From Buchenwald to Carnegie Hall / Marian Filar and Charles Patterson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Filar, Marian, 1917-2012.

Contributor:

Patterson, Charles, 1935-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Filar, Marian, 1917-2012.

Filar, Marian.

Pianists--Poland--Biography.

Pianists.

Poland.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

xiii, 231 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2002]

Summary:

Before the Nazis sent members of the Filar family to Treblinka, these were the last words Marian Filar's mother said to him. "I bless you. You'll survive this horror. You'll become a great pianist, and I'll be very proud of you." Born in 1917 into a musical Jewish family in Warsaw, Marian Filar began playing the piano when he was four. He performed his first public concert at the age of six. At twelve he played with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and went on to study with the great Polish pianist and teacher Zbigniew Drzewiecki at the State Conservatory of Music. After the German invasion, Filar fled to Lemberg (Lvov), where he continued his music studies until 1941, when he returned to his family in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis killed his parents, a sister, and a brother, but he and his brother Joel survived as workers on the German railroad. After taking part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the two were captured and sent to Majdanek, Buchenwald, and other concentration camps.

After liberation Filar was able to resume his career by studying with the renowned German pianist Walter Gieseking. In 1950 he immigrated to the United States and soon after was performing concerts with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He made his Carnegie Hall debut on New Year's Day, 1952. He became head of the piano department at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia and later a professor of music at Temple University, while continuing to perform in Europe, South America, Israel, and the United States. He does not end his story with the liberation but with his fulfillment of his mother's blessing. Without rancor or bitterness, this memoir comes full circle, ending where it began -- in Warsaw. In 1992 Filar traveled to Poland to visit the school next to what had once been the Umschlagplatz, the place from which Jews had been sent to Treblinka and where he said farewell to the mother who blessed him.

Contents:

Part 1 Old World

Early Training 3

Conservatory Days 13

Part 2 Fires of War

War Comes to Warsaw 27

Refugee in Lemberg 34

Musical Worker 45

The Warsaw Ghetto 56

Resistance 67

Part 3 Inside the Nazi Camps

Majdanek and Skarzysko Kamienna 81

Buchenwald and Schlieben 94

Liberation 105

Part 4 After the Storm

The Tables Are Turned 119

Searching for Pieces of the Past 125

A New Beginning in Germany 133

Walter Gieseking 144

Enter Sol Hurok 154

Farewell to Europe 164

Part 5 New World

Getting Started in a New Land 175

Managing without a Manager 185

Settling Down 195

Philadelphia 206

Return to Warsaw 217.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

1578064198

OCLC:

47136457