I have travelled a fair bit, for work and pleasure, and, like most of us, I have my favourite places to which I return whenever the opportunity arises. Some places I cannot do without for long – Scilly, Cornwall, rural France and especially Venice. I do not go on these travels consciously searching for stories, but I do know that I am making myself available should I come across an idea for a story that resonates with me, engages me, will not leave me alone. It is rare that happens in the space of twenty-four hours, but the events of one day in 1990 in Venice left me in no doubt that I would write The Mozart Question, that I had to write it, needed to write it, and do it at once.
In a street close to our little hotel in the Dorsoduro part of Venice, near the Accademia Bridge, I discovered a barber’s shop. Growing up, I had often seen in London those red and white striped poles above a barber’s shop. Many of the barbers of my childhood were Italian. And here I was in the city of red and white poles, of gondolas tied up to them, the city from which so many of those Italian London barbers may well have come, and whose poles you can find now outside barbers’ shops all around the world. Walking past this barber’s shop in Venice, I thought, Go and have a haircut in a proper Venetian barber’s – my hair was looking a bit scraggy anyway. So in I went.
I was greeted with a shy, silent smile and ushered to the chair. The place was tidy, immaculate, the barber too. There was no radio, just the two of us. And he stayed tactfully silent which was just as well, because, I’m ashamed to say, my Italian is strictly limited to ciao, grazie and cappucino. As he cut my hair, I found myself utterly entranced by his fingers as they worked the scissors. They were fast, deft, expert, rhythmic, almost as if he had a tune in his head that he was conducting with his scissors.
It reminded me after a while of that extraordinary film The Great Dictator, in which Charlie Chaplin plays a humble Jewish barber who has the misfortune to be mistaken for Adolf Hitler. There is a glorious scene in the film, where, to the accompaniment of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, he cuts and shaves and trims his customer with such dexterity, such skill, oblivious to everything else in the world except his craft and the music.
After twenty minutes or so, I walked out into the sunlit street, my hair trim and perfect and Italian, knowing I had witnessed a performance of supreme skill. Never once did he use a machine. He was simply a maestro with the scissors, a genius. (Every time I return to Venice I go back to the same place to have my hair cut. It is a ritual I look forward to. I have never been disappointed.)
That same afternoon, Clare and I decided to discover a place I think we had always avoided until now. Venice may be one of the most beautiful places on this Earth, but there is a great sadness hanging over it, because it is fading, crumbling, sinking, and maybe because it is a tourists’ Mecca now, overcrowded, over-commercial, its great moment in history past. However splendid and magnificent the architecture, however lively the bustle and music and mime of the streets, it is a decaying place, threatened constantly by the invasion of the sea, by the ever-increasing pressure of tourism. It is a place that reflects the human condition, both achingly beautiful and deeply sorrowful.
So, not wishing perhaps to overload our spirits with sadness, we had over the years always resisted going to visit the area of Venice known as the Ghetto. We knew what had happened there in the Second World War, that of the 400 Jews taken away to the concentration camps, only very few had returned. We went in the end, I think, because we knew that we had to, that we should. This was, after all, the place that gave its name to Jewish ghettos all over Europe, the first ghetto.
You go in through an archway, over a bridge or two, past a synagogue, and, at last, into a small square, a well in the centre, apartment buildings all around, stark, plain. Here, the Jewish people of Venice had lived for hundreds of years, separated from the rest of the population, shut in at night, but left to get on with their lives. And it was here, in that square, that they had been gathered together in 1944 and taken away. There is a café there now, a few Jewish bookshops, and happily, the Ghetto of today is alive again with Jewish families. So, it is a place of horror and anguish, but of hope and renewal too.
