Though born in Paris March 6, 1930, Maazel was a second-generation American who was recognized very early on as a musical prodigy. After beginning violin lessons at age 5 and conducting just two years later, he conducted most of the major American orchestras before he was 15. Yet he did not neglect academic studies. He studied languages, mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and, in 1951, went to Italy as a Fulbright scholar.

Soon after that he began appearing on many of the world’s most prestigious podiums — not universally beloved as an artist or a personality, but recognized as brilliant nonetheless. He appeared at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 1960 — the first American to lead a performance there, and Jewish to boot — and made his debuts with the Boston Symphony in 1961 and the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 1963.

Maazel was one of the most internationally prominent conductors of the post-World War II era. Usually conducting from memory and heralded for his precise technique, his performances themselves were often wildly uneven. As Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2002, “He is unpredictable: Performances of his that I have heard over the years have ranged from the propulsive to the repulsive, with few subtle shades in between.”

Nevertheless, over the course of his lengthy career, he conducted more than 7,000 performances in concert halls and opera houses, and made more than 300 recordings. He served as artistic director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin (1965-1971), general manager and artistic director of the Vienna State Opera (1982-1984), music director of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (1993-2002), Pittsburgh Symphony (1988-1996), Cleveland Orchestra (1972-1982), Munich Philharmonic (2012 until his death) and the New York Philharmonic (2002-2009). He founded the Castleton Festival in Virginia with his third wife, Dietlinde Turban Maazel, in 2009 as a full-scale, 500-acre music festival and summer school for rising young musicians.

Controversially, Maazel also lead the New York Philharmonic in a very widely covered 2008 visit to North Korea. At the time, the tour was heralded as a potential breakthrough in that cloistered country’s relations with the wider world.

Though Maazel was known primarily as a conductor, his international prominence allowed him the occasion to premiere his own compositions in very high-profile venues. His first opera, 1984, based on George Orwell’s allegorical novel, had its world premiere at London’s Covent Garden and was revived at La Scala in Milan. He also made his own concert arrangement of Wagner’s Ring cycle, The Ring Without Words.

Along with his wife, Maazel is survived by seven children (three from his marriage to Dietlinde Maazel and four from previous marriages) and four grandchildren.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Pärt is a major composer, and I was a little nervous meeting him. So I brought along a bell for good luck. I set it on the table between us and gave it a little tinkle.

“Oh, this is a good beginning, thank you,” he said in his heavily accented English.

Pärt likes bells, literally and figuratively in his music. He also likes space and silence. Fans tend to use words like “timeless” to describe his contemplative music. But for Pärt, time has deep meaning. In conversation, as in his music, he takes his time to unclutter his thoughts. They come out like poems.

“Time for us, is like the time of our own lives,” he says. “It is temporary. What is timeless is the time of eternal life. That is eternal. These are all high words, and so, like the sun, we cannot really look at them directly, but my intuition tells me that the human soul is connected to both of them — time and eternity.”

Pärt has gravitas to burn. But he didn’t start out that way. As a kid in Soviet-era Estonia, he practiced on a battered old piano and rode his bike around the town listening to Finnish radio broadcasts. I told him that I strapped a transistor radio to my bicycle when I was a kid. “It’s very interesting,” he responded, with a slight twinkle in his eye.

Early on, Pärt wrote thorny, atonal music in the style of the day. But in 1968 he hit a wall. He went nearly silent for eight years, and when he returned, it was with something completely different. Slow, pure, simple, yet powerfully focused is how conductor Stephen Layton describes the music: “If you had to give an aesthetic for his compositional output, less is more is certainly it,” Layton says.

A choral specialist, Layton has recorded two albums of Pärt’s vocal works (a third is scheduled for this fall). Layton says after the complicated music that dominated the mid-20th century, Pärt’s new style, with nods to Gregorian chant and Renaissance music, wiped the slate clean. Part of Pärt’s breakthrough, Layton says, came from hearing just three notes in a supermarket.

“Over the public address system one hears the sound ‘doo, doo doo’ ” — Layton sings three descending tones — “‘Could so-and-so please go to till No. 25?’ Now that sound is called a triad in music, but it’s actually the building block of all music in the Western world.”

