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Karel Ančerl
Karel Ančerl (11 April 1908 – 3 July 1973) was a Czechoslovak conductor and composer, renowned especially for his performances of contemporary music and for his interpretations of music by Czech composers. Ančerl was born into a prosperous Jewish family in the village of Tučapy in southern Bohemia. After graduating from the Prague Conservatory, he pursued his conducting studies under Hermann Scherchen and Václav Talich. He was the assistant conductor at the Munich premiere of Alois Hába's quarter-tone opera ''Mother'' (1931) and conducted the orchestra of the avant-garde theatre ''Osvobozené divadlo'' in Prague (1931–1933). Conducting work for Czechoslovak radio was interrupted by World War II which resulted in his being imprisoned with his family in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 and then sent to Auschwitz in 1944. Unlike his wife and young son, Ančerl survived Auschwitz. After the war, Ančerl conducted for Radio Prague until 1950, when he becam ...
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Warsaw Pact Invasion Of Czechoslovakia
The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia refers to the events of 20–21 August 1968, when the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was jointly invaded by four Warsaw Pact countries: the Soviet Union, the Polish People's Republic, the People's Republic of Bulgaria and the Hungarian People's Republic. The invasion stopped Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring liberalisation reforms and strengthened the authoritarian wing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). About 250,000 Warsaw Pact troops (afterwards rising to about 500,000), supported by thousands of tanks and hundreds of aircraft, participated in the overnight operation, which was code-named Operation Danube. The Socialist Republic of Romania and the People's Republic of Albania refused to participate, while East German forces, except for a small number of specialists, were ordered by Moscow not to cross the Czechoslovak border just hours before the invasion because of fears of greater resistance if German troops were inv ...
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State Opera (Prague)
The State Opera (Czech: Státní opera) is an opera house in Prague, Czech Republic. It is part of the National Theatre of the Czech Republic, founded by Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic in 1992. The theatre itself originally opened in 1888 as the New German Theatre and from 1949 to 1989 it was known as the Smetana Theatre. More recently it was renamed the Prague State Opera. Currently it is home to approximately 300 performances a year. History New German Theatre The history of the theatre currently known as the Prague State Opera dates back to the late 19th century. While often overshadowed by the more prominent National Theatre of Prague, the company has its own distinct history. The birth of a magnificent Czech Theatre, the National Theatre, in 1883 indirectly created a longing among the Prague German community for a German-speaking opera house of its own. At that time the Czech lands were part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and there was a large German minority ...
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Ghetto Swingers
The Ghetto Swingers were a jazz band organised in the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. The original amateur Czech band playing in the Café of the Ghetto was led by Eric Vogel and Pavel Libensky. Vogel petitioned the Kommandant on January 8, 1943. The personnel of The Ghetto Swingers would be: Dr. Brammer (piano), Dr. Kurt Bauer (percussion), Fr. Goldschmidt (guitar), Fasal (bass), Ing. Vogel (trumpet), Langer (tenor sax and clarinet), and Fr. Mautner (trombone). When the famous jazz pianist Martin Roman arrived in the camp he was asked to lead. The band appeared in a Theresienstadt cabaret review, known as the ''Karussell'' ("Carousel"). The Ghetto Swingers performed over fifty times, most frequently during June and July 1944. The cabarets were organised by Kurt Gerron, who could draw upon the best talent in the camp. Both Roman and Gerron had come to Theresienstadt via the Westerbork transit camp, and qualified for entry to Theresienstadt as "artists". After the Red Cr ...
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Martin Roman
Martin Roman (23 April 1910 – 12 May 1996) was a German jazz pianist. At the time of the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Martin was stopped by SS men at the entrance to the huge Vaterland emporium in Berlin, where his band, the Marek Weber Band, was employed. He left for the Netherlands. In January 1944 Roman was transported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. In summer 1944 he was forced to participate in a propaganda film in Theresienstadt which the commandant Karl Rahm had coerced the actor Kurt Gerron to direct. Roman appeared leading his Ghetto Swingers. When the filming was over Roman and Gerron were sent to Auschwitz, where Gerron perished.F. C. DeCoste, Bernard Schwartz ''The Holocaust's ghost: writings on art, politics, law, and education'', 2000 pg. 79."Hiding out in Amsterdam in a rented room in 1943, Berlin swing pianist Martin Roman was rudely awakened by a knock on the door one morning." Like jazz drummer and guitarist Coco Schumann, Roman survived. Gerron ...
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Pavel Haas
Pavel Haas (21 June 189917 October 1944) was a Czech composer who was murdered during the Holocaust. He was an exponent of Leoš Janáček's school of composition, and also utilized elements of folk music and jazz. Although his output was not large, he is notable particularly for his song cycles and string quartets. Pre-war Haas was born in Brno, into a Moravian-Jewish family. His father, Zikmund, a shoemaker by trade, was from the Moravian region, while his mother, Olga (née Epstein), was born in Odessa. After studying piano privately, Haas began his more formal musical education at the age of 14 and studied composition at the Brno Conservatory from 1919 to 1921 under Jan Kunc and Vilém Petrželka. This was followed by two years of study in the master class of the noted Czech composer Leoš Janáček. Janáček was far and away Haas's most influential teacher, and Haas, in turn, proved to be Janáček's best student. In 1935 he married Soňa Jakobson, the former wife of Russ ...
