CBS’s 60 Minutes will include a segment this Sunday, February 25th on Hans Krasa’s Brundibar, an opera that the composer performed with child inmates in the Nazi concentration camp at Terezin.
The opera is now available on Naxos - featuring an English libretto by Pulitzer Prize – winning playwright Tony Kushner – performed by the Seattle-based organization Music of Remembrance and Gerard Schwarz.
Krasa had originally completed Brundibar in 1938 in Prague. As a Jew, he was imprisoned in Terezin after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, where he revised the score and mounted a production in 1943.
A story built around the themes of good versus evil and the value of courage, Brundibar provided some measure of inspiration for Terezin inmates. In a sick irony, however, the Nazis also found a way to use Krasa’s production as a propanganda tool to demonstrate their “fair treatment” of the Jewish population in Czechoslovakia.
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