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MD: Please continue… will you discuss the relationship of the
tragedy of the Holocaust with our work here at Mythic
Imagination?
HF: At the Mythic Imagination Institute, we are working with personal stories and the huge cultural stories. The story of the Holocaust has all these different ownership committees: from the Israeli side, from the Arab side, from the German side, from the French side, and so on. They are all stories of profound hatred and of things going massively wrong.
And so, what can we set against that?
When Francesco Lotoro came into our lives, being an artist, I suddenly saw an opening, a possibility, a hope, a method… of how one can deal with these things.
As I began to work with the music, I began to see, as an
artist, what you can set against it. These people, the
composers show the way, and there is a way. It’s a way the soul can survive --- through creativity.
I could talk for three hours about this, but here it is: when I met Francesco Lotoro, it was an answer to a question I’ve been working on forty years. This is actually a language for going forward for peace, and maybe, activated, it could even penetrate into the political. The problems we face cannot be solved in simplistic political terms because that isn’t where the pain is. The pain is in the soul. Experiences of violence, injustice, terror, humiliation have to be addressed where the wounds are. And though we must do our best with justice, that is usually not a real healing because earthly justice is
not even possible. No matter what, one is not healed of the deaths and tortures by a court of law. But if one can be kept alive by the recompense of beauty and meaning, a deeper kind of healing is possible. The dead do not return, the scars are still there, but the trauma can be balanced, the trauma can even be a fertilizer for the growth of new fruit.
MD: This concert will be the world premiere for three of the
composers – Heilbut, Goué, and Schul. Can you give us
more details about bringing this forward?
DF: After our dinner in Rome with Francesco Lotoro, those
of us present discussed the possibilities for moving forward. He had edited and recorded the first twelve CDs of the music, and the costs of recording the orchestral works were especially high. Six more with choral music (and Lucio Ivaldi’s choral group) were being pressed, and Francesco and Lucio were becoming trusted colleagues.
Two years ago, in September of 2008, we brought Francesco Lotoro here to the United States, and introduced him to Maestro Lucas Richmond of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and Maestro Michael Palmer of Georgia State University and the Bellingham Music Festival in Washington state. We met to discuss how to program some of Professor Lotoro’s collection into the season to defray the cost of recording. We also introduced Lotoro to the Mythic Imagination Institute team.
Then our friends, Eve Hoffman and Sal Brownfield held a
“friend raiser” for about forty people at Eve’s home and
there we met Paul Wolpe, Director of Emory University’s
Center for Ethics. Dr. Lotoro told his story of the collected
music. When most of the people left, Paul Wolpe, Trudi…(a
survivor), and Lucas Richmond stayed and we talked in
detail and with great interest.
Over the next year, these people remained active. Paul
Wolpe called us for collaboration with Emory University.
HF: What is really happening with all this is that the
program began to shift and change, and what evolved is a
series, instead of a single event.
When we became involved with Emory University, at first it
was the concert only, and then Paul suggested including the work of a woman he knew, Ann Weiss, who had collected photographs from Europe showing Jewish family and community life in several Polish communities before the Holocaust (Ann Weiss had by chance found these photos set aside at Auschwitz , although the Nazis thought they had systematically destroyed all pictorial evidence of the prisoners’ lives pre- Holocaust). We named our partnership, “Testaments of the Heart.” And so now out of the fusion of these different elements and the Mythic Imagination Institute, “Testaments of the Heart” is the first event in a series, called “Creativity in Captivity.”