Forbidden Music

About the production

Since March 2025 and until December, the Görlitz Collections in Kaisertrutz Görlitz have been showing the special exhibition »National Socialism in Görlitz – 80 years since the end of the war«. With reference to this, the Lausitz Festival is dedicating one of its concerts in Görlitz to music that was suspect and even hated by the rulers of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union and was therefore ostracised and even banned in some cases. The Quatuor Danel from Belgium, which thrilled the Lausitz Festival audience last year, returns this time with string quartets by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Dimitri Shostakovich and Mieczysław Weinberg. What connects these composers against the backdrop of the so-called ostracised music, which the Nazis labelled »degenerate«? 

Both Mendelssohn and Weinberg were victims of National Socialism due to their Jewish origins. One was defamed posthumously and his memorials were demolished. The other had to flee Warsaw from the Nazis to the Soviet Union at the age of 19 during the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Dimitri Shostakovich's role in this context draws attention to the oppression and desire for annihilation that continued to characterise intellectual life in many places in the second half of the 20th century. Weinberg was imprisoned during the nationwide anti-Semitic campaign under Stalin in 1952/1953. He would probably have fallen victim to the regime if his mentor and friend Shostakovich had not stood up for him. 

When Shostakovich travelled to the Saxon spa town of Gohrisch in 1960 to compose his Eighth String Quartet, he did so in the context of the repression to which he was subjected while living in the authoritarian system of the Soviet Union. The International Shostakovich Days Gohrisch write about this: »The String Quartet No. 8 is an extremely tragic, personal work, which he understood – as can be seen from a letter to Isaak Glikman dated 19 July 1960, which was only published many years after his death – as a ›requiem‹ for himself«. Of Shostakovich's 15 string quartets, the eighth is the one that is most frequently performed today. It bears witness to how the composer, who oscillated between adaptation and opposition, became a victim himself – victims of the balancing act between tolerating and ostracising those in power. Seen in this light, the Quatuor Danel's concert programme revolves around the theme of »forbidden music« in a double sense.

Programme:

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, op. 80
Dimitri Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, op. 110
Mieczysław Weinberg: String Quartet No. 6 in E minor, op. 35