Something heartbreaking

I ran across this image on the Classical Iconoclast blog just now.  It stopped me in my tracks.

What do you see here?  People making music?  Certainly that.  Does the room evoke a middle-class home, or something more sinister?

Look a bit more closely.  Can you see something that might give a clue as to where this image is set?  There are only two people whom we see front-on, the little girl and the older man to the left of picture.  They have yellow stars on their outer clothing.

The scene is a dormitory at Terezin Theresienstadt, one of the concentration camps of the Third Reich.  The artist was Helga Weissova-Hoskova, who was an inmate of the camp who survived the war.

When I think of music in the difficult circumstances of the 1930s and 40s, I often end up thinking about the public dilemmas of Wilhelm Furtwangler.  If I think about music in concentration camps during the same period at all, it's generally the Quatour pour la fin du temps, Messian's transcendentally epic journey out of a shared musical syntax.  I suppose the sheer fact of the concentration camps stops one from contemplating that people didn't merely die there, they also lived -- many of them highly cultured people who were well-equipped to make music.  As Dondou Tchil comments,

The music of Thereseinstadt speaks for everyone, because it shows how people can be creative in the most adverse situations, and that art has value, against all odds. That's why its significance resonates for all humanity.

Because camp conditions were strained, no huge Wagnerian orchestral extravagance. Instead, focus on chamber music, song, things that ordinary people can do. Ilse Weber's poems and songs are loved because they are so simple and down to earth. They weren't meant to be fancy High Art but they  are moving because of their context. Terezin-Lied came from Emmerich Kálmán hit operetta Countess Maritza. Everyone knew the tune, so changing the words gave it another level of meaning. Trained voices not needed, everyone could sing along together.

The article from which I've extracted this little nugget is a thought-provoking write up of a concert at Wigmore Hall.  I highly recommend giving it a read, so do pay a visit to the Iconoclast.