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Joseph Schmidt - Story of a Short Life

Joseph Schmidt's career has been abundantly recorded in archive material. No re-enactments are necessary to bring the tenor and human being Joseph Schmidt back to life. He is found in merry excerpts from feature films such as "An Star falls from Heaven" or "A Song goes round the World", but also in touching scenes. And there are horrific excerpts, for example from "The Eternal Jew", in which the propaganda department compares the listener's favourite and his colleague Richard Tauber with rats. There are 8 to 10 feature films alone in which Joseph Schmidt sings. These are real live recordings - fortunately, playback was not yet possible at that time. The film limits itself to a few, selected interview partners, such as Paula Lindbergh Salomon, with whom we were able to hold an interview back in 1996. She was his last living friend and colleague. She died in Amsterdam in 2000 aged nearly 100. The Jewish tradition is demonstrated by a practising cantor. A historian describes the role of Switzerland in the question of emigrants and in their fates. The film moves on the search for the first and last traces of Joseph Schmidt. A journey to the Bukowina to Czernowitz. A tracing of the time in the synagogue. A search for Joseph Schmidt's musical roots. The years of success are told with the existing material. Then, the films, the radio appearances and the photos become rarer. They almost completely disappear. A journey to Gyrenbad and to Zurich searches further. Documents become more and more word-bound, the picture of the man has almost totally gone. All that remains are houses, towns and landscapes. His voice was out of the ordinary - his fate, at that time, an everyday occurrence.

Facts

Prog. No.
5413
Music genre
Documentary
Length
60 mins
Director
Marieke Schroeder
Producers
Pars Media, SF-DRS, ZDF/3SAT, ORF
Production year
2004