By Eileen Wingard
SAN DIEGO — The back stage entrance guard of the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. ushered me in after checking my name from a list of 50. Conductor Murry Sidlin’s concert-drama, “The Defiant Requiem,” scheduled for October 6, had been sold out since June 23. The best Murry could do was to invite me to the dress rehearsal the night before.
There I was, with 49 others, seated a few rows back from the stage. Murry Sidlin, looking calm and confident, came down to greet us. One of the women seated near me worked at the Holocaust Museum and facilitated additional video footage for this production. Another did publicity for previous performances. There was a couple from San Diego County. She, a native of Prague, was a friend of one of the survivors seen in a video clip. I recognized Edgar Krasa, the cook who had shared a room with Raphael Schechter, the conductor of 16 performances of Verdi’s Requiem at Terezin. Krasa sent greetings with me to his friend in La Mesa, Terezin survivor Eve Gerstle.
Edgar Krasa was also present when I attended the premiere of Sidlin’s “The Defiant Requiem” in Portland, Oregon several years ago. To simulate the primitive surroundings at Terezin, it was performed in a warehouse and the audience sat on crude benches. Here, I was in a comfortable plush seat at the elegant Kennedy Center. Would the impact be the same?
Except for a rehearsal break, the work was performed without interruption by the Washington National Opera Orchestra, the City Choir of Washington, the Catholic University of America Chorus and four soloists, all under the direction of Murry Sidlin. It was apparent that all the performers appreciated the profundity of the work. There was a sense of serious commitment from everyone on stage.
The performers understood what it required to learn such a challenging work by heart. Schechter had but a single score from which to teach the Terezin inmates Verdi’s Requiem. One survivor, who sang under Schechter. said, “We felt as if the words were written especially for us as we sang to the Nazis about their final demise.”
Stephen Brookes of the Washington Post, reviewing the event, described it as “a bare-knuckle performance…The requiem itself is almost unbearably powerful on its own—a searing tone poem about the end of the world, operatic in scope and run through with celestial melodies and cascades of fire and brimstone. But Sidlin’s setting of the music, incorporating film of the camp, interviews with survivors, and actors describing the dramatic background, was handled with both dignity and power, and pushed the requiem to even more harrowing depths and exalting heights”
A week later, I was in New York City at a reception sponsored by the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. Several people were there from Washington, D.C. I inquired whether they were at “The Defiant Requiem.” All six of them were present at the performance and they told me how deeply impressed they were. One had relatives who had been incarcerated at Terezin. For her, it was a personal story.
Several weeks later, back in San Diego, I was at the Jewish Book Fair. I asked one of the speakers, Erica Brown, author of Confronting Scandal and scholar-in-residence for the Jewish Federation of Washington, D.C., if she had attended the October 6 performance of Sidlin’s concert-drama. Yes, “it was one of the most moving nights of my life!”
The dress rehearsal left me filled with inspiration and sorrow. As Brookes described, ”When the singers filed out at the end, quietly intoning the “Oseh shalom” from the Jewish liturgy as a single violinist continued to play on the darkening stage, the effect was nothing less than electrifying.”
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Wingard is a retired violinist with the San Diego Symphony and a freelance writer on music