications and essays on the subject, including musical essays produced in the camps. This research and preservation effort is not yet complete; to protect and enhance this immense cultural and human heritage of global interest, Lotoro, together with other partners, has established the Fondazione Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria (ILMC) , based in Barletta. This will soon be joined by a true hub of international importance, the Cittadella della Musica Concentrazionaria , which will be built in the renovated spaces of the former distillery in the Apulian town: a total area of 9,000 square meters. which will include the Campus of Musical Sciences (including the National Center of Jewish Music), a Music Library and Media Library, the Museum of Regenerated Art, the Nuovi Cantieri Theater, the International Twentieth Century Bookshop, a Student Hotel, Café & Restaurant.

The expression “ concentration music” defines the musical corpus that in the prison, transit, forced labor, concentration, extermination camps, penitentiaries, POW Camps, Stalags, Oflags and Gulags – opened by the Third Reich, Italy, Japan, the Italian Social Republic, the Vichy regime and other Axis countries, as well as by Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and other Allied countries in Europe, colonial Africa, Asia, the USSR, the USA, Latin America and Oceania from 1933 (opening of KZ Dachau) to 1953 (death of Joseph Stalin and amnesty of prisoners in the Gulags) – was created by discriminated, persecuted, imprisoned, deported, killed or survivor musicians of any professional, artistic, social, religious, national background: Jews, Christians, Sinti and Roma and others of the Romanès people, Euskaldunak or the Basque people, Sufis, Bahá'ís, Quakers, Jewists, Communists, disabled people, homosexuals, civilian and military prisoners. In short, concentration camp music can be defined as music created in captivity or under extreme conditions of deprivation of fundamental human rights; an authentic World Heritage , it is one of the most important legacies of universal history inherited from the phenomenon of deportation.

Concentration camp music research, Lotoro explains, "nourishes the ambition of transforming a terrible catastrophe into the greatest opportunity humanity has today to improve art, music, creative thought, and the deepest and most unfathomable emotions of the intellect . Recovering this music is equivalent to rebuilding schools and hospitals destroyed by the war, restoring educational processes that were thought to be irreparably compromised by war and deportations."

The music that proliferated in the camps is incalculable in numbers and values, and the 8,000 recovered scores may one day prove to be a small fraction of what was created during the years between the rise of Nazism and the de-Stalinization of the former USSR. Musical historiography will need to be rewritten in light of the new perspective offered by the recovery of music written in captivity between the opening of the first concentration camp and the closing of the last Gulag. "This musical heritage must not only be recovered, but also repaired and performed so that it can be returned to humanity and regain its rightful place in the history of music," adds Lotoro.

There is an energy that drives musicians to make music in the face of death, like the musicians on the Titanic who played until shortly before the ocean liner sank; while Europe sank, it was up to musicians to safeguard civilization. "Just as a cathedral, in the eyes of an architect, reveals secrets and codes invisible to most people, " Lotoro concludes, " so a score written in captivity reveals historical truths that are otherwise difficult to convey through diaries or letters . We have restored dignity to musicians and to their music, written in notebooks, toilet paper, jute bags, postcards, or passed down by heart while they were still on trains; it was not possible to save the lives of many deported musicians, but we saved their music, and this is equivalent to having saved their lives in its universal, metahistorical, and metaphysical meaning.