How It Was

Works by Peter Zwetkoff and his Tirolian contemporaries

The exhibition project “Memories of Memories” deals with the culture of remembrance using the example of an NS forced labor camp near Schwaz, which served as a detention camp for Nazis after liberation and was named after the French town of Oradour, where a massacre of the civilian population took place on June 10, 1944, as a reprisal by the Waffen-SS, resulting in 642 deaths. With two compositions – "How It Was" and "Umschlagplatz" – the Tyrolean composer Peter Zwetkoff addressed the indifference of ritualized remembrance decades after the liberation in 1945. Othmar Costa, head of the serious music department at ORF-Radio Tirol, a companion of Zwetkoff and initiator of a discographical anthology of his works, wrote in 1995 about "Umschlagplatz": “Peter Zwetkoff achieved the most concise work with the greatest concentration of his compositional intentions in the absolute music Umschlagplatz 1993. The goal of the music: it aims to raise awareness, to generate attention against indifference and apathy.” Zwetkoff himself was a victim of the Nazi regime and was active in the resistance. From 1954, he primarily worked for SWF Baden-Baden and established himself mainly as a radio play composer.

Price information:

Price information at https://www.tiroler-landesmuseen.at/termin/konzert-69/?datum=202309101100

Image credit(s): Birgit Raitmayr