Tags: piano

Old Wicked Songs

A two character play set in the Vienna rehearsal studio between the spring and summer of 1986, when Austria is forced to confront its Holocaust past, due to the revelation of president Kurt Waldheim's alleged Nazi past. Twenty-five-year-old Jewish piano student Stephen Hoffmann, a former child prodigy who has not performed for a year, studies with Professor Josef Mashkan, whose outwardly anti-Semitic remarks drive the student away. After a visit to Dachau and a sexual encounter with a Jewish woman, he returns. Ultimately, Hoffmann saves his teacher from an attempted suicide and discovers that he is actually a concentration camp survivor.

Piano Fantasy [פנטזיה לפסנתר]

60-year-old Anna returns to the village in which she grew up in Poland. The village has financial problems it hopes to solve through Jewish tourism. The villagers fight over accommodating Anna. Anna is there to find her piano, the one she was playing with her mother when the Nazis came and took her. She wants her grandson to have the piano. She stays with an old couple and soon begins to suspect their house was her own childhood house. Helena, her hostess, never told her husband, the farmer, that the house is Jewish property, and fears Anna will not only take the piano but the house itself. The farmer confronts his wife after she kicks Anna out, and finds out the truth: Helena's parents worked for the Jews, and her mother told the Germans about Anna's family. When Helena's father saw the Jewish family on the train, he took the house. Anna shows them papers that prove the house is hers, but says she'll only take the piano. Helena refuses, being influenced by the village’s hatred of Jews. Anna tells her there is gold under the floor, and Helena and her husband tear down the house.

The Pianist of Willesden Lane

Set in Vienna in 1938 and London during the Blitzkrieg, the story of Lisa Jura, a teenage Jewish pianist who is dreaming about her concert debut at the storied Musikverein concert hall. But with the issuing of new ordinances under the Nazi regime, everything for Lisa changes, except for her love of music and the pursuit of her dream. Featuring some of the world’s most beloved piano music played live, this is a true family story about Mona Golabek’s mother.