Powerful ‘Defiant Requiem’ Revisits Verdi in Terezin
Cover image: Soloists Arianna Zukerman and Ann McMahon Quintero perform the Agnus Dei from Verdi’s Requiem as footage from the Nazi propaganda film made about Theresienstadt is shown in the background during the May 1, 2014, performance of Defiant Requiem at The Music Center at Strathmore. (Photo credit: Randy Sager)
Imagine 150 starving people, suffering degradation, fear and disease without help, coming together to sing Verdi’s Requiem, soloists and all, with the help of an out-of-tune piano missing some keys and one piano score only. This was the vision of musician Rafael Schächter, who taught the music, rehearsed, and conducted the performance, in fact 16 performances between 1943 and 1944, with often different singers as others disappeared. The performers including Schächter were all inmates at Theresienstadt, or Terezin, the infamous Nazi concentration camp which housed many of Europe’s Jewish artists, writers and musicians.
Fast forward to 2008 when conductor Murry Sidlin, with the contributed and recorded memories of four Terezin chorus survivors, began producing the Requiem as a concert-drama with visuals of the survivors speaking and a couple of actors describing how it was in the camp when they were trying to present the Requiem and taking the part of Schächter with his impassioned voice.
“It was a way of forgetting,” says one elderly survivor. “It’s very difficult to sing when you are hungry, hard to concentrate, but we became that music. It was a different kind of courage.”
Friday night at Meany Theater, Sidlin’s concert-drama, titled “Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin,” was presented by The University of Washington School of Music with support from The Defiant Requiem Foundation, using the UW Symphony Orchestra, UW Chamber Singers and University Chorale, Symphony Tacoma Voices, and members of the Seattle Jewish Chorale.
The four soloists, well known in the area, were soprano Kimberly Giordano, mezzo-soprano Sarah Maddox, tenor Eric Neuville and bass-baritone Clayton Brainerd. Actors Adrien Gamache and Tadd Morgan created the voices of The Lecturer and Schächter, and the whole was conducted by Sidlin himself.
The work itself, composed by Verdi as a tribute and memoriam to two dear colleagues who died close together, has as its longest section the Dies Irae—”The Day of Wrath”—and those Terezin singers took to heart the words which say that “the world shall be judged…whatever is hidden shall be made manifest…nothing shall remain unavenged.” As the chorus told each other and their fellow inmates: “We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them.” Probably few of the Nazis understood the Latin.
The hall was dark, all but the score on the podium at the start of the program, with first survivors speaking on screen and then guest concertmaster Herbert Greenberg playing a solo melody. After the lights went up and the Requiem began, the orchestra alternated with just piano (though not missing keys or out of tune). There were about 150 singers, probably no accident, and the entire performance went without intermission, just with occasional breaks for more survivor or actor commentaries.
The chorus, well-trained by Geoffrey Boers and Giselle Wyers, gave it their all, whether hushed or at full, thrilling voice, as did the orchestra. At the end, again in darkness, the chorus and musicians filed out quietly, humming, as Greenberg played a long solo melody seemingly without beginning or end. It was requested that there be no applause, just a moment of remembrance for Schächter, his singers and what they did. It was a long, still moment.
