As the musicians play, the tune is instantly recognisable: Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. It’s not quite as you know it, though. The orchestra is small, and there are odd instruments – recorder, accordion – that Mozart would not have used.
The familiar alien music is how it was arranged and performed in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. More than 1.1 million people died there, and for many it would have been the last music they heard – the gas chambers were near where one of the camp’s orchestras performed each day.
This music was not for entertainment; it was weaponised, a point English composer-conductor Leo Geyer makes early on in The Lost Music of Auschwitz, a documentary produced to mark this year’s 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.
The film is based on Geyer’s PhD research, and his aim here is to reproduce the music of Auschwitz as it was heard at the time, and show how it was used. The musicians are reading scores Geyer found languishing in the Auschwitz archives, untouched since the end of the war. They were not always in good shape, and rarely easy to decipher.
Geyer struggled to make sense of arrangements, which constantly changed as the people who played them died, meaning parts had to be rewritten to accommodate musicians’ different abilities and instruments.
The music is, nevertheless, there. Composers left traces. Some who died in the camps – notably Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann and Hans Krása – have had what remains of the music they wrote before Auschwitz revived, performed and recorded.
It’s harder to capture the sounds of the orchestra players, who left no such marks. They are heard here through what Geyer makes of the music and through survivors’ stories. Spoken testimonies, both new and archival, comprise a large part of the documentary and provide its most powerful segments.
The Lost Music’s final section is given to the detective work Geyer carried out to give name to the composer of a pencil-written smudge of music buried in the archives. There’s not much to go on, and Geyer shows considerable ingenuity to discover who wrote it and then complete and orchestrate a full work from the original sketch.
Watching as the piece, Daremne Żale (Futile Regrets) is performed for the first time in 80 years is unbearably poignant. You can read on their faces that the players feel it, too.
“You might think that having done this research for the best part of 10 years I’d be immune to the horrors,” Geyer said in a French TV interview. “I’m not. And the only way that myself and the other [musicians] can express how we really feel is through music.”
The Lost Music of Auschwitz, Sky Arts, 7.30pm, Tuesday, July 22.
