Discover the real story behind “Émigré: A Musical Drama with the NY Phil.”
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TRANSCRIPT
In 1938, a rash of anti-Semitic violence spread throughout Europe and an urgent wave of Jewish people fled persecution from the Nazi regime.
Immigrant quotas has made it difficult to enter most countries.
But Shanghai, Chin was one of the rare exceptions.
An open point of entry for immigrants.
Émigr is a story of a miraculous time where the governmen and the people of China harbored about 20,000 Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe.
It is an amazing story, which in the history.
Myself is Shanghainese, its been a long time, I wanted to bring the story to the public.
China was not without its own strife and serious conflicts.
The 1937 battle of Shanghai had resulted in Japanese occupatio and led to the Nanjing Massacre and the murder of hundreds of thousands of Chinese.
I neve quite knew about this history, and so it kind of gave me another layer of what was going on in China at the time.
The actual story of the show is a romance between two brothers in the city.
One of the brothers that emigrates falls in love with a Chinese woman and the other brother falls in love with a Jewish woman whose who's been an earlier wave of immigrants.
It was first actually approached maybe to do an opera, but then it kind of segue into an oratorio fairly quickly.
But I knew there needed to be, of course, a narrative, and to me it made sense to make this a multicultural love story with subtle political things going on on the backdrop.
I think the thing that's tricky is the piece is about migration and displacement.
And in a concert hall you only have so many places you can go.
And so there's actually a song in the piece called “Nowhere to Go.” And it's ironic because there isn't a lot of room to move around, but then you strategize, “Okay, where are the places, the alleyways and the arteries through the city that we can create?” And during their stay in Shanghai, a lot of Jewish musicians joined the city life to be the musician.
The orchestra, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, which is a major priority of this orchestra.
If you see the history during the wartime more than 80% of the musicians were Jewish musicians, in the orchestra.
So as musicians, we have the duty.
That well bring, something besides the classical music, we will also need to do something for our time, to do something for our life.
Also for our century.
♪ Light a flame for all whose lives have been displaced ♪ The import of the stor is about citizens of the world protecting each other, when our governments fail to do so.