Music of Remembrance (MOR) has always been committed to communicating the Holocaust's important lessons for our world today through music. MOR's 2019 commission will unveil The Parting by composer Tom Cipullo and librettist David Mason. This one-act opera relates the story of Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti.
Conscripted into forced battlefront labor during World War II, Radnoti was beaten to death and buried together with other Jews in a mass grave. After the war, the grave was discovered and Radnoti’s body exhumed. The front pocket of his overcoat contained a small notebook of his final poems. Those verses, which range from tender poems to the wife he would never see again to gruesome depictions of the barbarity he had witnessed, stand among the most powerful works of Holocaust literature.