Focus - Behind the Music: Winter Journey

Music@Menlo’s Focus Residencies offer a unique, mini-festival experience over two days. On the first evening, an immersive Behind the Music learning event explores music, history, and art, and on the second, a Concert Program showcases the works discussed.

This Focus Residency takes its inspiration from writer Martin Goldsmith’s book The Inextinguishable Symphony, in which he shares the remarkable true story of his parents, Gunther Goldschmidt and Rosemarie Gumpert Goldschmidt. During the Nazi regime, they were members of the all-Jewish orchestra, the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a group maintained as a propaganda tool by the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. The Goldschmidts’s participation in this group ultimately helped save their lives in Nazi Germany, and Goldsmith’s book inspired the making of a film, Winter Journey, which will be screened preceding a Q&A with the author. The following day’s concert program features works for winds and piano, including works by composers who were silenced as victims of the Holocaust, as well as works performed by the Jüdischer Kulturbund.