jewish musicians

"[Music] critic and cultural historian Jeremy Eichler makes a passionate case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers--Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten--lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving, transcendent works of music, scores that echo lost time. Summoning the supporting testimony of writers, poets, philosophers, musicians, and everyday citizens, Eichler reveals how the essence of an entire epoch has been inscribed in these sounds and stories. Along the way, he visits key locations central to the music's creation, from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral to the site of the Babi Yar ravine in Kyiv. As the living memory of the Second World War fades, [this book] proposes new ways of listening to history and learning to hear between its notes the resonances of what another era has written, heard, dreamed, hoped, and mourned"--Provided by publisher.

Pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman provides an account of his experiences trying to survive in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II, and shares excerpts from the diary of a German officer who saved his life.

From 1943 onwards, the SS fulfilled its fantasy of bringing together over forty female musicians from all over Europe to perform in the Auschwitz Orchestra. They were directed by the brilliant violinist Alma Ros?, who owes her own survival to her close blood ties to Gustav Mahler. Eleven of the "Orchestra" are still living, and on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz they met to recall their story and to confront their unique and terrifying position in the history of the Holocaust.

Presents a film based on the life of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew and brilliant pianist who sees his family shipped off to Nazi labor camps, and manages to escape and live for years in the ruins of Warsaw with the unlikely help of a sympathetic German officer.

Chronicles the true story of two Jewish musicians, Gunther Goldschmidt and Rosemarie Gumpert, who struggled against impossible odds to perform in Nazi Germany and found themselves falling in love.

Pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman provides an account of his experiences trying to survive in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II, and shares excerpts from the diary of a German officer who saved his life.