Conductor explores the nexus of music, Jewish identity

Arthur Fagen's credentials as an organizer of the inaugural Molly Blank Concert Series at the Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum are incomparable.

That's not just because he has conducted in so many of the world's symphony and opera halls that his baton should have its own passport. Nor is it because he's served as the Atlanta Opera's music director since 2010.

Fagen, who helped select the three Blank series programs, including Sunday’s second installment focusing on 19th- and 20th-century Jewish composers, is the child of parents whose lives were spared during the Holocaust through the efforts of Oskar Schindler.

Not only that, but the maestro himself, after moving to Germany as a 21-year-old in 1972 to become a Frankfurt Opera assistant conductor, came to befriend the man responsible for saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. That included his father Lewis, now 89, and mother Rena, 88.

That background fuels Fagen’s strong connection to his Jewish heritage, led to a still deepening interest in Jewish music, leaves him in disbelief at the existence of Holocaust deniers and has motivated him to do whatever he can as a musician to shine a light on the tragedy.

Lest that make him sound something approaching rabbinical, Fagen is quick to acknowledge that while he identifies with the Conservative branch of Judaism in which he grew up, he’s not strongly observant.

“At the same time, I feel Jewish to the core,” said Fagen, who resides in both Atlanta and Bloomington, Ind., where he chairs the orchestral conducting program at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.

You sense that when he discusses composers Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn, both of whom converted from Judaism to Christianity to avoid anti-Semitism prevalent in 19th-century Austria and Germany. Fagen finds it fascinating that, conversions aside, Mahler referenced Klezmer music in his Symphony No. 1 and Mendelssohn quoted the Jewish-Eastern European melody “Shalom Aleichem” in his ”Reformation” Symphony.

Works by both composers will be included in Sunday’s program, which includes music from the 19th-century Austro-Germanic Empire and France as well as 20th-century America.

"Since the concert is about Jewish identity in a world that is not always accepting of that identity, Arthur's background could not be more appropriate," Atlanta Opera General and Artistic Director Tomer Zvulun said. "Here is a man whose parents survived the Holocaust. But more so, here is an incredible musician and conductor who had a major career in Germany and Austria … the very same countries that persecuted his family.

“The combination of this unusual biography with a deep knowledge and love of the Jewish composers who dealt with the question of Jewish identity is going to make it a very moving concert.”

Schindler visited Fagen’s family at their Long Island, N.Y., home in 1957, but the future maestro was very young and doesn’t remember it.

But when he moved to Germany to become an assistant under Christoph von Dohnanyi at Frankfurt Opera, he soon sought out Schindler, who happened to live mere blocks from the opera house.

This was a decade before Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book, “Schindler’s List,” upon which Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning 1993 movie of the same name was based.

Fagen recalled Schindler’s apartment was in “not what you would call a great neighborhood” close to the Frankfurt train station.

“Quite poor, quite unrecognized,” Fagen recalled. “He was drinking quite heavily at the time. But he was extremely nice to me. He felt responsible for the fact that I was even alive.

“I just think it’s a tremendous tragedy that he didn’t get to enjoy the acclaim that he deserved, which came posthumously. Oh, if only he had known. He was basically living on handouts from people he had saved. He had a very tough time.”

Even in Schindler’s declining days, Fagen viewed him as a hero, a giant among men.

Schindler saved the lives of Fagen’s parents, who were Krakow high school students and friends when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, by listing them as skilled workers at the factory he took over there that produced supplies for the German army.

Still, their lives were far from safe. Lewis Fagen’s family was forced to move to a ghetto that was raided by the SS every few months. Rena and her mother, who at one point were to transfer to a different factory Schindler was taking over in Czechoslovakia, were instead mistakenly sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp with 300 other of his female workers. Schindler sprung them via bribes.

After the defeat of the Nazis, Rena and her mother made it to New York in 1946. Lewis and his parents arrived in 1947. They wed in 1949.

Arthur recalls that that his folks, who now reside in South Florida, didn’t want to talk about the Holocaust when he was growing up.

“They tried to forget their past,” he said. “They did their best to really assimilate into American culture, to become as American as they possibly could. … Holocaust survivors were all traumatized one way or another.”

That changed after Lewis Fagen was interviewed by Keneally. A decade later, they were flown to Jerusalem by Spielberg to appear in the epilogue of “Schindler’s List” in which some of those saved honor their savior by placing stones on his tombstone. Lewis also is interviewed in a documentary accompanying the 10th anniversary DVD.

Arthur Fagen paid respects in his own way by programming music by composers of the Holocaust for the first installment of the Molly Blank Concert Series last November.

“Even in Germany in the ’70s, there was a tremendous feeling of contrition for what had happened during the war. And now when you look at it 40 years later, people are thinking, ‘Let’s put it all behind us,’” Arthur Fagen said with welling incredulity.

“And now of course we have Holocaust deniers as well, and (yet) my parents are living testimony. I mean, it’s just amazing to me that this is happening. So for my small part, I try to do whatever I can to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.”