Interbellum. On the 80th anniversary of the end of the war

Interbellum — in this name, denoting a specific historical period between the two wars, different roots can be heard: bella — beauty, bell — bell (“Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for you”), bellum — the war itself, inter — between, international…

Beauties of the interwar period, beauty that did not save the world – this is what the Interbellum project is about. And it is dedicated to the heroines of their time, the stars of Paris and Moscow, Leningrad and Berlin, Prague and Amsterdam. And the project will open with the program “Poem without a Hero” – by the name of one of the most tragic works of Anna Akhmatova. This is women’s music and music based on women’s poems.

Dutch composers Henriette Bosmans and Marjo Tal were contemporaries of Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, the leading female faces of the Russian Interbellum. Bosmans, the daughter of a violinist at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and a piano teacher at the Amsterdam Conservatory, made her debut as a pianist in 1915. Her brilliant career was interrupted by the war – she was only able to perform at semi-legal house concerts known as “black evenings” (the windows were darkened or curtained so that the street could not see what was happening inside).

When this opportunity also disappeared, Bosmans concentrated on writing music, and her most fruitful period would be the first years after the war. In particular, she wrote a lot for her friend, the French mezzo-soprano Noémie Peruggia. But the anxieties of the war undermined her health, and she died in 1952 at the age of 56.

Marjo Tal, who also started out as a virtuoso pianist, will spend the war years in an even more difficult way – hiding from Gestapo persecution in secret apartments. She begins to write music, but during one of the police raids she loses all of her first compositions. After the war, she remains in Holland, almost never gives interviews, never talks about the years of occupation and intensively writes music – at first mainly songs to the verses of French poets, then Spanish, Dutch, Russian. The number of these songs is approaching two hundred. In 1988, without making any loud statements, she emigrates to Israel, where she will live to be 91.

The concert will also feature an early vocal cycle by Sergei Prokofiev on the poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Before the concert, there will be a screening of a short documentary film by Patricia Werner Leanse about Marjo Tal (11 minutes, BubbleEyes).

Program:

Henriette Bosmans. Eight French Songs (1920 / 1951)

Marjo Tal. Six Songs on Poems by Russian Poets (1975)

Sergei Prokofiev. Five Poems by Anna Akhmatova for Voice and Piano (1916)

Interbellum is part of the Forbidden Music Regained project, events within the framework of which have already taken place at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, the Nizhny Novgorod Arsenal, the Memorial Synagogue and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.