Martin Goldsmith - Lecture

The Mills College Music Department and History Department present

The Mary L. and Tony Bianco Lecture Series

MARTIN GOLDSMITH 

Lecturer

Thursday, February 16, 2017

4:30 pm

Littlefield Concert Hall

Mills College

5000 MacArthur Blvd

Oakland, CA 94613

Free and open to the public

Reception in the Foyer following the Lecture

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Martin Goldsmith will discuss his book:

The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000).  

“Martin Goldsmith, best known as the host of NPR's Performance Today, is the American-born son of two German-Jewish musicians who escaped the Holocaust. The Inextinguishable Symphony is the story of his own family, whom he never knew because most of them perished in Hitler's death camps. His book documents their lives in Nazi Germany, with its ever-tightening persecution and repression of the Jews, and on their nightmarish journey to the gas chambers. He follows his parents through their early musical training, their blossoming love, courtship, and marriage-—making them seem like a normal, happy young couple—to their miraculous rescue and escape to America.

The book’s linchpin is the Jewish Culture Association (Jüdische Kulturbund), in whose Berlin orchestra his parents met. Established by prominent Jewish leaders in 1933, after a “purge” of all Jewish Civil Servants, the Kulturbund flourished for eight years, with the permission and under the constant, increasingly repressive surveillance of the Nazis, who exploited it as a propaganda tool. Spreading from Berlin to other cities, its musical and theatrical presentations, lectures, and films offered employment to thousands of Jewish artists and the only cultural oasis to its Jewish audiences. In 1941, Germany's preoccupation with the war and the “Final Solution” rendered it superfluous, and it was dissolved. Goldsmith’s book provides the broader historical context for his uniquely individual, human account of the twentieth century's most inhuman period.”

—Review by Edith Eisler

Goldsmith is also the author of six Composer Portraits that he has performed with conductor Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra in the Concert Hall of the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Hour-long biographies of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and Copland, the Portraits attracted enthusiastic crowds to the Kennedy Center from 2003 to 2008, and furthered Mr. Goldsmith’s reputation as one of America’s foremost advocates for classical music. He established that reputation through his work as a broadcaster. Martin Goldsmith is the daily morning voice of Symphony Hall at Sirius XM Satellite Radio in Washington. For ten years, from 1989 to 1999, he served as the host of Performance Today, National Public Radio’s daily classical music program. During Mr. Goldsmith’s tenure as host, PT won the coveted Peabody Award for broadcasting. In September, 1998, Mr. Goldsmith was awarded a Cultural Leadership Citation from Yale University "in recognition of service to the cultural life of the nation.”