Conductor performs music from Theresienstadt

NEW YORK, April 26 (JTA) — As the Holocaust raged around them, 150 Jewish inmates at Theresienstadt joined together in song. Under the direction of Raphael Schachter, an energetic young conductor, the unusual chorus — which had to be replenished several times as its members were shipped off and murdered by Nazis — performed Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem Mass” 15 times between 1943 and 1944. The Christian liturgical text may seem an odd programming choice for a group of Jewish singers incarcerated in a Nazi labor camp. But for Robert De Cormier, who has conducted the piece at Carnegie Hall, performing the Requiem was a bold act of defiance by a group of doomed artists. “When the mezzo sings, ‘On that day the book will be opened and no crime will go unpunished’ — the whole idea of the Jews singing this incredible statement and hurling it in the face of the Nazis was overpowering,” he says. At 83, De Cormier is notable for both his longevity and his continued vigor: he is the musical director for the singing trio Peter, Paul and Mary; performs 25 to 30 concerts a year with his Counterpoint vocal ensemble and is choral director of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. But as the conductor and arranger of dozens of pieces of Jewish and Israeli music throughout his long career, some from the repertoire of the Theresienstadt choir, the Belmont, Vt., resident is also notable for something else. He is not Jewish. “I love that music, the culture, the stories,” says De Cormier, who counts among his friends Theodore Bikel and Herschel Bernardi. It started, he says, when he was a voice student at the Juilliard School in New York. While studying toward his degree, he landed his first conducting job, leading a group of young Jewish folk singers who wanted to sing Yiddish numbers along with some African American spirituals. Then, during the McCarthy period, a group of actors and writers got together and created “The World of Sholom Aleichem,” three plays tied together by the narrative voice of Mendele the Bookseller, a classic Aleichem character. De Cormier composed the music for one of the stories, “The Gymnasium.” Later, he wrote music for “The Wall,” a play about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that starred George C. Scott. He also has been the arranger on albums by Martha Schlamme and the Israeli singer Netanya Davrath and on a record of Yiddish songs — along with songs from “Fiddler on the Roof” — with Jan Pierce. For many years, he also was Harry Belafonte’s musical director. The latter gig may not seem to follow naturally from all the Jewish music, but for De Cormier it’s all related. “I’ve always been involved in African American music, too,” he says. “And I find great similarities in the cultures: the persecution, the yearning for freedom. Everything about it rings a very, very strong bell for me.” In 1995, De Cormier and his wife of 54 years, Louise, founded the Terezin Project, an effort to teach New Englanders about the Holocaust, both in schools and to the general public. Terezin is the Czech name for Theresienstadt. De Cormier’s interest in the Holocaust stems from two sources. In 1967, he was asked to conduct the music for a planned film on the performance of the Theresienstadt “Requiem.” An Auschwitz survivor named Joseph Bor, who had written a book on the camp’s chorus, guided him on a tour of the site, pointing out where the group had rehearsed. The trip, De Cormier says, exposed him first-hand to what had happened there. During the war, the camp housed many of the finest Jewish musicians, writers, actors and artists from Central and Western Europe, and the Nazis tolerated some of their artistic activity in order to deceive the world into believing that they were treating Jews humanely in their camps. Among those imprisoned at Theresienstadt was Edgar Krasa, who shared an attic room with Schachter, the choir conductor, and sang in all 15 performances of the “Requiem.” Schachter, who taught choir members Latin to perform the “Requiem,” “wanted to get at the Nazis by explaining to himself that this is a requiem for the dead Nazis,” Krasa, now 84, recalls. “He told us what is in his mind and the council of elders responsible for internal affairs told him, ‘If the Nazis find out your intent behind your performing, they’ll hang you and deport the whole choir.’ “He told us about the danger,” Krasa continues. “None left. We all stayed behind. We all shared his conviction in telling the Germans that they will not escape unpunished.” While Krasa was incarcerated in Theresienstadt, De Cormier was fighting in Germany as infantryman in the U.S. Army. In November 1944, as his unit pushed toward the Rhine River, a mortar shell exploded nearby and badly injured his hand; it took 13 operations to save it. “At the same time these people were doing these things in the concentration camps, I was in northern France and Holland and Germany,” he says. “I felt very strongly about defeating fascism and” this experience has “added a deeper meaning to the music.” After its first six weeks of rehearsals, the Nazis deported close to half of the original 150 members of the choir, forcing Schachter to recruit dozens of new singers and to train them from scratch. By the time the choir put on its final show, its ranks had been diminished to just 60 singers. Adolf Eichmann, who supervised implementation of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” is said to have attended one of the group’s concerts, joking to a colleague that the Jews were “singing their own requiem.” Schachter was later killed by Nazis, although it is not clear exactly when or where he died. In 2004 De Cormier released “When the Rabbi Danced: Songs of Jewish Life from the Shtetl to the Resistance.” The album includes 25 songs in Yiddish performed by Counterpoint, including some that were once sung by Schachter’s choir. And in addition to his performances of the “Requiem,” De Cormier has recorded music by the Jewish composer Victor Ullman — who created some 20 works while in Theresienstadt and later was killed at Auschwitz — including the opera “The Emperor of Atlantis.” Earlier this month, Counterpoint put on a concert of Israeli folk music in Montreal. The program included such songs as “Shir la’Shalom,” the Song for Peace — the lyrics that were “in Rabin’s pocket when he was assassinated,” De Cormier notes — “Mayim Mayim,” “Erev Shel Shoshanim,” “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” and several versions of “Hinei Ma Tov,” including one from Uganda’s Abayudaya Jews. They’ll be recording an album of Hebrew music in May. Of the 11 singers in Counterpoint, De Cormier says, only one is Jewish. And so, much as Schachter’s singers did with Latin more than a half century ago, De Cormier’s singers have begun to learn Hebrew and Yiddish — or have at least started learning how to pronounce them. “We had wonderful help with the Yiddish pronunciation,” he says. “And we’re now getting help with the Hebrew, which is easier than the Yiddish.”