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Peter Lobbenberg’s mother died in 1971, and made way for an extraordinary discovery of his family’s past.
Clearing out his mother’s desk, he found 22 letters of correspondence penned by his grandmother, Leonie ‘Lony’ Fraenkel. Lony was a German-Jewish exile who ran the Café de Paris in Amsterdam. Her letters illustrate the time of war and Nazi-occupation in Europe, with many of the letters addressed to Lobbenberg when he was a baby.
Years later, the letters form the text for a new work, Letters from Lony: a Holocaust Story, composed by Ronald Corps for mezzo-soprano, piano and string quartet.
‘My emotional connection came only much later, when I re-read them and realised Lony was pouring out her heart to me; of course, she was also keeping in touch with the family,’ said Lobbenberg.
Lony died in Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944. After finding the letters, Lobbenberg translated the text and asked Corps to set them to music, as a way to memorialise his grandmother he had never met, as well as the millions of others who shared her fate.
On writing the work, Corps said: ’I wanted the music to sound conversational but not too much like recitative. I felt the music had to have melody and I hope to have found a way of writing in an arioso style which brings Lony alive.
’I also had to be sensitive to the accompanying musical palette and to give the singer some respite during the cycle – hence the interludes, which also serve the purpose of helping the narrative to progress.
’The combination of string quartet and piano seemed to provide the fullest “orchestral” accompaniment without drowning the voice.’
The 70-minute work is divided into sections that represent different letters. Notably, one of the first numbers is a lullaby, which recurrs at the very end of the work, hummed by the singer as she walks offstage, to signify that Lony has perished in Auschwitz.
The work was first performed by the Chilingirian Quartet in 2017 at the Proms at St Jude’s. It will be performed at the 2025 Three Choirs Festival by Olivia Ray (mezzo-soprano), Sholto Kynoch (piano), Gildas Quartet on 1 August. The concert will be in memory of Corps, who died recently in May 2025.
The Three Choirs Festival runs from 26 July to 2 August 2025. Find out more here: https://3choirs.org/events/letters-from-lony-a-holocaust-story
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