The recently deceased French engineer Claude Yaakov Torres was a prominent collector of recordings and musical literature produced in concentration camps and under conditions of persecution and discrimination. At the initiative of his family — his wife, Nicole, and their children, Benjamin, Julie, and Olivier — the material he gathered with such passion has become part of the holdings of the Concentrationary Music Literature Foundation in Barletta, Apulia.
The foundation, conceived and led by pianist Francesco Lotoro, announced the donation of music by artists such as Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, and Dmitri Shostakovich. The organization emphasized that the collection is “invaluable” and includes around 700 books of “enormous library value” that are “extremely rare and virtually impossible to find.” The collection is “invaluable,” the organization emphasized, noting that it includes around 700 books of “enormous library value” that are “extremely rare and virtually impossible to find.” The collection will be housed and promoted within the Bibliomediateca delle Scienze Musicali.
“Thanks to this donation, Italy has become the world’s best-equipped hub for concentrationary music,” Lotoro said. “His family’s initiative strengthens our commitment to serving as a global point of reference.”
Over the years, Torres and Lotoro developed a close friendship and an intense collaboration, linked to Torres’s role as a pioneer in the field through the website musiques-regenerees.fr. Lotoro described Torres as “a genuine mine of information” for scholars and researchers, noting that he was “the very first person I consulted when I began working on France and its persecuted artists.”
Born in Bordeaux in 1946 and deceased in Montpellier in February this year, Torres was a member of the Foundation’s scientific committee.
Following the acquisition of the donation, Lotoro continues to work on the project for a “citadel” dedicated to concentrationary music in Barletta. The complex is expected to be built in a different location than originally planned. Lotoro said, “I hope to move forward together with Jewish institutions, sharing every necessary step with the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.”