The experience that colored everything Britten went on to write classical music

IIn 1945, violinist Yehudi Menuhin briefly toured Germany, giving concerts for concentration camp survivors. On Friday, July 27, 1945, he arrived in Bergen-Belsen, which had been liberated three months earlier, and held two concerts in the camp cinema. The experience had a profound impact. “I will never forget that evening as long as I live,” Menuhin said. “After Belsen, he was never the same as a Jew again,” said his sister, Yaltah Menuhin. Anita Lasker, a Pilsen survivor, was present at one of those concerts. She was nineteen years old, and had been a cellist as a child at Auschwitz, where she played in the women’s orchestra, under the direction of Alma Rösé, Gustav Mahler’s niece.

Lasker wrote to her cousin about the concert. “Who would have thought that Belsen Camp would hear Yehudi Menuhin play? A wonderful evening”, which included “Bach/Kreisler’s Prelude and Fugue, Kreutzer’s Sonata, Mendelssohn’s Concerto, something by Debussy and many smaller, unfamiliar items”.

Lasker’s attention to detail was relentless. Menuhin’s clothing “borders on sloppy and fits in perfectly with the surroundings.” He played “flawlessly”, but she felt he had regressed. She wondered: Maybe the atmosphere was not inspiring (“It was impossible for complete silence in the hall, and I felt very shy in front of the audience”).

Lasker also noted that Menuhin played with a pianist whose name she omitted. He made an impression: “As for his accompaniment, I can only say that I cannot imagine anything more beautifully done. He was quite unobtrusive, and yet I found myself transfixed by him as he sat there as if he were not booing a goose—but playing to perfection.”

Lasker’s memory never faded. she later told an interviewer. “I couldn’t take my eyes off that man who was playing the piano, and that was Benjamin Britten.”

In the 1960s, Lasker-Wallfisch, as she became after her marriage to pianist Peter Wallfisch, performed with “The Man Who Played the Piano.” She came to Aldeburgh, as a member of the English Chamber Orchestra (which she helped found in 1948, originally as the Goldsbrough Orchestra). On several occasions she was in the cello section when Britten was the solo pianist or conductor. “He was a very detached man, and you didn’t really talk to him,” she recalled. “I accepted Britten as Britten, and that was that!”

1969 They met each other the next morning while training in the nearby village of Thorpenness.

“He walked in and the first thing he said was: ‘Anita, I’ve got your letter.’” Lasker-Wallfish was distraught: he had lost his piano, his Maltings, and yet he recognized the importance of the letter.

Menuhin will say that Britten insisted on joining him on the tour. Like the violinist, he was “looking for some commitment to the human condition whose terrible depths have recently been revealed.”

Britten rarely spoke about the experience, which he found, in many ways, “terrifying.” Peter Pears will recall that he once admitted that the experience “colored everything he later wrote.” The biographer shared this view, concluding that “everywhere Britten brought out every word he never spoke of Belsen.”

Shortly after his return from Belsen, Britten set about writing The Rape of Lucretia, with a libretto by his friend Ronald Duncan. The opera ends with a finale (written on a train from London to Bath, according to Duncan, so I am not alone in finding inspiration to write on such journeys), an elegy for a female chorus:

Is it all? Is all this suffering and pain?
Is this in vain?
Is this old world getting old?
In sin alone?
Can we get to nothing?
But oceans wider than our tears?

“That’s not all,” the chorus answers in a hopeful tone.

These words recall Robert Jackson’s opening arguments at the famous Nuremberg trial, where new crimes – genocide, crimes against humanity, and aggression – that I wrote about in the East West Street Journal appeared for the first time. “Civilization wonders whether the law is so backwards that it is completely incapable of dealing with crimes of this magnitude committed by criminals of this level of importance,” Jackson told the justices. “It does not expect that you will be able to make war impossible. It expects that your judicial work will place the forces of international law, its principles, its prohibitions, and, most important of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will in all countries may ‘live without permission, under the law.’”

However, one should not get caught up in the law and legal procedures.

Six months after her release, Anita Lasker was still in Pilsen, working as a translator. She appeared as a witness in the trial of the commandant of Auschwitz, an experience that remains engraved.

“The trial struck me as a colossal farce,” she wrote in her memoir, Inherit the Truth. I came face to face with “British justice” and the idea of ​​“you are innocent unless proven guilty”. This was a ‘praiseworthy principle’, but how could it be applied to crimes ‘incomprehensible to the rest of the world’, in legal proceedings that presented the impression of performance, such as ‘exaggerated theatre’?

The experience left her skeptical, and we talked about this when I met her, shortly after her 100th birthday. Naturally, the trial allowed “the lawyers to show their abilities,” but for those who were on the receiving end of the “killing machine,” the experience was a “sickness” and left a “bitter aftertaste.”

The cellist asked: “Is it possible to apply the law in the traditional sense to crimes so far removed from the law as the massacre of millions of people, which were committed in the cause of ‘purifying the human race’?”

This is an appropriate question, and it was not only Lasker-Wallfish who raised it. I often ask myself the same question, not least last January in The Hague, where I was appearing in a genocide case before the International Court of Justice, and where we heard horrific and painful accounts from members of the Rohingya community of killings, rapes and murders of children.

Such topics motivated Britten. In 1968, he decided to perform Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Kinderkreuzzug,” written in 1941, about a group of children who become orphans after the outbreak of war in Poland. Asking for help with an English translation, for the fiftieth anniversary of Save the Children, he turned to his friend Hans Keller (to whom he later dedicated his last completed instrumental work, Quartet No. 3 in G, Op 94).

Brecht’s poetry – and Britten’s music – evoke the absurdity of war, and the limits of due process, as here in Keller’s translation of The Children’s Crusade:

Then there was war
The war against some other runaway children;
The war ended simply:
Meaning he had none.
And then there was a trial,
On both sides a candle burned.
What an embarrassing case!
The judge condemned! What a scandal!

Like the East West Street lawyer Hirsch Lauterpacht, Keller often listened to music at his home in Willow Road, Hampstead, which Britten visited. Oddly enough, I now live in the house that Keller shared with his wife, Mylène Cosman, an artist whose drawings of musicians, including Britten (and his parrot) and Menuhin, brought great fame.

For Menuhin, performing in Pilsen with Britten was “like a ray of light in the darkness… because music is liberation.”

For Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, whose life was saved simply because she played the cello, music is “indestructible,” even when it is taken over by malevolent forces.

And for me, when things seem tough, as they did in The Hague last January, I draw strength from listening to “The National Anthem,” a song by Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, who was a law student: “There’s a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”