This book presents a number of problems. It focuses not on the Holocaust but on music composed and performed in concentration camps, among which it includes prisoner-of-war camps, Soviet gulags and ghettos. Most of the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust died in mass shootings or at extermination centres where they were killed on arrival.
The framing of the study elides vast differences between camps. One example even pertains to the musical activity of Italian soldiers in (comparatively benign) British wartime captivity in South Africa. Although he speaks constantly of “research,” Francesco Lotoro offers no footnote documentation. It’s difficult to tell what he himself discovered, or how he built on the investigations of others. Accounts of meetings with survivors dissipate into banal logistical detail. No clear distinction emerges between new finds and works already known.
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Questionable too is a consistent motif of celebratory tribute to the indomitable triumph of artistic creativity over adverse conditions. Apart from the fact that the Holocaust, above all other historical crimes, is considered irreconcilable with such consoling pieties, Lotoro’s emphasis ignores how music-making in the Nazi camps was sometimes mandated by the overseers, and became a form of torture. The one example he does cite in this connection concerns what may be a myth about a composition known as the “tango of death” and the Janowska camp near Lviv. A paean to the ingenuity of prisoners in constructing (or forgoing) musical instruments omits the correlation between an increase in the number of pianos at Theresienstadt in early 1944 and preparations for a propaganda film.
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Lotoro is a pianist, not an historian, and this text is primarily a series of often anecdotal notes to accompany the pieces he has collected, performed and recorded. His inventory reminds us to go back to the musicians themselves and the traditions in which their work was embedded, rather than relegating them to his not only linguistically dubious category “concentrationary music”. One of the well-known pieces from this ruinous period is French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written and first performed in a German internment camp in 1941. Listening to it could not take you farther from the schmaltzy original title of this book, “a song will save the world”.
