Tue, 5. 10. 2021, 7.00 p.m.

K1 WRITE TO ME, YOUR ALMA

Venue: Zlín Congress Centre  |  Organizer: Filharmonie Bohuslava Martinů, o.p.s.  | 

The subject of this dramatised spoken-word presentation with a musical backdrop is Gustav Mahler's niece, the violinist Alma Rosé, who came from a prominent Viennese musical family and whose mother Justina was born in Jihlava.

Alma Rosé, being married to the Czech violinist Váša Příhoda, held a Czechoslovak passport and performed in the twenties and thirties in several European countries. After Vienna was occupied by the German army, she fled that country because of her Jewish family origins.

The action in this piece written by Zdeněk Geist and produced by David Kříž takes place between autumn 1940 and 1942 when Alma Rosé lived in different locations in Holland, performing at concerts there and seeking to leave that country and find safety beyond the reach of the Nazis.

Written communication with family in Britain and America in wartime conditions became more and more difficult, as did Alma's life, and her prospects of being saved from the Nazis and what was called the Final Solution of the Jewish question became increasingly worse with time.

Alma thus had no alternative but to look for reassurance in music and in her memories of earlier happy times with her loved ones in Vienna and Czechoslovakia. Before the inevitable threat of the transports east, she tried to save herself by fleeing illegally to Switzerland, and the story ends with Alma taking leave of her friends in Holland and crossing the border.
What happened to her next is narrated at the end by a male voice reading a letter to her father. In the course of her escape, Alma was arrested and deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where for several months she led the prison's women's orchestra until spring of 1944 when she died there in unclear circumstances.