Requiem Letters

A dramatic and original biography of a married couple, each violated in different ways but bound together by their suffering, their mutual understanding and love, and a desperate struggle for renewal. These twin biographies are brought to life by an imaginary exchange of letters in which, nevertheless, the events described are completely factual.
Dita was an inmate of Auschwitz as a young girl - she and her father were the only surviving members of her Czech-Hungarian family. Ronald, a Londoner, was the victim of a dangerous and unnecessary prefrontal leucotomy, against his will, in the knife-happy days when this operation was common and left a pathetic trail of zombies vegetating in the asylums. To say simply that Ronald 'survived', to become a composer and scholar of international repute, is to gloss over the long and painful path of recovery he describes.
Dita trod a parallel path, although the trauma each suffered was of a different nature. Auschwitz does not ever relinquish its victims: it remained a perpetual assassin in the wings, and even Dita's death from cancer, nearly forty years later, was perhaps its final victory.
This imaginary correspondence is remarkable for the vivid picture it paints of a living death inside Auschwitz as well as the fearful existence of a patient inside a mental hospital in mid-century Britain. Above all, the intimate letters reveal a deep commitment and compassion between two people, a love-story intertwined with the horrific historical events of our time.

Ronald Senator

"a composer of real distinction" (New York Times)

"brilliant, original music" (London Times).

"superb music...warrants comparison with Shostakovich...just as compelling..." (American Record Guide)

Pulitzer Prize nomination 1991 for his Holocaust Requiem , after its New York premiere in 1990 (Lukas Foss conducting the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra , Ron Silver as narrator): a work whose world premiere was at Canterbury Cathedral in England in 1986 under the auspices of the United Nations and the German Government, with many subsequent performances including in Moscow 1993 (Moscow Philharmonic, Bel Kaufman as narrator), recorded live for a DELOS CD; the Holocaust Requiem was the principal work featured in the 1995 Commemoration at Terezin near Prague (Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra) in the presence of the President of the Czech Parliament and the ambassadors of many countries worldwide.

Concerts entirely of Senator's music have been given in New York, London, Moscow and St. Petersburg. His music has been performed live, on radio and on TV in England, France, Germany, Spain, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, as well as the USA. His six operas and musicals includeTrotsky in New York with book and lyrics by Anthony Burgess:Echoes , a panorama of London's history commissioned for the 1986 City of London Festival, with book by Ursula Vaughan Williams; Insect Play, book by Ursula Vaughan Williams adapted from the original by Karel Capek;The Wolf of Gubbio , an ecological parable based on the legend of St. Francis and the wolf, with book by Peter Porter. His list of piano compositions, chamber music, and song-cycles is also extensive. His choral music includes the BBC commission Sunday Soon is Past , a collaboration with W. H. Auden. His orchestral music includes the three sets of Studies in Symphony , and the Concerto for piano, percussion and strings . Sacred music includes the drama He has come back , written for BBC TV, and the Whitsun Mass . His work for film includes a collaboration with Peter Greenaway in his film Lightning.

Ronald Senator studied composition at Oxford with Egon Wellesz, the distinguished disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, and has since established an international reputation both as a composer and, like his 'grandfather' teacher Schoenberg, as a leading innovator in musical education. His radical methods in education, which are based on the universal operations by which all music is formed, were developed at London University, where he directed a large team of teachers and researchers in a program sponsored by the Social Science Research Council.

Dr. Senator has been a professor of music at London University, at the Guildhall School, and at the Europe University. He has been visiting professor at the M.I.T., the University of Southern California and at City University New York in the USA, at the Universities of Queensland, Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, of Toronto and McGill Montreal in Canada. He is a founding member of the Montserrat Composers' Association; founding Director of the National Association of Music Theatre; executive of the Composers' Guild. He now resides in both New York and London.

See the entry in Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Revised Edition.