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Kurt Sonnenfeld (Vienna, 24 February 1921 - Milan, 22 March 1997) was an Austrian musician and composer of Jewish origin who was interned in Italy in the fascist camps established by Benito Mussolini. [1]
Born in a Vienna at the height of its cultural, artistic and musical splendour, from an early age his musical talent did not go unnoticed by his father Leopold, who belonged to that circle of Jewish actor-musicians active in the city at the turn of the century. He began his musical studies first at the Vienna Conservatory and then had the famous Viennese operetta composer Edmund Eysler (1874-1949) as his teacher in piano, harmony, composition and counterpoint. In July 1939, in the climate of growing anti-Semitic hatred following the Anschluss, [2] he was sent by his parents to Milan. They hoped, but in vain, for a future transfer of their son to the USA through the legal institution of Affidavit.
In February 1941, the young Kurt was arrested in Milan and taken to the San Vittore prison. [3] Italy’s entry into the war led Mussolini to regard Jews, immigrants, and refugees as threats to national security. A few weeks later, Kurt faced a long train transfer from Milan to Calabria (over 1,000 km), where he was sent to the Ferramonti internment camp near the village of Tarsia, on the southernmost edge of mainland Italy, in the malaria-ridden valley of the Crati River, in the province of Cosenza.
There, amidst palpable segregation, frequent hunger, and a sense of disorientation, the Jewish internees—many of whom were highly skilled professionals and intellectuals—developed various activities, driven by their resilience and will to live. Among them, Kurt encountered, and later joined, fellow professionals who had been prominent figures on Europe’s musical stages in the 1930s. Despite the harsh conditions of deprivation, their determination to make music persisted, allowing for numerous concerts to take place. Evidence of this is found in the musical diary left by Sonnenfeld, now preserved at the CDEC in Milan.
Kurt also had the opportunity to continue his musical studies in Ferramonti, under the guidance of Lav Mirski and Isko Thaler.
Among the most significant musicians present at the camp was the Croatian Jew Lav Mirski, conductor and composer, who organised a choir there, a true cultural and liturgical-musical masterpiece, with the intention of building, through music, a new identity for those who had lost it. Kurt took part as a chorister in the concert on 9 February 1942, set down in Arthur Lehmann's precise account in a chapter of Bilderbogen aus Ferramonti, a concert that was a real event and at which the local authorities took part.
His parents (Leopold Sonnenfeld and Therese Schwarz) were deported to the Nazi lager in Maly Trostenets (Belarus) and died there in June 1942. Kurt kept up a regular correspondence with them from March 1941 to April 1942, as evidenced by the 26 letters addressed to him, preserved for the rest of his life and now among the epistolary collections of the Rari-Archive of the Library of the Milan Conservatory of Music. [4]
After the liberation of the camp, the return was particularly long and painful. Despite the solicitude with which his doctor friend Joseph Lax urged him to regain his freedom, ex-inmate Sonnenfeld chose to the last to stay at Ferramonti, where he remained for four years and eight months. Then he returned to Milan: it was 12 September 1945. He tried to resume his academic music studies, but was not admitted ‘on account of his age’ to the Milan Conservatory, before a commission formed by Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli, Renzo Bossi, Ettore Desderi and Giulio Cesare Paribeni. Sonnenfeld remained in Milan all his life, teaching music, for some time piano accompanist at the Piccolo Teatro's dance school, at La Rinascente department store and music teacher at the Jewish School in Milan. He wrote music until his death on 22 March 1997. Sonnenfeld is buried at the Maggiore Cemetery in Milan.
He never mentioned the tragic memories that indelibly marked his life, always remaining tied to the two places (Vienna and Ferramonti) that decided, for better or worse, his path as a musician and a man.
More than two hundred autograph musical manuscripts remain of him; [5] from his period of internment we remember the Ferramonti - Walzer, a typical form of Lagerlied, among the few forms tolerated and sometimes even supported by the regime.
Since 2024 a digital library has been active at the Conservatory Library in Rovigo, containing many digitised materials (autographs, photographs, books, scores) belonging to Kurt Sonnenfeld. Also in the same year, the Rovigo Conservatory of Music initiated a collaboration with the music publisher Universal in Vienna, which involves the publication of the works of Sonnenfeld and other musicians interned in Fascist Italy, in the series ‘Musica internata’Universal Edition.