Memorial sites are not dedicated to silence. This is the conviction held by Alain Chouraqui, founding president of the Camp des Milles Foundation. Both a history museum, perpetuating the memory of the Shoah, but also a “museum of ideas” with its reflective section on the mechanisms that lead to genocides, the old tile factory in the hamlet of Milles (in the commune of Aix -en-Provence), which served as an internment and deportation camp during the Second World War, will this evening welcome baritone Julien Clément and the Les Métamorphoses orchestra for a most emblematic concert.
Organized with the association Forum Voix suppresses, this will indeed feature several works by composers persecuted by the Nazis… Including Erich Itor Kahn and Adolf Sieberth, both interned at Les Milles between 1939 and 1942.
“The last one composed the camp anthem on the spot. The first, a very beautiful piece for cello and piano, whose fateful title, in Latin (Nenia Judaeis qui hac aetate perierunt, “All the Jews are not dead”), sounded from 1940 like a premonition of the Final Solution. explains the pianist and artistic advisor of Voix Étoufées, Thomas Tacquet. Which at the same time reminds us that many composers fleeing Nazism passed through France. “Some stayed there, like Joseph Kosma. Others only spent a more or less long stint there before going into exile in Spain or the United States. But most were initially cabaret and light music composers, curious about jazz and cinema. Many found a favorable response to their music, considered degenerate on the other side of the Rhine,” he continues.
The program for this evening’s concert, which will mix the light music and klezmer sounds of Leopoldi, Weill, Spoliansky or the Comedian Harmonists (“a sort of Frères Jacques before the Second World War”) with the laments of Kahn or the Chant des deported, it will be echoed. Recalling that music does not only have the value of historical testimony working as a memory. “It is also an act of resistance in the face of dehumanization,” underlines Alain Chouraqui.
A double resonance that the Camp des Milles Foundation has strived to perpetuate since the inauguration of the memorial site in 2012. “From the first year, we carried out significant musical creation work, in partnership with the Aix Festival -en-Provence and the London Symphony Orchestra. The latter had worked throughout the year with 200 young people from the northern districts of Marseille around musical portraits of camp internees,” recalls the researcher.
Each year, the foundation strives to host at least two concerts in the venue’s auditorium, and regularly supports musical creation projects as part of initiatives against extremism and discrimination. “If music occupies a less important place than exhibitions or conferences, we want it to always be an integral part of the place,” he explains. On the one hand because among the many artists who were interned here were musicians. Then because music, thanks to the direct emotions it communicates, is a very powerful way of transmitting history or resisting the mechanisms of dehumanization. We saw it during the various concerts here, like when Renaud Capuçon came to play Messiaen’s Quartet pour la fin du temps. The emotion felt by the public as well as by the artists is of unusual intensity.”
A dual role which is also far from trivial in the current context. “The news of recent months and days reminds us that there are still so many suppressed voices in the world!” It is not the association that will contradict him. Founded just twenty years ago by conductor Amaury du Closel, the latter has never stopped working to rediscover or rehabilitate composers persecuted by Nazism in Germany, but also in France. “And more broadly of all composers prevented, in one form or another by totalitarian regimes,” specifies Thomas Tacquet. We are far from being at the end of the road!”
Concert on October 5 at 7 p.m. at Camp des Milles (Aix-en-Provence). www.campdesmilles.org All dates of the “Music, war and peace in Europe 1922-2022” project by Les Voix etouffees on www.voixetouffees.org
