Conductor Leo Geyer carried out extensive research into testimonies from Auschwitz and the history of music at the camps.
Fragments of musical scores discovered at Auschwitz will be played for the first time next week after being painstakingly restored by a composer.
Leo Geyer, 31, who is also a conductor, said he stumbled upon the collection of musical manuscripts by accident during a visit to Auschwitz in 2015.
Geyer was visiting the former Nazi concentration camp after he was commissioned to compose a musical score in memory of Martin Gilbert, the British historian and holocaust expert who died in the February of that year.
Not Jewish himself, Geyer traveled to Poland to gain a “sense of the gravity” of Gilbert’s work. While there, he met with an archivist at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, who mentioned they had remnants of musical scores arranged and played by orchestras at the camp.
“I knew there were orchestras in Auschwitz and that was what we were talking about because, as a musician, it was something I was interested in,” said Geyer in a telephone interview with CNN Thursday.
“It was only then that he mentioned about the manuscripts in the archive. I nearly fell over when he first told me — I couldn’t believe such a thing had gone almost unnoticed for almost 80 years.”
A month later, Geyer returned to Poland to inspect the scores.
“That’s when I understood why it had taken so long for people to take an interest,” he said, explaining that the archive contains “210 pieces of music of varying levels of completion.”
“The music had been mostly destroyed, so what remains is almost like a broken jigsaw puzzle, except there are several and they are all mixed in together,” he said, adding that he has since returned a further four times.
Geyer, who is undertaking a doctorate in music and composition at Oxford University, said he was determined to recreate the pieces and bring them to life.
