They have tended to think that if the music had been any good they would already have known about
“They have tended to think that, if the music had been any good, they would already have known about it,” he explains. “But then Berthold Goldschmidt’s work made them think again, while Braunfels’ Die Vogel [a masterly operatic version of Aristophanes' The Birds recently issued as part of the series] marked another step forward…”As to Yinon, further discoveries soon followed Brundibar and so did recording commitments, initially for Koch International (for whom he has recorded music by Terezin composer Vicktor Ullmann, creator of the camp’s best- known musical memorial, the opera The Emperor of Atlantis), and now for Decca. For him, even being in Israel couldn’t protect him from the Nazis.” Before Yinon left Israel, he met Ruth Elias, who, years earlier, had survived one of Josef Mengele’s hideous medical experiments. “She had been in Auschwitz,” Yinon explains, “and had decided to speak out about these things – although people at the time thought she was crazy and that she ought to shut up.
She said to me, `Why go to Germany?’ And I answered, with some embarrassment, that I wanted to start my career there. My father’s mother was shot in front of his eyes: he was just nine at the time. My mother was actually born in Israel, but when the Italians bombed Tel Aviv – in 1943, I believe – her father was killed. “It is very hard for an Israeli to go to Germany,” he tells me. “Some weeks after I arrived there, I started to think things out more deeply.
Though modestly attended, the Prague performance was enthusiastically received and the conductor, Israel Yinon, visibly grateful for such a genuinely appreciative response. Yinon, who is Israeli-born and now in his mid-forties, is tirelessly energetic. Some two hours after conducting Sarlatan, he walked from the State Opera to my hotel; he didn’t actually reach me until well after midnight, and yet he was still eager to talk.His first significant conducting engagements were in Germany, mostly with leading radio orchestras. Then there was Brundibar (Bumble-bee), a children’s opera by Haas’s compatriot Hans Krasa, performed in the camp itself by a cast that was constantly replenished as its young stars were systematically despatched to the gas chambers. Both Krasa and Haas entered Terezin in 1941, and both travelled to their deaths in Auschwitz on the same October day three years later.Sarlatan itself dates from the late 1930s and has a decidedly Czech flavour: bright, tuneful and vividly atmospheric, sometimes reminiscent of Haas’s teacher, Leos Janacek, sometimes of Korngold, even Hindemith. The “small fortress” museum houses a number of remarkable pencil sketches made at the time, many of which astound with their acute sensitivity to detail and human expression.
