Anne-Sophie von Otter's Musical Memento
The long, sad road to soprano Anne-Sophie von Otter's latest album began with a chance meeting in the corridor of a railroad sleeper traveling from Warsaw to Berlin in 1942. On that train, the singer's father, Baron Goran von Otter, a Swedish diplomat, was approached by a young SS officer. As von Otter related to Norman Lebrecht in La Scene Musicale:
'With beads of sweat on his forehead and tears in his eyes' (as von Otter reported to his superiors), Gerstein explained that he was head of a Waffen-SS Technical Disinfection unit, responsible for supplying poisons and gas equipment. 'Yesterday,' he told von Otter, weeping uncontrollably, 'I saw something appalling.' 'Is it about the Jews?' said the diplomat.
Baron von Otter was just one of many authorities the soldier, Kurt Gerstein, appealed to in order to expose the atrocities he had witnessed. Unfortunately, all his whistle blowing was apparently in vain. Von Otter never reported Gerstein's information and the soldier, after surrendering to the French in 1945, was charged with war crimes and died in prison.
Six decades later, Anne-Sophie von Otter has released "Terezin-Theresienstadt," a eulogy to Gerstein, the father whose troubled and guilt-ridden life she recounted to Lebrecht, and the doomed prisoners of the Terezin concentration camp located north of Prague. Anne-Sophie's sad yet fascinating album opens with the ballad "Ich Wandre Durch Theresienstadt" (I Wander Through Theresienstadt), which Ilse Weber wrote for the son she shipped out of Prague prior to the Nazis' arrival. Weber, a nurse, was eventually sent to Auschwitz along with the children she sang to sleep in Terezin. In addition to other songs by Weber, von Otter's album contains a selection of classical songs by Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Ervin Schulhoff, and others, which were performed by camp musicians in order to mislead official visitors. "Terezin-Theresienstadt" is as somber and haunted an album as its origins portend.