Missing Voices

6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1941 and 1945, all over Europe.

Musicians were as affected as anybody else. One can count at least 35 composers who were murdered in the Shoah; hundreds more were persecuted, imprisoned, or forced into exile. Some of them were very well-known composers before the War, some of them were young promising talents, and we can assume thousands of children, who belonged to a centuries-long tradition of Jewish musicians, were to follow that path, that was forever broken.

With the “Missing Voices” project, initiated by French pianist Dimitri Malignan, we intend to make a cultural restitution of the lives and works of people who have suffered a double penalty: they have been murdered in the most atrocious conditions, and their music has been mostly completely forgotten afterwards. And the fact that their music is nowadays still rather unknown shows, unfortunately, that the Nazis, in a way, reached their goal. It shows how thoroughly and lastingly the German extermination machinery functioned in World War II if, still to this day, those composers are "dead" to us and their music seems irrelevant.

It is our duty, as musicians, to make them come to life again.