2012 Verdi Defiant Requiem Week

Conductor Murry Sidlin will once again create his brilliant multi-media concert drama, the Verdi Defiant Requiem, with Berkshire Choral Festival in 2012 at the Sheffield venue.

Chorus, actors, soloists, orchestra and video projections tell the story of conductor Raphael Schaechter and the choruses who learned this great work by rote from a single vocal score while imprisoned in Terezin concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia.

In 2009, a BCF concert tour took more than 200 choristers to Terezin to perform the work on a special day honoring those imprisoned there during the Holocaust. Edgar Krasa, a Terezin singer and survivor, attended the performance. The profound experience was captured in choristers’ reflections, which can be read at Prague Chorister Reflections.

Terezin was used by the Nazis as a “model” camp. The Jewish inmates were made to perform for visiting SS officers, German army staff, and even the Red Cross. When compelled to do the Verdi Requiem, it was Schaechter who began using the term “defiant” in association with the Catholic mass; instead of feeling humiliated by the Nazis by being forced to sing the Christian lyrics, the Jews would use it as a way to defy their captors. Terezin survivor Vera Schiff expressed it this way on a PBS documentary:

“The text of the Latin prayers suggests that we all will be judged by the Almighty, and this will include the Germans. That was a promise. That the day will come in which we all will be facing the final judge, and that gave us a great deal of satisfaction and hope.”

Raphael Schaechter conducted the last of 16 performances of the Requiem at Terezin in 1944. He and most of chorus were then moved to Auschwitz, where the gas chambers awaited them.

Murry Sidlin was on the faculty of the School of Music at the University of Minnesota when he stopped at a display of books outside a bookstore. The first book he saw was titled "Music at Terezin".

“The first thing I saw was ‘Rafael Schaechter, choral conductor, opera coach, pianist, piano teacher . . . and organized performances of the Verdi Requiem in the camp,’ ” he writes on his website. “I thought to myself, ‘My God,’ and then all the implications of this started to strike me: Verdi’s Requiem in a concentration camp – ‘Recruited singers’ was all it said - who were these singers - and this conductor? - why the Verdi Requiem in that place? Why did a choral conductor who was in prison for being Jewish recruit something like 150 singers to learn by rote a choral work that is steeped in the Catholic liturgy with a chorus that was 99 percent Jewish? That was the genesis of the project.”

The premiere of the Defiant Requiem was in April 2002 in Portland, performed by the Oregon Symphony and Portland Opera Chorus. It has been performed three times at Terezin, in Budapest, and across the United States.

Mr. Sidlin established The Defiant Requiem Foundation in 2008. A non-profit organization, it is dedicated to preserving the memory of the prisoners in Terezín during World War II, who, despite monumental suffering, disease and the constant presence of death, found hope and inspiration in the arts and humanities. Learn more at http://www.defiantrequiem.org.

Mr. Sidlin is the long-time resident artist/teacher and associate director of conducting studies at the Aspen Music Festival and Dean of Music at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

The BCF concert week of the Defiant Requiem is scheduled for July 15-22, 2012.