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.”