Description
Marius Flothuis wrote both his Sonata da Camera (1943) and Aubade (1944) in Nazi camps. Much of the Sonata retains a neo-Classical detachment, but the Lamento at its heart shows the composer’s pain, while the purity of the Aubade offers the hope of a new dawn.
Begun in 1939, the three movements of Leo Smit’s powerful Sonata reflect the increasing despair of his own experience; the tragic slow movement from February 1943, shortly before he was deported.
Hans Osieck’s mazurka, Varsovie accuse (1946), marked “slow, sorrowful and sinister”, is heavy with the misery of the Warsaw Ghetto; it casts the youthful exuberance of Dick Kattenburg’s Pièce (1939) in a terrible new light, for by the time Osieck wrote this work, the 24 year old Kattenburg had been murdered in Auschwitz. Even the lush Romanticism of Andriessen’s Praeludium (1942) is marked “with sadness”, and Escher’s haunting Habanera (1945) is but a ghostly flicker of how it might have sounded before the war.
