Totalitarian systems of rule have played a significant role in shaping the history of music over the past 100 years: Musical life could not escape the totalitarian dictatorships' claim to control all areas of life and culture and to shape them according to the respective ideology. Numerous outstanding musicians, composers as well as performers, became victims of these regimes. The reception history of many musical works and even entire stylistic directions was also directly or indirectly influenced by the totalitarian ideologies - in some cases up to the present day. In this context, the fates of the German-Jewish composer Hans Heller (1898-1969) and the Russian-Ukrainian composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky (1891-1953), who were completely forgotten until recently, will be addressed. Finally, the effects of the technological totalitarianism of our time on musical life are questioned.

Hans Heller (1898-1969):

Little Suite (1951)

I. Prelude              

II. meditation

III Scherzino

IV. Elegy

V. Like the song of a bird

VI. molto vivace        

Vsevolod Zaderatsky (1891-1953)              

from the cycle "24 Preludes and Fugues" (composed in the Gulag, 1938-1939)

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The pianist and musicologist Jascha Nemtsov was born in 1963 in Magadan, Siberia. He studied at the State Conservatory in St. Petersburg and has lived in Germany since 1992. He received his doctorate in 2004 and his habilitation in 2007. In 2013, he was appointed professor of the history of Jewish music at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Weimar. In addition, he is Academic Director of Cantorial Studies at the Abraham Geiger College at the University of Potsdam, where he also teaches. Nemtsov is editor of the series "Jewish Music. Studies and Sources on Jewish Musical Culture" published by Harrassowitz Verlag Wiesbaden. His scholarly work focuses on Jewish music and Jewish composers in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as topics such as "Nationalism and Music," "Religion and Music," and "Totalitarianism and Music."

As a pianist, he has recorded more than 40 CDs, which have won several international awards. The CD with sonatas for violin and piano by Shostakovich and Weinberg with violinist Kolja Blacher received the German Record Critics' Prize in 2007. In 2018, Nemtsov received the newly founded Opus Klassik Prizefor his anthology of 5 CDs with piano works by the composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky, who was persecuted under Stalinism.

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