MusicSpoke | Artist Owned Sheet Music™

About the Score

The Voices of Terezin. In the Spring of 2015, I was asked to write music to accompany the story of the Theresienstadt Ghetto choir. The 1944 performances of the Verdi Requiem by this chorus of 150 Jews in Terezín, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, is a fitting postscript to the history of this great work. With only a broken piano and single copy of the score, the inmates learned the powerful, inspiring composition and sang it for the only audience they had —their captors and fellow prisoners.

I was deeply moved and inspired by the request. Though, I also felt the burden of telling this story in music with every bar I wrote. Honestly, what music could there be that might do justice to the sufferings these people experienced, many unto death? Above all, this piece is an expression of hope. It is meant to honor the Theresienstadt choir’s members, both the fallen and survivors. It is offered as a tribute to their great strength and courage in the face of a horrific tragedy.

Hopefully the work may also serve as a small reminder of how fragile and precious life is and how intimately connected we all are as human beings. Perhaps the cries of the orchestra may reawaken the silenced voices of this humble choir for just a moment so that they may not ever be forgotten. The opening theme (which appears recurrently and at the closing of the piece) is a paraphrase of the "Agnus Dei” from Verdi's Requiem.

Marianka Zadikow May, one of the Theresienstadt survivors, said, “This is our way of fighting back —we have a vision of high art. Singing is the pinnacle of defiance.”

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