Since the end of the 1980s, so-called “verfemte Musik” (ostracized music) – the dissemination of which was prevented by National Socialism earlier in the 20th century – has been the subject of academic research and artistic reappraisal. In recent years, unexpected musical treasures have been unearthed – numerous previously forgotten or completely unknown compositions, whose revivals and in some cases even premieres, have enriched international musical life enormously.

The works of composers who were victims of the Stalinism have also been reappraised. These include Vsevolod Zaderatsky, Alexander Weprik, Mikhail Nosyrev and other composers who were imprisoned in the Gulag. Some Jewish composers who came to the Soviet Union to escape National Socialism, including Mieczyslaw Weinberg, were subjected to anti-Semitic persecution in the final years of the Stalin era.

Although the struggle for physical survival should have absorbed all the energy of the persecuted musicians, many of them still found strength for creative activity. For them, composing meant preserving their own humanity despite the inhumane conditions, and was therefore a form of spiritual resistance. Thus, an intensive cultural life developed in the ghetto of Terezín (Theresienstadt) in the years 1942-44, to which Jewish composers such as Viktor Ullmann, Gideon Klein, Hans Krasa and Pavel Haas also contributed. “It should be emphasized … that we were by no means merely sitting by Babylon’s rivers lamenting, and that our cultural will was consistent with our will to live,” wrote Viktor Ullmann in 1944, a few months before his death in the gas chamber in Auschwitz.