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Last update - 13:43 07/03/2008 American conductor revives lost opera music of Holocaust By Reuters Tags: World War Two, Nazis  The Nazis destroyed their lives, crushed their souls and burned their music. Now more than 60 years after World War Two ended, an American conductor is trying to restore the lost music of the Holocaust and its composers before history forgets. Los Angeles Opera conductor James Conlon last year started a program called "Recovered Voices" designed to introduce opera goers to a lost generation of composers. Some people questioned whether the $5 million program was needed, but now the whole town seems to be cheering. Advertisement Two fully staged one-act operas, "The Dwarf" (Der Zwerg) and "The Broken Jug" (Der zerbrochene Krug) opened to rave reviews in February. The audience's initial silence, after Conlon put down his baton, quickly turned to applause and an extended standing ovation. The acclaim came too late for their respective composers, Alexander Zemlinsky, who died broke and forgotten in exile in New York, and Viktor Ullmann, who was killed in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Conlon, 57, said in an that "Recovered Voices" had been dogged by a nagging question - why was he bothering to revive these works? Was it because the music was of such high quality that it needed to be heard again - Conlon's belief - or because it was time that the music world honored the composers, mostly Austrian and German Jews, silenced by the Nazis. Tragic tale "The Dwarf" is the tale of an ugly but noble dwarf given as a birthday gift to a Spanish princess, who considers him her toy. She is repulsed by his looks and cruelly forces him to look into a mirror for the first time. Horrified at his reflection, he dies. She momentarily regrets the loss of her "toy," but returns to her birthday party dance. "I think of 'The Dwarf' as one of the great operas of the 20th century and Zemlinsky as one of its great composers," Conlon said. Zemlinsky, once a prominent member of Gustav Mahler's circle, is said to have fashioned the 1921 work because of his own short stature and homely looks. By contrast, the Ullmann piece is a light satire written by the Czech composer two years before he was sent to the Terezin "showplace" concentration camp where the Nazis used artists as proof that the Jews were being treated well. He was later shipped to Auschwitz. Paradoxically, Conlon noted, the 20 works Ullmann wrote in the camps were saved while many of his pre-war compositions are lost. Conlon, 57, said he was drawn to the project by happenstance. A student of classical music since age 11, he was driving home one night when he heard an unfamiliar, yet magical, piece of music on the car radio. It was Zemlinsky. "One thing led to another. I was working in Germany at the time and recording with EMI and we decided to record almost everything Zemlinsky wrote," Conlon recalled. Soon, he was recording other composers of the era, men like Ullmann, Walter Braunfels, Franz Schreker, Ernst Krenek and Erich Korngold, who spent the war years writing Hollywood movie music. Krenek also thrived in exile, but many fell into obscurity, like Braunfels. Next year's "Recovered Voices" program will include operas by Braunfels and Schreker, who succumbed to a stroke in 1934. Both may have escaped the Holocaust, but anti-Semitism cut short their careers. The Nazis destroyed so many voices that "there was no one left in Germany who knew their work," Conlon said, adding that thanks to small car radio, he had gained "a mission." More Jewish World news and features Related articles: The music that couldn't be silenced Galicia's last klezmer arrives Music that melts the Great Wall Bookmark to del.icio.us   Hunting journalists Who leaked the details of a CIA-Mossad plot against Iran? Farming organic At Or-Gani, Israel's organic revolution is taking on new forms.   1.   Performance of "Der Zwerg" was very powerful 18:14  |  Voice of Reason 07/03/08

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