That evening, we went to an opera in La Fenice opera house, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, which was extraordinarily powerful but rather dark and sinister. As we were walking home to our hotel, we were talking though not of Benjamin Britten, but of the Ghetto, which had left us so moved that afternoon. When we came round the corner into the square below the Accademia Bridge we heard the sound of a guitar playing, beautifully. There seemed at first to be no one about, but then we saw a small boy in his pyjamas – he was maybe five or six – sitting on his tricycle, leaning on the handlebars, his chin resting on his hands. That was when we saw the guitarist too, standing just a few yards away, under the lamp post. The boy had not seen us, and neither had the musician. We stopped in the shadows and listened and looked. The music was Spanish, eighteenth century, elegant, delicately and passionately played by a young man lost entirely in his music. The little boy sat there gazing up at him. He did not move. Neither did we. We were all rooted to the spot by the beauty of the music, the place, the moment. I thought then, This is the kind of moment that changes lives. Maybe, because of this moment, that boy in his pyjamas would love music for ever, might even want to play it for himself, or compose it, or sing it.
I wondered if he was the son of my barber, and wondered if possibly my barber might have been Jewish. I knew as I listened that I already had in my head a story set in the heaven of Venice and in the hell of a concentration camp. I was aware already of the orchestras the Nazis had organized, how some inmates of the camps, many of them Jews, had been obliged to play for their oppressors, forced to sit there to play as the trains came in bringing new loads of prisoners, some to be selected for slave labour, some for the gas chambers. The music was to calm them, to make it all seem fine, that there was nothing to worry about. I thought then how it would be to have had to play in such an orchestra, to survive and then to try to live a normal life again afterwards. How would you feel when you heard again the music you had played? A lot of it was Mozart – marches, minuets, divertimentos. Would you ever want to hear it or play it again? Would you tell your children what had happened or simply keep quiet about it?
I began writing The Mozart Question almost at once, while I was there in Venice, while “the fire was in my head”. I wanted to affirm the power of love and music, of the human spirit to survive, to triumph over fear and hatred.
“Then late one summer’s evening I was lying half awake in my bed when I heard the sound of a violin. I thought Papa must have changed his mind and was playing again at last. But then I heard him and Mama talking in the kitchen below, and realized anyway that the music was coming from much further away.
“I listened at the window. I could hear it only intermittently over the sound of people talking and walking, over the throbbing engines of passing water buses, but I was quite sure now that it was coming from somewhere beyond the bridge. I had to find out. In my pyjamas I stole past the kitchen door, down the stairs and out into the street. It was a warm night, and quite dark. I ran up over the bridge and there, all on his own, standing by the lamp in the square, was an old man playing the violin, his violin case open at his feet.
“No one else was there. No one had stopped to listen. I squatted down as close as I dared. He was so wrapped up in his playing that he did not notice me at first. I could see now that he was much older even than Papa. Then he saw me crouching there watching him. He stopped playing. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You’re out late. What’s your name?’ He had kind eyes; I noticed that at once.
“‘Paolo,’ I told him. ‘Paolo Levi. My papa plays the violin. He played in an orchestra once.’
“‘So did I,’ said the old man, ‘all my life. But now I am what I always wanted to be, a soloist. I shall play you some Mozart. Do you like Mozart?’
“‘I don’t know,’ I replied. I knew Mozart’s name, of course, but I don’t think I had ever listened to any of his music.
“‘He wrote this piece when he was even younger than you. I should guess that you’re about seven.’
“‘Nine,’ I said.
“‘Well, Mozart wrote this when he was just six years old. He wrote it for the piano, but I can play it on the violin.’
“So he played Mozart, and I listened. As he played, others came and gathered round for a while before dropping a coin or two in his violin case and moving on. I didn’t move on. I stayed. The music he played to me that night touched my soul. It was the night that changed my life for ever.
“Whenever I crossed the Accademia Bridge after that I always looked out for him. Whenever I heard him playing I went to listen. I never told Mama or Papa. I think it was the first secret I kept from them. But I did not feel guilty about it, not one bit. After all, hadn’t they kept a secret from me? Then one evening the old man – I had found out by now that his name was Benjamin Horowitz and that he was sixty-two years old – one evening he let me hold his violin, showed me how to hold it properly, how to draw the bow across the strings, how to make it sing. The moment I did that, I knew I had to be a violinist. I have never wanted to do or be anything else since.
