One-woman show brings to life a Holocaust survivor
Alyse Warner, Staff Reporter
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On a stage with only a drum, a microphone and a piano, Claudia Stevens brought to life the powerful story of a Holocaust survivor on Wednesday, March 15. Sponsored jointly by the Women's Studies and Performing Arts Departments, "An Evening with Madame F," is a one-woman show that Claudia Stevens has performed continuously since 1990.
The performance, which concluded the Women in Music concert series, was marked by its sheer force of chilling words and unforgettable stories. Stevens tells an epic story of a French holocaust survivor, "Madame F," who was singled out and given special privileges in Auschwitz for her musical gifts. Once the Nazis recognized her for her talents, she was no longer an ordinary prisoner, but still not free. For Madame F and other women like her, music became the blessed escape from the horrible atrocities they were exposed to everyday.
Madame F even had to make herself useful to the orchestra's leader, a German Jew who was the niece of composer Gustav Mahler, whom she despised. As not only a singer, but a musical arranger and percussionist, she found an outlet for her frustrations by hiding forbidden music inside the music that they played, embedding songs of the resistance into the orchestra's performances. Her relationship with the orchestra director was turbulent, especially as she was bombarded with images of people dying in the camps.
The orchestra even played for top Nazi officials and the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele, who walks out of their performance. Her music is forced to create peace within a war, and even becomes distorted, as life begins to lose its meaning. In a timeless voice, she proclaims, "it is not living that matters, it's singing and living." Music became the lifesaver to which she clung. The dramatic end of the show, when the orchestra disbands and she is placed on a train, made for a moving moment in the performance. Starving and thirsty, Stevens portrayed Madame F laying on top of others in the camps as they die until she was rescued by a British soldier who demonstrated pity and horror at seeing her. To ease the sting, she sings the French National Anthem, for within music was her sanctuary.
As Claudia Stevens put it, "Music is what gave her humanity, to have a voice meant to retain a connection to humanity when everything else had been taken away." Incidentally, "An Evening with Madame F" has been produced for PBS. According to promotional materials, Claudia Stevens is "Currently [a] Visiting Scholar at the Brandeis University Women's Studies Research Center."