For Them, Time Ran Out

By Michael Walsh

COMPOSERS: THREE YOUNG EUROPEANS

ALBUM: SILENCED VOICES

LABEL: NORTHEASTERN

THE BOTTOM LINE: The work of talents who did not escape the Holocaust offers witness to what might have been.

During the 1930s, a steady stream of composers and performers fled Nazi Germany in the wake of Hitler's Kulturkampf. Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and other purveyors of "degenerate art" found a safe haven in the U.S. Gentile and Jew alike, they contributed immeasurably to the development of music in America. But what of those not so lucky as to escape? What talents were consigned to the flames of the Holocaust? The fascinating and moving new CD Silenced Voices offers poignant witness to what was -- and what might have been.

Perversely, music played an important role in the Nazi concentration camps. Loudspeakers blared Schubert, Wagner and march music, while, less officially, prisoners smuggled in instruments and put on private musicales. In "model" camps such as Theresienstadt (Terezin) in Bohemia, the inmates were even encouraged to perform for visiting Red Cross workers to show that they were being treated humanely. The late French composer Olivier Messiaen wrote one of this century's most illuminating chamber works, the Quartet for the End of Time, while incarcerated in a Silesian camp. Messiaen survived. But for most victims time was something that indeed came to an end.

The stilled voices on the new disc belonged to Ervin Schulhoff, a Prague- born composer and associate of George Grosz and Paul Klee, who died at age 48 in 1942 in the Wulzburg camp; Vitezslava Kapralova, a Czech-born pianist and conducting student of Charles Munch, who, only 25, perished in 1940 of tuberculosis while attempting to get to America; and Gideon Klein, another Czech composer, who died in 1945 at the age of 25 after trips to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Furstengrubbe.

The most accomplished composer of the three was Schulhoff, whose String Quartet No. 1 and two other chamber works, which date from 1924-25, reveal the kind of craftsmanship and imagination to be expected from a student of Reger and Debussy. The quartet in particular is outstanding, combining the rhythmic snap of Bartok with the plaintive melodic lines of Kodaly.

Kapralova's brief Dubnova Preludia Suite for piano is another strong work, dedicated to the pianist Rudolf Firkusny, who knew her in Paris before the war. In four short movements this collection of miniatures displays the Slavic influence of her teacher, Bohuslav Martinu, in its deft command of keyboard technique, sharp ear for piquant sonority and angular, accented melodies.

Klein completed the first movement of his Duo for Violin and Cello in November 1941, a month before he was sent to Theresienstadt. There he took part in the camp's Potemkin-village cultural scene, writing in a camp publication that "people who never lived here will look at the number of musical events here with wonder and amazement." He never finished the second movement: two minutes and 35 seconds into the lento, the music is cut off in mid-measure, mute testimony to catastrophe, as eloquent as any note ever written.

The performances by the Hawthorne String Quartet and other New England-based musicians are brisk and idiomatic. But such considerations are almost irrelevant in light of the music's larger issues. "If we consider the demands of the programs, together with the strains on the artists who live in new surroundings under unpleasant conditions," wrote Klein, "we will understand that these artistic efforts are not solely to be judged by the standards of a % metropolitan critic." History is now the judge.