Anne's spirit in music
This week the Toronto Symphony is paying tribute to a Canadian
composer. It is celebrating the 70th birthday of Oskar Morawetz by performing
his highly acclaimed and oft-played Diary of Anne Frank.
Mr. Morawetz belongs to that distinguished group of European
refugees who not only found Canada a land in which they could rebuild their
existence but who, in doing so, made a great contribution to their new home. A
distinguished composer whose work has won international recognition, Mr.
Morawetz has a special fondness for the Diary, making it an appropriate choice
by TS music director Andrew Davis to celebrate Morawetz the septuagenarian.
Long ago, the composer becamse intrigued by the spirit of Anne
Frank, that remarkable little girl, who, while hiding from the Nazis with her
family in Amsterdam attic, wrote about life and death, hope and despair, the
ordinary and the extraordinary. After several years, the Franks were discovered
and shipped to concentration camps where all but Anne's father died.
Her diary, discovered in the attic after the war, captured the
imagination of the world and eventually was made into a stage play and then a
television program. For his composition, Mr. Morawetz - who became a close
friend of Anne's father - chose an excerpt from the diary not included in the
stage and TV productions. In it, Anne describes suddenly dreaming of Lies
Goosens, her best friend who already had been carted away by the Nazis:
"Oh God, why should I have all I could wish for and why should
she be seized by such a terrible fate? I am not more virtuous than she; she too
wanted to do what was right, why should I be chosen to live and she probably to
die?" (How could Anne know that the opposite fate was in store for the two of
them?)
"Good Lord, you have given me so much - which I certainly do not
deserve - and still I do so much that is wrong every day.
"Oh God, protect Lies; protect her; defend her, save her and
bring her back to us!
"Lies seems to be a symbol to me of the suffering of all my girl
friends and all the Jews. And when I pray for her, I pray for all the Jews and
for all those in need!"
In the spring of 1945, Anne and Lies met again briefly through a
barbed-wire fence at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Lies recalls that
"she was in rags. I saw her emaciated, sunken face in the darkness. Her eyes
were very large. We cried and cried, for now there was only barbed wire between
us, nothing more. And no longer any difference in our fates.
"I told Anne that my mother had died and my father was dying,
and Anne told me that her mother had died and that she knew nothing about her
father. Only her sister, Margot, was with her, but she was already very sick and
died a few days later. Anne was not informed of her sister's death, but a few
days later she sensed it, and died soon afterward - only seven weeks before the
end of the war."
She was not yet 16.
