Happenings

Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín

March 15, 7:30 p.m.

By Lawrence Golan

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

- Winston Churchill, 1948 (George Santayana, 1905)

Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín tells the story of the courageous Jewish prisoners in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp (Terezín) during World War II who performed Verdi’s Requiem while experiencing the depths of human degradation. With only a single smuggled score, they performed the celebrated oratorio sixteen times, including one performance before senior SS officials from Berlin and an International Red Cross delegation. Conductor Rafael Schächter told the choir, “We will sing to the Nazis what we cannot say to them.”

Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín is a concert-drama conceived and created by Foundation President, Maestro Murry Sidlin. It combines the magnificent music of Verdi with video testimony from survivors of the original Terezín chorus and footage from the 1944 Nazi propaganda film about Theresienstadt. The performance also includes actors who speak the words of imprisoned conductor Rafael Schächter and others. The concert includes a complete performance of the Verdi Requiem. As such, the audience will see and hear a full symphony orchestra, full chorus, and four outstanding vocal soloists from the Yakima Symphony Chorus performing one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. In between each of the seven movements of the Requiem, narrators, actors, and video clips of the actual survivors who took part will tell the incredible story of how this piece was performed by concentration camp prisoners at Terezín during World War II.

Defiant Requiem is not just a performance of the Verdi Requiem, but a tribute to the inspired leadership of Rafael Schächter, who was forced to reconstitute the choir three times as members were transported to Auschwitz. The performances came to symbolize resistance and defiance and demonstrated the prisoners’ courage to confront the worst of humankind with the best of humankind. Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín is powerful, dramatic, and inspirational. 

 

--Lawrence Golan