Since its founding, the Vienna-based, not-for-profit cultural association Musiktheater Wien has been dedicated to interpreting lesser-known contemporary composers and musical-theatre works and collaborating with young international artists from Israel.

‘Musiktheater Wien’ has produced musical-theatre premieres in Salzburg (»Homage to Else Lasker-Schüler» by Josef Tal, with Marko Feingold, Sandra Kreisler, Einat Aronstein), at the Museum der Moderne and the Salzburg Synagogue, in addition to the world premiere of the chamber opera ‘Der Liebesfluch’, by Hans Kraus-Hübner, at the Trakl Bearthplace, featuring Marino Formenti and Felix Kammerer as the young Trakl.

Insofar as international cooperation, we have produced chamber operas by Josef Tal and Ella Milch-Sheriff in Bonn, Luxembourg and Tel Aviv, and we have staged the premieres in Israel and Hungary of ‘Der Goldene Drache’ (The Golden Dragon), by Peter Eötvös, at the Miskolc Opera Festival in Tel Aviv. On several occasions, such as in Israel, Kraków, and Miskolc/Hungary, we have engaged in successful collaboration with Israel Contemporary Players, an ensemble specialising in contemporary music.

Even during the hardships of the COVID pandemic, we managed to complete two productions: the commissioning of composers Adrian Gaspar and Koloman Polak to create chamber operas in Romani about the siblings Ceija and Karl Stojka, who were Vienna-based Romani artists and Holocaust survivors, and the Polish-Romani poet Bronisława ‘Papusza’ Wajs. The premiere took place online as part of the German presidency of the IHRA and was followed by the staged premiere in 2021 at Porgy & Bess in Vienna. With Kurt Weill’s ‘Mahagonny, ein Songspiel’ featuring Ethel Merhaut and Zoryana Kushpler, which also took place at Porgy & Bess during the pandemic, we were invited to the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow. The production was presented to the public at the Felicja Blumental Music Centre in Tel Aviv in December 2022 with young Israeli singers. This production starred the young Israeli soprano Miriam Hajiyeva, a graduate of the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, in the role of Anne Frank.

Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt on June 12, 1929, as the second daughter of businessman Otto Frank and his wife Edith Frank-Holländer. Anne’s sister Margot was three years older, and her parents were Reform Jews who observed Jewish traditions but were not strictly religious. After the Nazi party rose to power on March 10, 1933, when Anne was four years old, the family emigrated to the Netherlands. Anne’s father began to work in Amsterdam as an agent of the company Opekta, which sold spices and pectin, and the family lived in a block of flats at Merwedeplein 37 in the new neighbourhood of Rivierenbuurt, where many Jewish families settled after fleeing from the Nazis. The family lived peacefully during their first years in Amsterdam. Anne quickly learned Dutch and went to Montessori School, located nearby on Niersstraat Street. She proved to be particularly skilled at reading and writing, and her schoolmates remember that she often wrote secretly, although no such notes are known to exist today.

On May 10, 1940, German troops invaded the Netherlands and began to persecute Jewish families through the implementation of restrictive and discriminatory laws. On several occasions, Otto Frank unsuccessfully sought asylum in the United States and Cuba, and the Franks were forced to go into hiding. From July 1942 onwards, with the help of Otto Frank’s employees (who were Aryan descendants), they managed to hide in a sealed-off annexe behind the Opekta offices, along with two other Jewish families. Nonetheless, the fear of being discovered assailed them constantly. On June 12, 1942, Anne received an autographed book bound with red-and-white chequered cloth for her 13th birthday. She began to record her thoughts, feelings, fears and experiences in the book, which she used as a diary, affectionately addressing her entries to ‘Kitty’. While in hiding, she read many books, perfected her style and quickly became an independent writer. Thinking about the end of the war, she felt a surging desire to work as a journalist and writer, and she wanted to publish her notes in a book titled ‘The Secret Annexe’.

The Franks spent over two years in the Secret Annexe, but on August 4, 1944, the eight people hiding there were discovered by the police. They were taken to the nearest camp, and, from there, to the extermination camp of Auschwitz. As Allied forces approached towards the end of 1944, the camp was evacuated, and Anne and her sister Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, near Celle, where they were separated from their mother. A few weeks before the war ended and the prisoners were liberated from the camps, the sisters fell ill with typhus and died shortly afterwards, in February or March of 1945, in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was the only family member to survive. After the war, he contacted a woman who was among those who had bravely helped the family during their time in hiding. She had conserved Anne’s diary, which Otto Frank published in 1947, under his daughter’s wishes. It has been translated into 55 languages and is one of the most widely read books worldwide. In 2009, it was included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World international register.