Holocaust victim’s opera stored for years in trunk gets premiere at last
An opera score retrieved from a San Francisco basement has had its world premiere in a German theatre, exuberantly brought to life by more than 150 musicians and performers nearly 80 years after its composer was murdered by the Nazis.
Grete Minde, a late-romantic opera of 1920s jazz-inspired melodies and large orchestral sounds, was the work of Eugen Engel, a Berlin-based Jewish textile tradesman in his day job, who gave his handwritten sheet music to his daughter for safekeeping when she escaped to the United States in 1941.
He waited in vain for permission to follow her but was killed in Sobibor extermination camp on 26 March 1943, at the age of 67,
