Hope Springs Eternal: The Holocaust Project
We are honored to present Heroes, a collaboration with “Hope Springs Eternal: The Holocaust Project” between The Community Foundation for the Alleghenies, Vision Together 2025, Pennsylvania Rural Arts Alliance, and the Arts Coalition of the Alleghenies. This unique educational initiative is supported by the generous backing of The Community Foundation for the Alleghenies Beerman Holocaust Education Fund.
On May 10th, 7:30pm at the Pasquerilla Performing Arts Center, we perform poignant and inspiring works by Jewish composers whose lives and careers were tragically affected by the Holocaust, while also extending our gratitude to WWII veterans for their bravery and sacrifices. This project brings together local and regional arts and community organizations, each contributing significantly to fostering understanding of this tragic time in world history and commemorating the enduring resilience of humanity. To learn more about the “Hope Springs Eternal Project”, please click here.
All tickets are available on a "Pick Your Price" basis, starting at $20. This approach is designed to increase accessibility and minimize cost as a barrier to attendance.
All proceeds will benefit future JSO education efforts.
ABOUT THE COMPOSERS
1916 – 1944
Zikmund Schul “was born to an assimilated Jewish family in Chemnitz, Germany, on 11 January 1916, moving with his parents to Kassel, in Saxony, on 3 September 1928. Zikmund and his father departed from Germany, taking residence in Prague on 7 October 1933. The extent to which Schul selected Biblical texts for original compositions and arrangements, both instrumental and vocal, is quite remarkable. The Hebrew texts, selected from the Jewish liturgy, were clearly chosen to bolster hope rather than despair: ‘To build and to plant, to plow and to sow. And the wasteland will be worked and will no longer be desert’ (from Jeremiah, Isaiah, Samuel and Ezekiel). ‘Sound the great Shofar [ram's horn] for our freedom…’ (When you come to the land). Several of Schul's works in the ghetto included choral pieces, both original and arrangements. One of these works, written in summer 1941, Shield To Our Fathers, was scored for soprano, baritone, mixed choir and organ. It is not certain if it was performed.
Two of his Jewish instrumental pieces were on Ullmann's second concert programme, ‘Young Composers in Terezín’, in his Studio für neue Musik series: Two Chassidic Dances for violin and cello and Divertimento Ebraica, written for Egon Ledeč's string quartet. This work had evidently been admired when it was written and was then performed by the Ledeč-Quartett in 1942 and again in autumn 1943 at the above mentioned concert, and once more in mid-August 1944, this time as a memorial to Schul, who had suffered lengthily from tuberculosis and died in the camp on 2 June 1944.”
Source: Zikmund Schul (ort.org)
1890 – 1987
Hans Gál was born near Vienna in 1890. Following considerable success in the 1920s, he was appointed Director of the Conservatory in Mainz in 1929. Hitler's accession to power in 1933 led to his instant dismissal and the banning of all his works. He returned to Vienna, but was again to forced to flee by Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938. He emigrated to Britain.” In the years that followed he helped to launch the Edinburgh Festival and became a lecturer at Edinburgh University. His extensive list of works includes his Sinfonia Concertante, Tryptich for orchestra and a Trio for violin, clarinet and piano. and settled in Edinburgh, where he remained active until his death in 1987.
Source: hansgal.org/hansgal
1897– 1957
“Erich Wolfgang Korngold is often associated with the creation of the symphonic film score. Indeed, many of his admirers today became familiar with his music through his film scores of the 1930s and 1940s. But before arriving in Hollywood he was a well-known composer of concert and chamber music, operas and stage works, as well as an arranger and conductor. Though most often compared to Mozart himself, Korngold was, in his own right, one of the most gifted composing child-prodigies in the history of music. Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born into a Jewish home in Brünn, Moravia (today known as Brno, The Czech Republic) on 29 May 1897 as the second son of Dr. Julius Korngold and his wife Josefine. He grew up in Vienna from the age of four, when his father assumed the position of music critic at the Neue Freie Presse (New Free Press) newspaper as successor to the noted reviewer Eduard Hanslick. In 1938, the “Anschluss” of Austria by the German National Socialists took the Korngolds by surprise. To save his family Korngold moved them to the US, choosing to write film scores regularly, and essentially vowing not to compose concert works again until Hitler was removed from power. His first movie score as an exiled resident in the New World – The Adventures of Robin Hood – earned him his second Oscar. “
Source: Biography – Erich Wolfgang Korngold (korngold-society.org)
“Schreker was considered by some to be one of the most promising twentieth-century composers. In the eight years between the peak of his popularity in 1924 and his forced resignation in 1932, however, the Nazis managed to ensure the almost total disappearance of his music from the public consciousness, not just within the Reich but throughout the world. By the late 1920s, Nazis had begun to boycott Schreker's performances and to interrupt them with anti-Semitic threats. The premiere of his new opera, Christopherus, which was dedicated to Schoenberg, had to be cancelled in 1932 due to threats of violence; (it was first premiered 47 years later). By this point, Schreker's musical fate was sealed, and he resigned from the Academy in March 1932. He died in Berlin in March 1934, barely a year after Hitler came to power.” A Schreker renaissance in the 1980s brought many of his works back onto opera stages and into concert halls, including his opera Flames and the melodrama The Wife of Intaphernes, as well as his Symphony Op.1.
