Conference Agenda

How does a musician express themselves while in captivity? What do we make of stories with radically different interpretations of musical life under persecution? Music in concentration and internment camps during the Holocaust served multiple, and often contradictory, functions, shaping not only what imprisoned musicians composed and performed but also how their legacies have been remembered, distorted, or forgotten. Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann, for example, reflected on his incarceration at the concentration camp Terezín by writing, “I have bloomed in musical growth and not felt myself at all inhibited: by no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon…” (Lotoro 2021). Such statements have frequently been referenced to support a reassuring narrative in which music in the Holocaust functioned primarily as a source of meaning, psychological survival, and emotional support. This optimistic framing continues to dominate scholarship and public understanding of what audiences and learners are encouraged to remember about music throughout the Holocaust. However, this emphasis on heroic or redemptive narratives risks obscuring experiences in which music was inseparable from coercion, surveillance, and trauma (Wlodarski 2015).

After surviving displacement and persecution, for example, Jewish composers Szymon Laks and Hans Gál wrote memoirs describing their experiences during the Holocaust in striking detail. These accounts have been translated into multiple languages and widely circulated for outreach and educational purposes, positioning them among the most preserved testimonial sources for Holocaust-era music-making. Yet, despite their accessibility and historical value, the music and writings of Laks and Gál remain largely absent from both scholarly discourse and performance.

This paper focuses on Szymon Laks and Hans Gál, who experienced the Holocaust via different forms of persecution, captivity, and displacement. While Laks composed in Auschwitz under surveillance and threat of death, Gál composed in a Scottish internment camp at his own will, writing music shaped by loss and dislocation yet also emphasizing optimism. Drawing from memoirs, diaries, and other archival materials, this paper foregrounds the individuality of musical experience and resists generalized interpretations that frame Holocaust music exclusively as a positive or redemptive coping mechanism.

On 23 July 1948, an orchestra comprised of young men stepped into the Cour de l’Archevêché for an inaugural performance of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. To many sitting in the audience of that first Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, these were familiar silhouettes: the Orchestre des Cadets du Conservatoire. Despite being students, their reputation preceded them: initially conceived by Paris Conservatoire director Claude Delvincourt in 1943 to prevent pupils from being deported to forced labor camps, the orchestra had survived the Liberation and remained preceded by the halo of Resistance. Beloved of reviewers, they had quite simply become an eponym for Free France. The main event that evening however, was possibly not so much the Cadets' presence as that of the maestro leading them, Munich Radio Orchestra conductor Hans Rosbaud. Indeed, for the first time, a conductor from Germany was invited back to perform in France.

Taking the orchestra’s 1948 festival performance as an entry point, this paper elucidates the manufacturing of the Cadets’ identity as a ‘Resistance orchestra’ after 1944. In particular, I argue that the new music festivals which hosted them in the French regions benefited from and contributed to this imagery. While the ‘Conservatoire Cadets’ have been studied by musicologists (Poidevin, 2003; Fulcher, 2018) and historians (Sablonnière, 1996) for the cultural role they played as an orchestra during the Occupation, I foray beyond the Occupation period and outside of Paris to show both the power and the limitations of their legacy.

Through the study of administrative archival sources and press accounts, this paper argues that the Cadets’ ‘Resistance’ aura was used by festival organisers as part of a ‘postwar tandem’ (Pestel, 2023)—a way to balance out the notoriety of professionals struggling to secure an invitation to perform in France after the Liberation. Ultimately, the attention paid to the Cadets-Rosbaud tandem highlights the political and cultural significance of festival performances during the postwar years.

Music was doubtlessly part of daily life for French soldiers held in Nazi prisoner of war (POW) camps after France’s defeat in the early years of World War II; government records indicate that hundreds of professional musicians were among the soldiers captured, reports from camp inspections by the French government and the Red Cross regularly note the presence of orchestras and other ensembles in most camps, and compositions written in captivity were frequently featured on concerts both in the camps and in occupied Paris. Among other purposes, music served as an essential distraction for the prisoners who spent long years suffering in captivity. Imprisoned musicians spent their time writing new works, educating other prisoners about music, and putting on performances for audiences of captives.

How can we make sense of these musical diversions from captivity? Did they represent prisoners’ valiant attempts to retain their dignity in a dehumanizing situation, resistant expressions of French pride and cultural status in the face of German domination, or metaphorical sedatives that numbed prisoners to the direness of their situation? Directly following and decades after the war, former prisoners and historians published their perspectives on other so-called “leisure activities,” including classes and conferences, theater performances, and sports, taking a variety of stances on the question of what, exactly, it meant to be distracted from captivity. By placing examples of music performance, education, and composition within the framework of postwar discourse on diversion, this paper examines the ways in which music served to distract prisoners from the circumstances of their captivity and explores the tension between understanding these activities as a source of dignity or pride and reading them as a cause of complacency.