Otto Manasse. Concert as part of the 9th Festival of Restored Music

The Festival of Recovered Music is an event dedicated to music that, for various reasons, has disappeared from our concert halls, our collective memory, and our everyday cultural experience. We bring forgotten works, old performance traditions, unknown composers, and musical worlds back to life—worlds that have remained hidden for years in archives, manuscripts, or local memory. Alongside these rediscovered masterpieces, we also present artists who creatively develop old traditions and give them new meaning. Why Szczecin? The history of our city is a history of constant encounters, migrations, and the intermingling of cultures. Here, every kind of music can feel at home. A concert dedicated to Otto Manasse, born in 1861 in Szczecin, presents the work of a composer whose legacy remained almost completely forgotten for decades. A native of Szczecin from a Jewish family, trained as a chemist, and associated with Munich for most of his life, he belonged to a generation of European Jews whose lives were dramatically cut short by Nazism. Although Manasse officially converted to Lutheranism, after 1933 he became the target of systematic persecution. In 1942, he was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where he died a few months later. The location of his grave remains unknown. Manasse’s work—rooted in the idiom of late German Romanticism and influenced by Max Reger—has survived only thanks to a few manuscripts that escaped the 1945 bombing of Munich. The discovery of these materials in the 21st century made it possible to reconstruct part of his oeuvre and reintroduce it into concert circulation. The concert program includes the two most important cycles preserved in their entirety. Suite für Violoncello und Klavier reveals Manasse as a composer adept at handling the grand chamber form. The second part of the program consists of the cycle Lieder aus dem toskanischen Liederbuch to texts by Edgar Kurz. Nine short songs—preserved in fair copies from around 1930—reveal Manasse as a composer with an extraordinary sensitivity to the text, capable of crafting an expressive, emotionally charged miniature within a limited space. Anja-Maria Luidl (Germany) – mezzo-soprano Tomasz Szczęsny – cello Michaela Pühn (Germany) – piano