Source: Franz Schreker (ort.org)
1878 - 1934
1899 - 1944
“The Czech composer Pavel Haas was born to a Jewish family in Brno on 21 June 1899. The Haas family encouraged the young Pavel’s increasingly evident talent, and by the age of 14 he had already produced his earliest attempts at formal composition.” A student in Janácek’s master class, Haas combined his teacher’s style with Jewish influences from his native Bohemian tradition and elements of jazz. The result was a very individual, powerful, and often polymetric tonal language. As it did for so many Jewish musicians across Europe, the Nazi onslaught brought about dramatic changes to Haas’ life and career. Performances of his works were banned, and he and his wife were forbidden employment. On 2 December 1941, Haas was sent on a transport from Brno to Theresienstadt, where he continued to compose. His first composition in the ‘model ghetto’ was the choral work Al S’fod (Do Not Lament), based on a Hebrew text by David Shimoni, followed by the Study for Strings (1943), and the Four Songs on Chinese Poetry (1944), both of which were performed by prisoners in Theresienstadt itself. The bass Karel Berman performed the Four Songs in Theresienstadt in 1944, and frequently included the work in his post-war programmes. Haas was deported to Auschwitz on 16 October 1944, and probably died in the gas chambers shortly after arrival.”
Source: Pavel Haas (ort.org)
1899 - 1945
As pianist and composer, Klein was considered a great talent. However, he had to give up his studies under Alois Hába after the Czech university was closed by the Nazi occupants. He wrote works of amazing maturity, such as a String Trio written at Terezín, Bachuri Le’an Tisa for women’s choir and recently discovered works dating from before 1941, including a Divertimento for wind instruments.
Nine days after completing his string trio, fated to be his last composition, Gideon Klein was sent to Auschwitz on 1 October 1944, and from there to Fürstengrube, a coal-mining labour camp for men, near Katowitz in Poland. It is not known whether he was killed there by the remaining Nazis as the liberating Red Army approached or whether he died on a forced march with those Jews made to accompany the fleeing SS. He certainly received no consideration for his musical gifts, but paid the ultimate price on 27 January 1945, less than two months after his twenty-fifth birthday. Remaining in the camp until its liberation, Irma Semtzka met Eliska again in Prague after the war and gave the precious manuscripts to her, together with an oil portrait of Gideon which to this day hangs over the piano in the same apartment where Professor Klevnova lived with her brother in their last years in Prague.”
Source: Gideon Klein (ort.org)
1903 – 1944
“The life of Ilse Weber, and her Holocaust experiences, leaves a moving, intimate and heart-breaking legacy. An author, singer and songwriter born in former Czechoslovakia, Weber demonstrated many creative and musical talents before her life was violently interrupted by the rise of National Socialism during the Second World War. Following the annexation of her town to the Third Reich in 1939, Weber and her family faced various acts of persecution, resulting in her deportation to the Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration camp; she remained there until 1944 working in the children’s infirmary, composing poetry and songs to keep the younger prisoners entertained. At the beginning of 1944, when the population of the children’s infirmary were to be sent East, Weber refused to abandon them and voluntarily joined the transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where she and her son Tomáš were both murdered. Her husband Wilhelm survived the war, and managed to hide his wife’s poems and songs in a garden shed before their deportation from Theresienstadt, only to retrieve them in late 1945. Through the “forgotten” voice of Ilse Weber, preserved in her songs and recovered writings, we are reminded of the tragic loss of young talent, the contributions of female Jewish artists more broadly, and of the importance of creativity as a form of spiritual resistance in the face of human suffering and depravity.”
Source: Ilse Weber (ort.org)