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Kurt Gerron
Kurt Gerron (11 May 1897 – 28 October 1944) was a German History of the Jews in Germany, Jewish actor and film director. He and his wife, Olga were murdered in the Holocaust. Life Born Kurt Gerson into a well-off merchant family in Berlin, he studied medicine before being called up for military service in World War I. After being seriously wounded, he was qualified as a military doctor in the German Army (German Empire), German Army, despite having been only in his second year at university. After the war Gerron turned to a stage career, becoming a theatre actor under director Max Reinhardt in 1920. He appeared in secondary roles in several silent films and began directing film shorts in 1926. Gerron's popular cinema breakthrough came with ''The Blue Angel'' (''Der Blaue Engel'', 1930) opposite Marlene Dietrich. Two years before, Gerron originated the role of "Tiger" Brown in the 1928 premiere production of ''The Threepenny Opera'' (''Die Dreigroschenoper'') at the Berlin Theat ...
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Karl Rahm
Karl Rahm (2 April 1907 – 30 April 1947) was a Sturmbannführer (major) in the German ''Schutzstaffel'' who, from February 1944 to May 1945, served as the commandant of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Rahm was the third and final commander of the camp, succeeding Siegfried Seidl and Anton Burger. He was hanged for war crimes. Early life and Nazi membership Rahm was born in 1907 in the city of Klosterneuburg, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He apprenticed as a toolmaker and worked for a time in Vienna, where during the 1920s he was exposed to the activities of the Austrian Nazi Party. He became a member of the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the underground Austrian SS at the same time. In 1938, after the Anschluss with Nazi Germany, Rahm became an SS officer attached to SS-Oberabschnitt Donau under the command of Ernst Kaltenbrunner. His brother Franz was deported to a concentration camp as a Communist. World War II At the start of World War II in ...
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Theresienstadt (1944 Film)
''Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet'' ("Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area"), unofficially ''Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt'' ("The Führer Gives a City to the Jews"), was a black-and-white projected Nazi propaganda film. It was directed by the German Jewish prisoner Kurt Gerron and the Czech filmmaker Karel Pečený under close SS supervision in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and edited by Pečený's company, Aktualita. Filmed mostly in the autumn of 1944, it was completed on 28 March 1945 and screened privately four times. After the war, the film was lost but about twenty minutes of footage was later rediscovered in various archives. Unlike other Nazi propaganda films, which were under the control of Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda, ''Theresienstadt'' was conceived and paid for by the Jewish Affairs department of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, at the initiative of Hans G ...
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Grove Music Online
''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theory of music. Earlier editions were published under the titles ''A Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', and ''Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians''; the work has gone through several editions since the 19th century and is widely used. In recent years it has been made available as an electronic resource called ''Grove Music Online'', which is now an important part of ''Oxford Music Online''. ''A Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' ''A Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' was first published in London by Macmillan and Co. in four volumes (1879, 1880, 1883, 1889) edited by George Grove with an Appendix edited by J. A. Fuller Maitland in the fourth volume. An Index edited by Mrs. E. Wodehouse was issued as a separate volume in 1890. In ...
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Gymnasium (school)
''Gymnasium'' (and variations of the word) is a term in various European languages for a secondary school that prepares students for higher education at a university. It is comparable to the US English term '' preparatory high school''. Before the 20th century, the gymnasium system was a widespread feature of educational systems throughout many European countries. The word (), from Greek () 'naked' or 'nude', was first used in Ancient Greece, in the sense of a place for both physical and intellectual education of young men. The latter meaning of a place of intellectual education persisted in many European languages (including Albanian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Greek, German, Hungarian, the Scandinavian languages, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Slovak, Slovenian and Russian), whereas in other languages, like English (''gymnasium'', ''gym'') and Spanish (''gimnasio''), the former meaning of a place for physical education was retained. School structure Be ...
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Karel Ančerl Gold Edition
The Karel Ančerl Gold Edition is the collection of 42 reissued and remastered albums, recorded by Czech conductor Karel Ančerl from 1950 until 1968, when the artist left Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion. The CDs were released by the Supraphon label between 2002 and 2005.The gramophone - Volume 81, Page 49 August 2003 "ORCHESTRAL REISSUES - Karel Ancerl's 'Gold Edition'" In 2006, this set was awarded the most prestigious prize by Grand Prix du Disque de l'Académie de Charles Cros due to the exceptional artistic and technical level of the classical music recordings. After 2005, Supraphon released the last four discs of the collection, linked as no. 43 of the set. * Ančerl Gold 1: Bedřich Smetana - Má vlast (Czech Philharmonic), SU 3661-2 011 * Ančerl Gold 2: Antonín Dvořák - Symphony No. 9 "From The New World", In the Nature Realms, Othello Overture (Czech Philharmonic), SU 3662-2 011 * Ančerl Gold 3: Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Bruch, Berg - Concertos for ...
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