Conductor in L.A. revives lost music of Holocaust

By Arthur Spiegelman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - 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 operagoers 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.

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 interview with Reuters 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.

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