The Los Angeles Opera has received a $4 million donation for a multiyear "Recovered Voices" project that will produce music the Nazis tried to silence.
Marilyn Ziering, a philanthropist and opera board member, donated $3.25 million and raised an additional $750,000 from various donors, LA Opera General Director Placido Domingo announced Monday.
The "Recovered Voices" project will highlight the music of early 20th-century composers such as Alexander Zemlinsky, Kurt Weill and Viktor Ullmann.
"I have great admiration for Marilyn Ziering, whose visionary support will give audiences today a significant opportunity to hear what the Third Reich attempted to silence," Domingo said.
Music director James Conlon will conduct the multiyear project, which will begin with concerts at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on March 7 and March 10.
Those concerts will include excerpts of operas by Ullmann, Franz Schreker, Walter Braunfels, Ernst Krenek, Erwin Schulhoff and Erich Korngold. They also will feature a complete performance of Zemlinsky's "A Florentine Tragedy," a one-act opera based on Oscar Wilde's play of the same name.
"The Third Reich silenced two generations of composers, the greatest single rupture in what had been a centuries-long stream of German classical music," Conlon said in a statement.
"The creativity of the first half of the 20th century is far richer than we think," he said. "We can take an important step toward reviving the music of those whose lives were affected by the Holocaust or whose work was otherwise deemed 'offensive' by that authoritarian regime."
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