Music Set Free – Stories of Notes, Imprisonment, Horrors, and Hope

RAI TECHE ARCHIVE ALIVE! 10 YEARS
presents
Free Music
Stories of notes, imprisonment, horrors, and hope
(2022 – 56’)

In connection with the show Pour la fin du temps Presented by Madalena Reversa—with a national premiere on October 13th at the Teatro Astra as part of the 31st edition of the Festival delle Colline Torinesi—Rai Teche invites the public to a screening of the documentary produced by Rai Cultura. Music Set Free. Stories of Notes, Imprisonment, Horrors, and Hope By Pietro De Gennaro and Alessandro Greco, directed by Alessandra Peralta. The evening will be introduced by Sergio Ariotti, president of the Festival delle Colline Torinesi, and historian Aldo Salassa. Produced by Rai Cultura for Holocaust Remembrance Day, the documentary chronicles the extensive research of pianist and composer Francesco Lotoro, who has worked to bring to light “musical works written during civilian and military captivity in the Second World War”—a collection compiled in his *Antologia Musicale Concentrazionaria* (Concentration Camp Musical Anthology). Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Terezín, Buchenwald, Fossoli, San Vittore in Milan, Via Tasso in Rome, and Alberobello are among the sites where the stories of remarkable musicians—including not only Jewish individuals, but also Roma, Sinti, and political deportees—resurface. These accounts are shared by survivors still living today—in kibbutzim in Israel or in the United States—as well as by family members who keep the memory of their loved ones alive.
Lotoro has succeeded in recovering musical instruments, which have been returned to the families, along with thousands of musical scores—melodies composed by prisoners in Nazi camps between 1933 and 1945 as an irrepressible hymn to life. This echoes the event of January 15, 1941—a moment also highlighted in the theatrical production by Madalena Reversa, which accompanies this screening—when, in the Nazi camp of Görlitz, Olivier Messiaen conducted the premiere of his *Quatuor pour la fin du Temps* (“Quartet for the End of Time”). The piece had been composed in the camp’s latrines, using broken instruments, before an audience of three hundred prisoners and Nazi soldiers. One of the most monumental compositions of the 20th century was born in a place that represented the end of the world—the end of time.
*Rai Teche Archive Alive!* is a series that invites the public to explore the vast Rai archives. Admission is free; reservations are required and can be made by writing to mediateca.torino@rai.it.