Damaged sheet music was discovered at Auschwitz. A composer got to work.
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Add to your saved stories Save With the wave of a conductor’s baton, a heartbreaking melody began to resound inside a concert hall in London — a song composed by a prisoner in a Nazi death camp that, until Monday, had not been played in public. “Futile Regrets,” as the composition was titled, unfolded like the pages of a tragic novel. The violin strings reverberated with the weight of unspeakable sorrows. With each note, the instruments conjured the cold, unforgiving realities of the barbed wire and watchtowers that once imprisoned its anonymous composer at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The song was part of a collection of 210 pieces of music that British composer and conductor Leo Geyer stumbled upon in 2015 while visiting the World War II death camp run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. Geyer made the trip after he was commissioned to create a piece honoring Martin Gilbert, a historian and Holocaust expert who died that February . Geyer traveled to Poland to get a “sense of the g...