“So Benjamin – Signor Horowitz I always called him then – became my first teacher. Now every time I ran over the bridge to see him he would show me a little more, how to tighten the bow just right, how to use the resin, how to hold the violin under my chin using no hands at all and what each string was called. That was when I told him about Papa’s violin at home, and about how he didn’t play it any more. ‘He couldn’t anyway,’ I said, ‘because it’s a bit broken. I think it needs mending a bit. Two of the strings are missing, the A and the E, and there’s hardly a hair left on the bow at all. But I could practise on it if it was mended, couldn’t I?’
“‘Bring it to my house sometime,’ Benjamin said, ‘and leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.’”
We are sometimes urged to “move on”; even to erase the memory of wars, the bombing of civilians, massacres or genocides. But many feel that in remembering lie the seeds of understanding, which can lead to forgiveness and reconciliation and focus the desire to avoid future conflicts. “Lest we forget” is a phrase from the First World War encouraging us to remember those who died in conflict.
The first Nazi concentration camps were erected in Germany in 1933, immediately after Hitler became chancellor. Initially, concentration camps housed forced labour, usually on back-breaking and dangerous building projects, including building the camps themselves. Even before they were developed as extermination camps, death rates were high, and prisoners felt they were being literally worked to death.
The first inmates of the camps were mainly political opponents. Later, the list of victims grew to include Jews, resistance fighters and “opponents of the state”, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, criminals, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the “antisocial”, such as beggars or vagrants. Under a Nazi secret plan, “Master Plan East”, the elimination of people from Slavic countries such as Poland and Russia, whatever their racial make-up, was also planned.
Hitler and the Nazis believed that the genes of the people they had identified as undesirable polluted an idealized German Aryan “master race”. Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s loss of the First World War and in his book, Mein Kampf, he promised to “rid” Germany of all Jews. After he came to power in 1933, laws were soon passed to limit Jewish rights to work and to vote. Once the Second World War started, the Nazis began forcing all of the Jewish people into a small district in each city they captured. Called a “ghetto”, the area was fenced in and guarded. It was very crowded, there was little food, water or medicine available. But it became much worse.
The Nazis developed the death camps as part of their plan for what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.
The people taken to these camps, from all over occupied Europe, were told they were relocating to a new and better place. But on arrival, anyone unable to work – children, the old, the weak, and any pregnant women, were isolated and immediately taken to specially designed buildings. Here, thinking they were about to have a shower, they were killed with poison gas. The rest were subjected to hard labour, and had a temporary reprieve. Millions died of starvation, or were later gassed.
Only one in ten Jews living in Germany and Poland at the beginning of the war survived the camps. About five million non-Jews were murdered.
Those prisoners who had skills useful to the Nazis, particularly musicians, might survive for longer. Fania Fénelon, the French pianist and singer, recalled how she, and other musicians, had clean clothes, daily showers and a reasonable food supply. “There were so many musicians in Terezin, there could have been two full symphony orchestras performing simultaneously daily. In addition, there were a number of chamber orchestras playing at various times.” Not surprisingly, the musicians’ “privileges” set them apart from the other prisoners and made them objects of jealousy and suspicion.
The price of survival for the performing musicians, however, was hideous. Musicians were often used for the apparently harmless role of entertaining the camp guards and officers, many of whom were music enthusiasts. But they also had to perform for hours at roll call, regardless of weather conditions. Musicians were also forced to meet the daily trains bringing the prisoners to the camps. The music continued as new arrivals were sorted. Camp survivor Sam Pivnik reported: “He [the guard] gestured to the right (for life) and to the left (for death).” In addition, there were regular selections of those too weak to work another day and musicians were required to play light-hearted or marching music for hours on end throughout, watching the selected trudge to the gas chambers. They had to play during executions, such as the hanging of prisoners who had attempted escape. The suicide rate amongst musicians in concentration camps was one of the highest of any group of prisoners.
Yet, in some ways, performers and camp inmates used music as a form of resistance. Performers organized the repertoire and included their own compositions, boosting morale for themselves and fellow inmates. Traditional or newly composed songs could be sung at any time and required little practice or preparation. Group-singing sessions produced a sense of companionship and belonging. The playing of traditional songs and tunes, or of new music, counteracted the SS’s intention to crush the prisoners’ physical and cultural existence. Arguably, music in the camps helped some inmates retain their sanity, identity and traditions.
