An event that embellished everything Britten went on to write | Classical music

MeIn 1945, violinist Yehudi Menuhin was on a short tour of Germany, giving readings to concentration camp survivors. On Friday 27 July 1945 he arrived in Bergen-Belsen, liberated three months earlier, and gave two concerts, in the camp’s cinema. The incident had a profound impact. “I will never forget that afternoon for the rest of my life,” Menuhin said. “After Belsen, Yehudi was never the same,” said his sister Yaltah Menuhin. Anita Laskera Belsen survivor, was present at one of those concerts. At the age of nineteen, she is a cellist, as a child she was in Auschwitz, where she played in a women’s orchestra, led by Alma Rosé, Gustav Mahler’s niece.

Lasker wrote to his cousin about the concert. “Who would have believed that Belsen Camp would hear Yehudi Menuhin playing? An amazing evening”, which included “Bach/Kreisler Prelude and Fugue, Kreutzer Sonata, Mendelssohn’s Concerto, something by Debussy and several small, unknown things”.

Lasker’s eye for detail was relentless. Menuhin’s clothes are “lazily bordered, which perfectly match the surroundings”. He played “flawlessly”, but he felt that he would restrain himself. Maybe he wasn’t impressed by the atmosphere, he wondered (“it was impossible to be quiet in the hall, and I was embarrassed by the audience”).

Lasker also said that Menuhin performed with a pianist, who left his name. He left a comment: “As for his escort, I can only say that I can’t think of anything more beautiful.

Lasker’s memory has not faded. Then he told the interviewer. “I couldn’t take my eyes off the man playing the piano, and that was it.” Benjamin Britten.”

In the 1960s, Lasker-Wallfisch, following her marriage to pianist Peter Wallfisch, performed with “the man who played the piano”. He came to Aldeburgh, as a member of the English Chamber Orchestra (which he helped to establish in 1948, originally the Goldsbrough Orchestra). Several times he was in the cello section while Britten was the pianist or conductor. He was “an aloof man, you didn’t really hang out with him”, she recalled. “You accepted Britten as Britten, and that was it!”

In 1969, shortly before the opening of the festival, Lasker-Wallfisch showed Britten a letter he had written after the Belsen concert: “I said to Ben, if you want to read a letter about your piano playing, written by someone you don’t even know who he was, an unbiased criticism.” He was interested in the letter. I said: ‘Of course.'” The next day, the Snape Maltings concert hall was destroyed by fire. The singer and the singer met the next morning at a rehearsal, in the nearby village of Thorpeness.

“He came in and the first thing he said was, ‘Anita, I got your letter.'” Lasker-Wallfisch was shocked: he lost his piano, and Maltings, and still realized the importance of the letter.

Menuhin would say that Britten insisted that he join the tour. As a violinist, he “wanted to commit himself to a human nature whose ugly depths had just been revealed”.

Britten never talked about his experiences, which he found, in many ways, to be “terrifying”. Peter Pears can be said to have once admitted that his experiences “shaped all his later writings”. The opinion was shared by the historian, who confirmed that “at all times, Britten suppressed any words he could not say about Belsen”.

Not long after leaving Belsen, Britten began to compose the song Rape of Lucretia, with a libretto by his friend Ronald Duncan. The opera ends with an Epilogue (written on a train from London to Bath, according to Duncan, so I’m not the only one who has found inspiration to write on such journeys), the chorus of the Female Chorus:

Is that all? With all this pain and suffering
is this for nothing?
Is this old world getting old
in sin alone?
Can’t we find anything
but our greatest tears?’

“Not at all,” the Male Chorus replies, with a voice of hope.

These words evoked the opening arguments of Robert Jackson at the famous Nuremberg trial, where new crimes – murder, cruelty to people, brutality – were broadcast for the first time, and what I wrote in East West Street. “Civilization asks if the law is so slow that it is unable to deal with such serious crimes against these important criminals,” Jackson told the jury. “It does not expect that you will be able to make war impossible. It expects that your judicial system will place the force of international law, its directives, its prohibitions, and above all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women who want good in all countries may have ‘cease to live without human consent, under the law’.

However, no one should pay close attention to the rules and regulations.

Six months after her release, Anita Lasker is still in Belsen, working as a translator. He appeared as a witness at the trial of the commandant at Auschwitz, which continues to this day.

“This case made me very ashamed,” he wrote in his article. Enter the Truth. He came face to face with “British justice” and the idea that “you are innocent until proven guilty”. This was a “praiseworthy principle”, but how can it be applied to cases of “unprecedented universality”, in laws that provide an image of work, such as “damaged theatres”?

What happened to him made him suspicious, and we discussed this when I met him, not long after he celebrated his 100th birthday. Of course, the case allowed “lawyers to show their skills”, but for those who received the “killing machine”, what happened was “sick” and left a “bitter taste”.

The prison worker asked: “Is it possible to apply the law in the conventional sense to crimes that are so far from the law as the killing of millions of people, which were carried out in order to ‘purify the human race’?”

The question is a good one, and Lasker-Wallfisch is not the only one who asked it. I often ask myself the same question, not least last January in The Hague, where I appeared at the genocide trial at the International Court of Justice, where we heard the terrible, terrible stories of the Rohingya people, of murder, rape and murder of children.

Such themes inspired Britten. In 1968, he decided to sing Bertolt Brecht’s poem Kinderkreuzzug, written in 1941, about a group of orphaned children after the outbreak of war in Poland. In need of help with the English translation, to mark the 50th anniversary of Save the Children, he turned to his friend Hans Keller (who later contributed his final work, Quartet No 3 in G, Op 94).

Brecht’s verses – and Britten’s effect – evoke the futility of war, and the limitations of legal policy, as here in Keller’s translation of the Children’s Crusade:

Then there was war.
War and other children are running away;
And the battle ended:
Sense didn’t have it.
And then there was the case,
A candle was lit on all sides.
What a shameful story!
The judge objected! What a deception!

As a lawyer in East West Street, Hersch Lauterpacht, Keller often listened to music at his home in Willow Road, Hampstead, where Britten visited. Ironically, I now live in that house, which Keller shared Milein Cosmanhis wife, an artist whose paintings of musicians, including Britten (and his parrot) and Menuhin, brought fame.

For Menuhin, performing in Belsen with Britten was “like a ray of light in the darkness… because music is freedom”.

For Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, whose life was saved because she played the cello, music “cannot be destroyed”, even if it is affected by negative forces.

And for me, when things seem difficult, like in The Hague last January, I find the strength to listen Anthem, a song by Canadian poet Leonard Cohenformer law student: “There’s a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.”