The Lost Music of the Holocaust: English edition of Francesco Lotoro's book released

Published by the prestigious British publishing house Headline , THE LOST MUSIC OF THE HOLOCAUST is Francesco Lotoro’s new book on the music produced in Ghettos, Lagers, and Gulags from 1933 to 1953.

Two years after the release of his book "A Song Will Save the World. 1933-1953: Music That Survived Deportation" (Feltrinelli), which traces over 30 years of research, recovery, and promotion of music written in concentration and extermination camps and other sites of civilian and military captivity between 1933 and 1953, pianist Francesco Lotoro has returned as a writer to discuss his tireless work recovering, studying, revising, performing, and recording this extraordinary musical heritage.

He did this in the book The Lost Music of the Holocaust. Bringing the music of the Camps to the ears of the world at last published by Headline Publishing Group (official release 26 September 2024).

In The Lost Music of the Holocaust, Lotoro offers an updated narrative of his research into this extraordinary music, the recovery of which has become a lifelong mission, resulting in a monumental archive of over 9,000 scores, recently placed under the tutelage of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Symphonies, operas, and songs written by interned and deported musicians, many of whom died in captivity, recovered while traveling around the world to meet survivors and their families; tales of scores sewn into coat linings, instruments hidden in suitcases, scores hidden among dirty laundry, and musical works written on food wrappers—to name just a few of the ingenious ways prisoners protected their music during the darkest hour of their existence.

The book movingly brings together the stories of many of those who wrote and performed music while deprived of their freedom; it takes readers on a journey through their lives and their music, shedding light on a beauty created in the most unlikely places, in contexts until now known more for producing suffering, despair, and death than art and life of the mind and heart.

Today, this immense historical and musical heritage is archived and catalogued in Barletta at the Fondazione Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria; the book promises to immerse the reader in a full immersion in the pages of the most dramatically brilliant musical literature of the twentieth century.

Francesco Lotoro

The Lost Music of the Holocaust. Bringing the music of the Camps to the ears of the world at last

Publisher Headline Publishing Group | Headline Book Publishing

Published September 26, 2024

Pages 400

ISBN 9781472297792