Music From Auschwitz // Performed by Musicians from the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance

Warning: This video contains topics that
some viewers may find disturbing,
including anti-Semitic and racist imagery.
--
For over forty years, Patricia Hall, professor of music theory at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (SMTD), has explored archives all over the world, looking for significant musical manuscripts that have been forgotten, lost, or ignored.
In 2016, she went on a somber quest, visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to search its collection for musical manuscripts. One in particular, a foxtrot called “Die schönste Zeit des Lebens,” struck Hall because of the horrible irony of its title, which translates to “the most beautiful time of life.” She learned that the music had been copied by hand and arranged by Polish political prisoners in the Auschwitz I men’s orchestra during World War II.
Hall returned to Ann Arbor with scans of the existing copies of the manuscript for that song and embarked on a collaborative effort with SMTD students and faculty - including conductor Oriol Sans, who was at the time an SMTD assistant professor of music - to present it in concert. The project also involved transcribing the handwritten copies into printed notation and creating a recording that closely matches how the song would have sounded as performed in Auschwitz in 1943. The recording, Hall said, was then returned to the museum and made available to researchers.
The story of Hall’s work with this song, and the public performance of “Die schönste Zeit des Lebens,” drew the interest of many who recognized its significance, from the perspective of music history and that of Holocaust scholarship. Hall was interviewed by several major media outlets, including NPR, the CBC, and the BBC, and an Associated Press article about the project ran in hundreds of publications nationwide.
The level of interest surprised Hall, who made a subsequent visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 2019 to continue the search. She found several more neatly handwritten scores of German songs and instrumental pieces popular at the time, including waltzes and tangos. Working again with SMTD students and Sans, who is now the director of orchestral activities and assistant professor in conducting at the Mead Witter School of Music at the University of Wisconsin, Hall prepared these additional works, including the original foxtrot, for a series of concerts.
An ensemble of undergraduate and graduate students will perform the pieces in concerts held at the Stamps Theatre in Ann Arbor (May 17), the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan (May 22), and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City (May 25-26). The concerts include instrumental arrangements as well as songs, with vocals being performed by a quartet of singers from the SMTD Department of Voice. The singers will also recite lines from transcripts of the postwar testimonies of the copyists and arrangers, offering an important personal complement to the music being performed. The testimonies, Hall pointed out, “give the context of what it was like to work in this environment and to create these pieces in a concentration camp.”
The performances of this music provide a fuller understanding of one aspect of a concentration camp existence. “Before, these manuscripts were being preserved in an archive, but they weren’t being heard,” Hall noted. Some photos of concentration camp ensembles exist, but there was no aural record of how they sounded. With these concerts and the recordings that will be made, the notes on the page will be brought to life after decades in an archive. “It’s the first time audiences can hear these arrangements of these pieces since World War II,” said Hall. “You’re hearing them as close as possible to how they actually sounded, and you’re learning a great deal about the daily life of these musicians.” Hall has been contacted by children of Holocaust survivors who appreciated the opportunity to learn a bit more about what their loved ones experienced in the camps, experiences rarely spoken of by the survivors themselves.
“The most important aspect of what we’re doing with this project is the amplification of history,” said Mason. “As we get further and further away from a moment like this in history, we start to lose the firsthand accounts, we start to lose the witnesses who can speak to it in their own words. This is a way we keep those people and their stories alive,” he concluded. “Music really does have a remarkable power.”

[@juliamolinaro6948]

Such beauty from people who suffered so much. How they could have such hope for their future makes me cry.

[@user-hk8yp7cw1v]

I was also in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2016

[@disgustangy4901]

Fascinating stuff. If I may ask, we’re these pieces written by the workers at Auschwitz themselves? These pieces so wildly different from what you might expect from a concentration camp

[@patriciahall9609]

They were arranged by Auschwitz I prisoners for a dance band that performed for the SS on Sundays. The pieces themselves were usually hits from the early forties by German composers.

[@disgustangy4901]

@@patriciahall9609 That's really interesting, thanks for the reply!

[@user-hk8yp7cw1v]

I was also in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2016