A Message from Arnold Mittelman After a career in not-for-profit and commercial theater spanning more than 40 years I was honored in 2007 to found the National Jewish Theater / Foundation and in 2010 to assume leadership of its Holocaust Theater International...
Charlotte Salomon
Charlotte Salomon was a German Jewish artist from a prosperous Berlin family—her father was a surgeon and her stepmother a successful opera and concert singer. Salomon was one the few Jews to be admitted into the Berlin Academy of Art when the Nazis came to power. She fled to the south of France with her grandparents in 1939 following the outbreak of WWII, where she spent her time in exile creating over 1, 300 watercolor paintings. In 1943 at age 26, she was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed. Her diary, Leben? Oder Theatre?, on which the opera is based, is itself a part fiction and part non-fiction “Singspiel” or “song-play.”
Format: Opera
Running Time: Approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes
Notes:
Marc-André Dalbavie, composer
Barbara Honigmann, librettist
Snapshot
Original or Prominent Production:
Performed by the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra in 2014 at the Felsenreitschule for The Salzburg Festival in Austria.
Performed by the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra in 2014 at the Felsenreitschule for The Salzburg Festival in Austria.
Original Source Material: Based on Charlotte Salomon’s diary, Leben? Oder Theatre? (Life? Or Theatre?)
Original Language:
Experience(s) Chronicled: Concentration and Extermination Camps | Hiding | Women and the Holocaust | European Jewry Before the Holocaust | Germany, Hitler and the Growth of Nazism
HTC Insights
Views, reference and research of interest.
Lifetime Achievement Award
The National Jewish Theater Foundation presented its 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award to Alfred Uhry. The presentation took place as part of the Lincoln Center Library event on January 27th 2025 in commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
Lifetime Achievement Award
On September 30, 2024, French playwright, Mr. Jean Claude Grumberg received the Lifetime Achievement Award. It was presented by NJTF HTII President, Arnold Mittelman with Dominique Trimbur, PhD-Manager for the History of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Teaching of the Holocaust of Fondation Pour La Memoir de la Shoah Project.