NPR : Verdi’s Requiem Revived as WWII Tribute

I heard my friend Debbie singing on the radio the other morning… she’s one of the musicians that performed this piece! When she told me about the project I was so thrilled for her, because she’s had some amazing performance opportunities with the Washington Chorus, and this one just gave me chills when she told me about it.

According to the NPR story we heard Monday morning, they performed Verdi’s Requiem (AKA, the Defiant Requiem) on Sunday in the Terezin concentration camp (she tells me the performance space had been an old barn.

During WWII, hundreds of prisoners in the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia performed Verdi’s Requiem as a way to passively defy their Nazi captors. On Sunday, American musicians performed the same requiem in the former Nazi camp as a tribute to Terezin’s victims and survivors.

There were survivors in the audience; the whole undertaking commemorates the power of the human spirit to fight for life and dignity to the end. These people went down fighting, and singing, for their lives. May the original performers be at peace, and let the echoes of Sunday’s performance reach to the highest vaults of heaven so they will hear that they are not forgotten.