Opera Orlando is presenting the Florida premiere of a concert-drama called “Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin.” Throughout a full-scale performance of Guiseppe Verdi’s renowned “Requiem” is woven the stories of real people who once performed the opera in horrific circumstances – as prisoners in the Terezin Concentration Camp in World War II.
See the theatrical trailer for the associated documentary film at the end of this article.
Murry Sidlin is president of the Washington, D.C. based Defiant Requiem Foundation, and creator of the concert-drama. He will also be conducting the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra and a 120-person chorus with members from Opera Orlando and Orlando Sings.
The Steinmetz Hall performance at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts is a benefit concert for the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida.
Sidlin explained that the story for “Defiant Requiem” begins with Rafael Schacter, a conductor and pianist who became a prisoner in the Terezin Concentration Camp in 1941.
“And at some point after a year or two of watching the artistic growth – if you can imagine that in the concentration camp – he decided that he would like to put together a volunteer chorus and teach them, by rote, Verdi’s ‘Requiem,’” said Sidlin.
The resulting 150-person choir would eventually go on to perform the piece sixteen times, once for the Red Cross and the rest at the request of Terezin’s large community of fellow prisoners.
Sidlin explained that Rafael Schacter was extremely strict on the singers, with the goal of mentally and emotionally removing them from their circumstances. They would come after 8-10 hours of slave labor and a dinner of watery gruel, said Sidlin, “and it was very hard for them to concentrate. And [Schacter] would not accept the fact that they were tired, that they were not feeling well, that they were worried. But at the same time, here was a chance for them for a couple of hours a week to lose themselves, to lose themselves in great music.”
In Sidlin’s production, the performance of “Requiem” is interspersed with video testimony from survivors of the original Terezin chorus and chilling footage from the 1944 Nazi propaganda film about the camp. There are also live actors and soloists along with the orchestra and combined chorus.
Among the interviewed survivors was Vera Schiff – the last of the remaining original chorus members, said Sidlin, who died just a few months ago. She described her experience in the chorus, as members fought through unthinkable horrors to rehearse.
“People cannot understand what it means to be a human being, to write, think, plan, calculate, at a time when you eat standing, and you have one tin,” said Schiff in the recorded interview. “You have difficulty to maintain cleanliness, you’re hungry…it’s all very difficult to understand the courage you need for all this, and I wish the world would understand how many different faces courage and bravery have.”
