Caroline Stoessinger

Bio

It is hard to believe that Caroline Stoessinger, an accomplished
musician, acclaimed artistic director and world traveler, began her life
on a farm in Arkansas. She credits her Jewish grandmother with sowing the
initial seeds for this development and her parents for nurturing them.

"Raise children with beauty and they won't go bad," was her
grandmother's credo. She never traveled more than 15 miles from her
home, but managed to give all her twelve children music lessons, which
she paid for with her vegetables, cured meats and "very high angel food
cakes."

Her parents did the same for Stoessinger and her sister. There were two
piano teachers in the tiny town where she grew up; one could read music
and charged 25 cents per lesson and the other couldn't read music and
gave free lessons. Her father, who said that "a girl can never have too
much education," decided that paying 25 cents was the more valuable
option. At the age of nine, Stoessinger became the official town
musician, and earned $1.00 each time she played the electric organ at
the local funeral home. She gleaned as much information and literature
as she could find at the small town library and "pieced it all together"
to get an idea of what the outside world was like.

Her characteristic persistence showed at the age of ten, when she
learned that pianist Artur Rubenstein would play a concert in Memphis,
130 miles away. She insisted on being there even though the family
could barely afford the one ticket. She traveled by train, attended the
concert, and later made her travel companion take her to the Peabody
Hotel so she could personally ask Rubenstein how she could be a great
musician like him. As a student at Barnard College in New York City, she still
couldn't afford to go to concerts. She readily admits that she sneaked in to
as many as she could.

When she became the Music Director at the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine in New York, she produced many concerts benefiting worthy causes. By using poetry read by actors, appearances by celebrities and international
political personalities, she gave her audiences music with a purpose.
In the early 1980s, during the anti-nuclear campaigns, she invited
Leonard Bernstein to say a prayer for peace at the New Year's Eve
concert. This started a tradition with Bernstein conducting regularly
on New Year's Eve. She celebrated Nelson Mandela's first visit to New
York City with an evening featuring musicians and actors at the Cathedral.

Stoessinger served as Artistic Director, Pianist and Host of Tilles
Center's Music at Hillwood series on Long Island from its inception in
1988. At the suggestion of Elie and Marion Wiesel, she produced a concert in Oslo, sponsored by the Nobel Institute, with Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, James Baldwin and Simon Estes, among others. To celebrate democracy in Eastern Europe in 1990, she produced a concert in Prague, with the Prague Symphony and Czech president, Vaclav Havel.

On the 60th anniversary of the birthday of Anne Frank, Lukas Foss
composed "Elegy for Anne Frank," for Stoessinger to play on piano with
the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. Very moved by this composition,
she says music tells that "a child's voice continues to sing."

In 2002, Stoessinger became the music director of Great Music for a
Great City, a series of free concerts she curated for the CUNY Graduate
Center. Some of the programs in the series were, "Dvorak in America,"
“Celebrating George Gershwin, the Composer from Brooklyn," "Music Shall
Live: Remembering Theresienstadt," and a lecture by Ms. Stoessinger on
"Music of the Holocaust," in which she examined how music was used by
the Nazis as a weapon of torture and for propaganda, and by the Jews for
spiritual and physical survival.

As part of this series, in 2003, she presented a revival of the Czech
children's opera, "Brundibar" at the Henry Street Settlement on the
Lower East Side of New York. Written by Hans Krasa in 1938, it was not
performed until three years later at a Jewish orphanage in Nazi-occupied
Prague, where Jews were prohibited from attending public performances.
When the original producers were sent to the Theresienstadt
concentration camp, they revived "Brundibar" and presented 55
performances with the camp's children. The Nazis allowed musical and
other artistic activities in Theresienstadt to create the illusion,
during Red Cross inspections, that the camp was harmless. They ordered
the famous cabaret performer Kurt Gerrons (the original 1928 Mack the
Knife) an inmate of the camp, to produce a propaganda film for the
outside world. Gerrons included a presentation of "Brundibar", a chamber
orchestra, nicely dressed children playing and eating sweets.
Immediately after filming, the food, the clothes, all the false
amenities were taken away. Gerrons, Kraus, and other composers, along with most of the child performers, were among the 120,000 later sent to their deaths at other camps.

Ironically, "Brundibar" tells a children's story of innocence and hope.
"My primary motivation to produce 'Brundibar' is the knowledge that if I
lived 60 years ago in Czechoslovakia, one of those children singing in
(it) could have been my daughter," Ms. Stoessinger states. "When
children learn this music, they learn history and sing passionately for
those whose little voices were silenced. I want to try to open up
people's thinking about bigotry and what it does. This puts a true face
on it."

Appearances on CUNY TV

Jewish Women in America

One to One