Pärt realized the beautiful simplicity of the triad and ran with it. He called his newfound style “tintinnabuli,” a word referring to little tinkling bells. Another ingredient in the recipe is silence.

“On the one hand, silence is like fertile soil, which, as it were, awaits our creative act, our seed,” Pärt says. “On the other hand, silence must be approached with a feeling of awe. And when we speak about silence, we must keep in mind that it has two different wings, so to speak. Silence can be both that which is outside of us and that which is inside a person. The silence of our soul, which isn’t even affected by external distractions, is actually more crucial but more difficult to achieve.”

Pärt’s musical combination of awe and silence caused German record producer Manfred Eicher to pull off the autobahn when he heard Tabula Rasa on the radio. “It was music you discover that makes you speechless, breathless and thoughtful,” Eicher recalls. “Yes, I wanted to be closer to this music.”

It took Eicher, the founder of ECM Records, six months to track down Pärt and a few more years before he released Pärt’s first ECM album in 1984. The album, which included Tabula Rasa for two solo violins and chamber orchestra, opened the door to the West for Part’s music. Thirteen records have followed on ECM alone, with albums appearing on other labels as well.

Pärt’s austere music and his penchant for religious texts (he embraced Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the 1970s) have lent him a certain reputation, says countertenor David James of the Hilliard Ensemble, a group that began championing Pärt’s music in the 1980s.

“A lot of people have this impression,” James says, “that he’s a bit of a recluse, sort of monk-like. Yes, when you see him. But as soon as you speak to him and get to know him, I tell you, he has the most wonderful sense of humor and a most engaging personality.”

I asked Pärt how he likes being thought of as a mystic. He laughs.

“Ah,” he says, “that is the last thing I want to be.”

Pärt turned out to be exactly as James described him — engaging and personal. And at the end of the interview, he even said we had something in common. That’s when he held up his hands, as though he were holding the handlebars of a bicycle.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Violinist David Harrington dreamed up the idea of a string quartet devoted primarily to contemporary music in 1973. Since then, he and his fellow musicians have commissioned and premiered new works by some of the most important composers of our time, including John Adams, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. Violinist John Sherba, who came onboard in 1978, says the pace has been breathtaking: more than 800 brand-new works or arrangements from composers from all over the world. That’s meant learning an often complex new piece every two weeks for some 40 years.

“Every time we bring a new work, a new composition, into our rehearsal and then ultimately into a performance,” Sherba says, “it’s so fresh, it’s a little bit like climbing a new mountain, you know. The challenges are there: Can we play it in tune? Can we play it together? Can we kind of get music out of the piece?”

They’ve developed very deep ties with composers they’ve known for almost half a century. Violist Hank Dutt has been with Kronos since 1977. “We’ve played many composers’ works, and so there’s a relationship going on,” Dutt says. “And a lot of times, those composers recognize the strengths of each of us individually, and can write for that, which is terrific. But there’s also the great thing about our work is that we always work with a composer.”

Speaking from his home in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, 78-year-old composer Terry Riley, one of the fathers of minimalism, says each member of the group brings a specific personality to whatever they play: “I definitely was aware of the differences in playing between different members of Kronos. You know, if I want something really warm, I’ll usually go to Hank’s viola, which is I think the warmest viola sound. If I have a highly technical passage, I might give it to John, the violinist. And if I have something that is like a screaming rock-type passage, I’ll give it to David.”

Riley also says that their bonds proved a ripe ground for experimentation and finding new paths to communicating his ideas. “Especially early on, I was trying to create a kind of improvisational form for Kronos,” Riley recalls, “and the first pieces I showed to them would have involved a lot of improvisational skills. And David told me from the beginning, ‘You know, we do best when we have everything written out, details written out, and then polish those details.’ And so what I realized is that the improvisational feeling in the music would kind of have to be written into it, the kind of interaction that might happen between like, say, north Indian classical musicians onstage when they tossing ideas back and forth in kind of a playful manner.” His Serquent Risadome will have its world premiere at the Carnegie Hall concert tomorrow night.

