1933: Upon their rise to power, the Nazis began to ban any musical expression that did not conform to their ideology and to eradicate what they called “degenerate music,” according to the title of an exhibition organized in 1938 in Dรผsseldorf, modeled after the one dedicated to “degenerate art” held in Munich the previous year. Particularly targeted were “Negro music,” namely jazz, and Jewish composers, some of whom, like Schoenberg, were representatives of an avant-garde for which the Nazis had only hatred and contempt. Thus, atonal music โ which a critic of the time considered to destroy “this very obviously German element, the perfect chord” โ was for the Nazis the quintessential product of the “Jewish spirit.” The Nazis opposed it with Wagner, who in his time wrote an anti-Semitic pamphlet, “Judaism in Music”. He embodies, in the eyes of the regime’s ideologues, a music supposed to regenerate the German soul, which Jews are accused of having negatively influenced.
Banned from concerts, expelled from orchestras and conservatories, deprived of all possibilities to earn a living in the land of Bach and Beethoven, many composers and performers, Jewish or not, chose to go into exile, particularly to the United States, but many have fallen into oblivion. They are just beginning to reemerge.
2009: The choreographer and artistic director Julia Tumorticchi with Les Ballets des Alpes-Maritimes presents in this new creation, a little-known episode of history during the dark period of Nazism. Ilse Weber, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa, Walter Braunfels… so many unknown composers and forgotten voices, whom the young dancers will bring back to life. Choreographies with clean lines, where contemporaneity and neoclassicism mix, through music composed almost entirely in concentration camps. A bodily evocation on the chords of these stifled musics, highlighted by minimalistic lighting settings by scenographer Jean-luc Tournรฉ and light designer Yann Le Meignen, delivering through dance a vibrant allegorical, timeless, and powerful tribute.
The new creation of the Ballets des Alpes-Maritimes is part of the obligations we all have towards history, which are transmission, preservation, and the perpetuation of the collective memory.
This creation, so that the day may come when these composers, played, recorded, and listened to, will finally find the audience that was stolen from them.
