The ILMC Foundation rediscovers the music of Rudolf Kende, a composer who survived the concentration camps

by Francesco Lotoro

Rudolf Kende

The achievement with the Jihočeské Muzeum in České Budějovice —the Czech Republic city and capital of the district of the same name—is one of the most significant milestones in concentration camp music research. The Bohemian Museum and the Foundation Institute of Concentration Camp Musical Literature in Barletta have reached a collaboration agreement regarding the musical production of Czech Jewish composer Rudolf Kende (pictured), born in 1910 in České Budějovice. A quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound, Rudolf Kende—born Rudolf Kohn—was deported to Theresienstadt with his parents; the latter were transferred to Birkenau and killed in 1944.

Despite the German occupation authorities' tendency to physically eliminate disabled people, Kende was rescued and brought to safety in Theresienstadt; unable to use his hands and feet, his musical manuscripts were written by students and friends. At Theresienstadt, Kende taught music and in 1943 composed Návrat, two songs for soprano, baritone, and piano, based on a text by Moritz Hartmann, translated into Czech by Karel Hartmann. He also wrote Bejvávalo and Hory, Doly for male choir (based on his own text), an (incomplete) string quartet, and other works.

After the war, he wrote several works under the pseudonym Bedřich Konša, including Romance, Op. 19 No. 1 for violin and piano, Sonata, Op. 24 for solo violin, Rondo for piano and other works for piano four hands, and drafts of a cantata for two-part male choir and piano. He died on 24 August 1958 in České Budějovice.

The management of the Museum in České Budějovice has granted the Institute of Concentration Camp Musical Literature the right to publish all the works composed in Theresienstadt by Rudolf Kende in the 12-volume encyclopedia Thesaurus Musicae Concentrationariae ; the Barletta Foundation will promote Rudolf Kende's musical work worldwide through concerts and lectures.

Kende's musical writing is very interesting ; linguistically, it follows the post-Schubertian and post-Brahmsian tradition with a notable use of brilliant pianism – in Návrat the solo piano introduces the sung parts with a lively Prelude and closes the work as a soloist – but it is in the a cappella choral pieces that Kende displays his best inspiration.

Concentration camp music research is "Jewish" even when it doesn't deal with Jewish composers or ghettos or concentration camps with a high Jewish population. "Jewish" also means recovering music by Bosnian imams and members of the Catholic, Reformed, Orthodox, and Old Catholic Churches interned in Dachau, and Protestant pastors interned in Neuengamme rather than Flossenbürg. Because Jewish is the exercise of Memory as a muscle of the spirit, Jewish is the human experience of saving what is life, physical, mental, or spiritual. Of any life, even that of the enemy. To be Jewish is to be incurably optimistic; we want to believe that even those who are hostile to us have the right to understand their error and do teshuvah.

From the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls to the 330 sheets of toilet paper filled with music saved from the infirmary of the Vazební věznice in Prague-Pankrác, wherever there are nezizot [sparks] of life from the human heart and ingenuity, there the Jew arrives and saves everything. What would have happened in Theresienstadt if the deportees had not sat next to the disabled Kende, writing notes and lyrics that he, unable to write, dictated to them? What would have happened to the Polish musician Aleksander Kulisiewicz, seriously ill with tuberculosis, hospitalized in Krakow after being liberated from Sachsenhausen, if a nurse skilled in music and typing had not sat next to him and emptied his memory of 716 Sachsenhausen songs that had never been written into score?

This music resolves in musical—and therefore logical—terms the famous Riemann conjecture and all the unsolved questions of mathematics; given the negation of logic (the War) and the logic of that negation (the concentration camp), music and the sharing of the musical and extensively artistic experience of captivity resolves the dramatic paradoxes of History and restores their exact coordinates.

Supporting research into music created in captivity, deportation, and civil and military internment is not optional; it is a duty, part of those unwritten rules by which all the cathedrals of human ingenuity devastated by the tsunamis of history must be rebuilt .

For Rudolf Kende and a thousand other musicians awaiting their due recognition, we will rebuild the destroyed wing of the Universal Conservatory of Twentieth-Century Music.*

* Francesco Lotoro's article was published on MOKED - The portal of Italian Judaism

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