Children's opera from Terezin: Brundibar at the Madlenianum marks ten years of Music of Hope

In Terezienstadt in 1942, Hans Krasa converted a children’s opera he had composed in Prague three years earlier into a twenty-six-minute space of resistance, for a single performance. Brundibar, an opera for children about a sparrow, a cat, a dog and a young boy named Aninku who in an evil town must obey a cruel organ-grinder, was performed in the ghetto fifty-one times between 1943 and 1944, with a local children’s ensemble renewed after each new transport to Auschwitz. Krasa himself was deported to Auschwitz on 16 October 1944 and killed the same day. Most of the children who sang in the ghetto did not survive. Brundibar became, after the war, part of the world’s operatic repertoire as a monument to that brief resistance, but it is performed rarely, because it requires a children’s ensemble that can devote itself to a work carrying the weight of a historical monument.

Tonight at 7.30 p.m. at the Madlenianum, the opera house in Zemun, Brundibar is performed for the fourth time in the Serbian context, with the local children’s ensemble Music of Hope, a programme that for years has worked with children with various forms of disability. This year’s date, 26 May, was chosen to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the founding of Music of Hope, started in 2016 by Madlena Cepter with the idea that the opera house bearing her daughter’s name should not work only as a commercial theatre stage but should dedicate part of its work to children for whom art is not easily accessible.

What the opera says and what remains of it

Brundibar at first reading looks like a typical children’s opera about victory over cruelty. Aninku and his sister Aninka want to buy milk for their sick mother but have no money. They go to the town square to sing, but the cruel Brundibar, who has a monopoly over the musicians on the square, drives them away. Only when other town children and three animals, a sparrow, a cat and a dog, join Aninku can they together outshout Brundibar and earn the milk. The story is didactic, but the composer’s score is not. Krasa writes music with Czech folk motifs but also with atonal passages of the Second Viennese School, an unusually demanding technical requirement for a work intended for children.

What emerges as complexity in the Madlenianum performance is also that the Music of Hope ensemble works with children aged eight to eighteen, including children with Down syndrome, autism and hearing impairment. The director Andrijana Vesna Popovic, who has worked with the Music of Hope programme since its founding, has worked the score regularly with the children in the 2024 and 2025 seasons, but the current performance is the first to put a full staging together. The set is reduced to five movable elements: a house facade, a tree, a stall, a milk cart and a piano that is simultaneously a set element and the instrument on which the music is performed. The piano part is played by the conductor herself.

What the opera house admits by staging this piece

The Madlenianum has often been presented in the Serbian cultural field as a private house dealing with operatic production in a space where the state network of institutions is sufficient. That interpretation overlooks what this house has done over the past decade: programmes like Music of Hope, or Young Operatic Talents, or collaborations with the Czech Stavovske divadlo in Prague and the Opera in Brno. Brundibar is precisely the product of one such Czech collaboration; the score and stage solution were developed with the Prague Symphony Orchestra in the 2022/23 season, with the aim of bringing together houses in Central Europe at programme points that historically carry the weight of shared memory.

The Music of Hope programme, according to figures I obtained from the Madlenianum’s director’s office, has over its ten years worked with over three hundred and fifty children, with an annual active ensemble of around eighty participants. What such a programme financially demands is not modest, because working with children who need additional pedagogical support requires more work than a standard children’s ensemble, with local psychologists and special educators involved in the creative process. Tickets for tonight’s performance range from two thousand dinars, not a high price for an operatic production, with part of the ticket revenue going directly toward continuing the programme’s work. The Madlenianum’s gesture in marking ten years of its inclusive programme with Brundibar should not be read as a PR event but as a rational choice of what a private opera house can do with its own resources and curatorial commitment. From a privately owned theatre such as the Madlenianum, a success of this kind deserves to be registered, because state institutions with budgets five times larger have not over the same decade built an inclusive programme with this kind of continuity.