An evening devoted to music in concentration camps with Francesco Lotoro
An evening devoted to music in concentration camps with Francesco Lotoro
Music
possessed a wide variety of functions in the “everyday life” of the
concentration camps. It could console, give voice to hopes, or send out a
signal of solidarity and resistance; at the same time however, it was used as
an instrument of repression and torture, for example when the prisoners fell in
for roll call, were forced to sing, or helplessly exposed to it for long
periods.
The evening
begins with the screening of an excerpt from Le Maestro, a documentary that gives an insight into the work of
Francesco Lotoro.
Drawing
on a number of examples, Francesco Lotoro explains the background to and
circumstances surrounding the respective compositions. Frequently the pieces
were created in secret – by autodidacts as well as professional musicians. The
works reveal a broad spectrum of styles and genres: Francesco Lotoro has found
simple songs, but also a complex opera, classical symphonies and examples of
jazz, which was banned at the time in Nazi Germany.
Francesco Lotoro is an Italian pianist, composer, and musicologist. He is regarded as
the world’s foremost collector of musical compositions created in concentration
camps, military prisons, and prisoner-of-war camps between 1933 and 1945. He has traveled the world for the last 25 years adding to his
collection, speaking with survivors or family relatives of former prisoners.
He has already rediscovered and archived more than 5,000 works, some of
which he has recorded on a CD entitled “Music from the Concentration Camps”.
The talk is in Italian and will be translated.
The music evening takes place on Tuesday, April 26,
2016, beginning at 7 pm in the Visitor Center of the Dachau Memorial Site.