The Library of Congress presents this virtual lecture, in which Professor Mackenzie Pierce analyzes one of the earliest operas that commemorates the Holocaust, The Annointed (1951) by Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern. Drawing on unexamined materials from the Koussevitzky papers and Koussevitzky Foundation’s collection at the Library of Congress, Pierce examines how Holocaust survivors deployed music to navigate the often incompatible personal, political, and commemorative demands of the early postwar period.

This lecture features special recordings by Erika Switzer and Tyler Duncan, baritone.