By Gigi Yellen, JTNews Correspondent
Jewish and Nazi prisoners interned together behind the same barbed wire? Sometimes in the same bed? Both considered “enemy aliens”? That actually happened in the England of World War II. Those strange bedfellows were the first audiences for the satiric, cabaret-style revue “What a Life!” which receives its West Coast premiere Monday, November 7, at Benaroya Hall, on Music of Remembrance’s fall concert.
Composer Hans Gál, interned at such a camp on the Isle of Man, wrote this barbed songfest for his fellow prisoners. In place of the show’s original lines of dialogue, now lost, MOR’s performance will feature ACT Theater’s artistic director Kurt Beattie as Gál, speaking words from journals the composer kept during his four-month internment.
“A very Kafka-like experience,” Beattie describes the work. “It’s a cri de coeur of sorts, with lines like, “˜In sober moments it’s clear to me that I am mad.’”
The Isle of Man internment camp was originally a resort, “originally bed and breakfasts,” as MOR Artistic Director Mina Miller describes it. The men (the British only interned the men) might find themselves, as in the “Song of the Double Bed,” sharing intimate quarters with sworn enemies. “The Barbed Wire Song,” songs of betrayal, absurdity, liberation — Miller, always sleuthing for new angles on musical resistance to the Holocaust, found these treasures at the Austrian embassy in Washington, D.C.
She found an extra irony in the show’s production history. Gál had been begging for a release on medical grounds, but when it came, he asked to remain an “enemy alien” for one more day so he could see his much-revised show through its second performance. Miller obtained the score and the diary excerpts from the Gál family.
“This show is a window on a little-known injustice,” says Miller. “What it reminds us of is that even decent societies are capable of mistreating people.” Indeed.
Gál had escaped from Austria to England, arriving in 1938, and establishing important musical connections in Edinburgh. In 1940 he was arrested and interned, says Miller, “without any evidence of his committing any crime.” Like the Roosevelt administration’s roundup of Japanese-Americans, Churchill’s England launched its own version of preventive detention of suspected “enemy aliens.”
Gál was first sent to Huyton, a camp near Liverpool, where he wrote a suite for the only musical instruments he had to work with, a flute and two violins. That “Huyton Suite” is also on MOR’s Nov. 7 program.
“Ballad of the German Refugee” includes lyrics by fellow prisoner Otto Erich Deutsch, the celebrated music historian whose “Deutsch listings” catalogue the works of Franz Schubert. The usual array of MOR’s renowned musicians — Seattle Symphony players Laura de Luca (clarinet), Zart Dombourian-Eby (flute), Mikhail Shmidt and Leonid Keylin (violins), Susan Gulkis Assadi (viola), and Mara Finkelstein (cello), plus Miller at the piano — will join tenor Ross Hauck and baritone Eric Parce, who also directs the show.
A friendship between the late Seattle physician Alex Fefer and a fellow cancer researcher in Buffalo brought to MOR’s attention a Piano Trio by Marcel Tyberg, which will also receive its West Coast premiere at the November 7 concert. Tyberg “was one-sixteenth Jewish,” says Miller, in one of those strange reminders of the bizarre calculations of Nazi persecution. Born in Austria, Tyberg was murdered in Auschwitz, but not before he had passed along his musical manuscripts, including this trio, to a personal friend. That friend’s son, Enrico Mihich, who wound up in Buffalo, is a cancer research physician who never forgot his father’s commitment.
Mihich’s efforts have led, so far, to performances of Tyberg’s music in Buffalo, and now in Seattle, where the Fefers have been regulars at MOR concerts; Thea Fefer is a member of MOR’s board. Citing another Holocaust-era composer whose reputation has soared thanks to efforts such as MOR’s, Miller says she expects a resurrection of Tyberg’s voice: “I’m sure five to 10 years from now, Tyberg will be as hot as [Erwin] Schulhoff.”
This is a prodigious opening week for Music of Remembrance’s 14th season: Sun., Oct. 30 is the world premiere screening of the documentary The Boys from Terezìn. The film traces the journey of an underground concentration camp literary magazine, Vedem: Of its creation by a brave group of teenage boys, of the tiny handful of those boys who survived the death camps, of the near-miraculous preservation of their work, and of the transformation of their literary resistance into an oratorio commissioned and premiered by Music of Remembrance with the Seattle Boychoir. The screening, at Seattle Art Museum at 2:30 p.m., includes a conversation with the filmmakers. Later this fall, the film will screen at Jewish film festivals in Australia (Sydney and Melbourne) and in Palm Beach, Fla.
Free tickets for the Oct. 30 screening of The Boys from Terezìn are available to the first 100 high school students to claim them, online only, at www.musicofremembrance.org.