Abstract
Building on an earlier analysis of the repeated performances of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem in the Terezín ghetto, this article revisits the undertaking as a paradigmatic instance of musical practice under conditions of radical persecution. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies and historical–musicological sources, and guided by psychoanalytic concepts, we suggest that Verdi’s Requiem could function as a collective container in Bion’s sense: a structured musical–textual matrix that received death and terror and returned it in forms that could be borne, shared, and symbolically elaborated. We bring Ogden’s modes of experiencing into dialogue with the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC), used here as a descriptive vocabulary for layered musical and bodily experience. Focusing on Dies irae and Libera me movements, we trace how musical form, vocal embodiment, and textual meaning converged with Jewish liturgical memory and with the political circumstances of Verdi’s composition, which many prisoners experienced as charged with subversive significance. We argue that rehearsals and performances created a liminal, ritualized space in which inmates could experience themselves as singular subjects and as a community, reclaiming dignity, agency, and voice. Within this musical “third,” psychic life and meaning could, however precariously, be sustained in the midst of an otherwise scarcely representable catastrophe.
Keywords
Terezín, Verdi’s Requiem, Bion, Ogden, Expressive therapies continuum, Trauma, Containment, Music