Newly restored Music composed at Auschwitz to be played in London

The young British composer and conductor LeoGeyer(31),whoiscurrentlycompletinghis doctorate for music and composition at the University of Oxford, has recently finished restoring fragments of the music that was discovered in the concentration camp of Auschwitz, and will play them with his orchestra in an upcoming performance in London.

There, he heard of the musical scores and manuscripts discovered at Auschwitz, that had not been further studied for almost 80 years. In an interview with CNN Geyer said: “I knew therewereorchestrasinAuschwitzandthatwas what we were talking about because, as a musician, it was something I was interested in.”

In total, around 210 musical compositions had been found, though large parts had been destroyed, which made the pieces almost impossible to restore. Geyer said that reconstructing the music was “like trying to remember a novel, word by word, but music is immensely more complicated.” During his work, he returned to Poland four more times and has conducted detailed research into the orchestras at Nazi concentration camps, especially the one at Auschwitz.

In 2015 Geyer travelled to Auschwitz because he was asked to compose a piece in memory of the British holocaust expert Martin Gilbert, who had died earlier that year. As he is not Jewish himself, he wanted to visit the site to experience the necessary “sense of the gravity” – as he stated – of the work of Gilbert.

The music will be performed at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London by Geyer’s Constella Music orchestra, under the name “Orchestras of Auschwitz''. Part of the orchestra is Simon Wallfisch, whose grandmother, Anita LaskerWallfisch, is a holocaust survivor. She has stated that she only survived her year at Auschwitz because she joined the camp orchestra. In an interview with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust she said: “as long as the Germans wanted an orchestra, it would have been counter-productive to kill us.”