Kronos has also launched the careers of younger composers, and often nudged their work in new directions. Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov, 43, began corresponding with the group when she was in her 20s. Even though she was just an undergrad at San Francisco Conservatory when she first contacted them, they were very encouraging.

“We really love the first quartet that you wrote,” she says the quartet told her, “and we are very curious to see what are the next pieces you are going to write. So whatever you write, just send it to us.”

“And that was the beginning,” Vrebalov says, “because I did send scores that were not even for string quartet, just whatever I would write. And then three years later, they commissioned the first piece.”

Vrebalov says Harrington and the other members of Kronos encouraged her to tackle themes that she wouldn’t have touched on her own, especially using instruments and ideas from her native country.

“Those were the ’90s, and the ’90s were extremely difficult for that part of the world,” she says. “So a big element in that war, an extremely negative element, was nationalism, and how it was used in those years in the ’90s, in Serbia and Croatia, to promote values that were just so narrow and not good at all for that time when it was happening.”

Kronos encouraged her to subvert that approach. In her piece …hold me, neighbor, in this storm… she used Serbian folk instruments, church bells and even the sound of her own grandmother’s voice singing a traditional song.

Vrebalov has had many works premiered by Kronos, including her piece Bubbles, which the quartet will perform with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus at the Carnegie Hall concert, as well as a collaboration with video artist Bill Morrison and Kronos about World War I that will premiere at Cal Performances in Berkeley, Calif., next month.

The quartet’s influence even extends to its own members. Cellist Sunny Yang, 28, joined Kronos last June. She says long before she ever imagined being a member, she heard them play.

“I first saw them live I think my last year of high school,” Yang says. “I was studying at Interlochen Arts Academy. And I remember I sat in one of the first rows, and I couldn’t close my mouth! They really made a big impression on me!”

Kronos Quartet has made an impression on musicians and composers for more than its musical sensibilities. Its business structure created a new paradigm for younger groups to follow. Janet Cowperthwaite was a senior in college when she was hired to help out with their office work. She is now their managing director, and oversees a staff of eleven that serves the quartet as well as a nonprofit organization called the Kronos Performing Arts Association.

“All of us are employed by the organization, including the members of Kronos,” Cowperthwaite says. “The nonprofit part is about raising money for commissions, mainly, and for other programs. I mean, we’ve commissioned I think it’s up to 831 new works and arrangements for quartet since the quartet was founded. So that kind of output requires a lot of fundraising. There wasn’t really a model for that, or if there was a model, we weren’t aware of it!”

“A lot of younger groups now have seen the model that Kronos has built and have emulated it, which is something that is very gratifying for us,” she continues. “Along the way, I’ve talked to colleagues at eighth blackbird, Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can, the Sō Percussion group. It really makes us feel good to see other groups learning from what we’ve done.”

But what makes them feel great, according to Harrington, is looking to the future — new music in hand. “It feels like a launching point into the future,” he says. “It’s taken 40 years to be able to get to where we’re at right now, and I want to use every day to propel our music forward and further and wider and louder and softer, and every way it can possibly go.”

And at this rate, Kronos will click by 1000 commissions by their 50th anniversary.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, C.P.E. for short, was the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian, whose sturdy, impeccably built music made a great impression on the young composer.

Still, C.P.E. seemed to chafe against the old Baroque restraints by forging an innovative and dramatic new sound, especially in his keyboard music and symphonies.

So where did C.P.E. get all his radical ideas? Not from his father. Although Johann Sebastian personally gave his son a complete music education — and moral support — Harvard professor and Bach scholar Christoph Wolff says C.P.E. had a mind of his own.

“I think he became fascinated by modern trends,” Wolff says. “His father actually supported that, and that was, I think, part of his educational concept not to make clones. And C.P.E. Bach became his very own character.”

One of the modern trends C.P.E. helped design — while he was bored with his 27-year job as harpsichordist to Frederick the Great in Berlin — was something the Germans called empfindsamer Stil. The literal translation is “sentimental style.”

But it’s not about being delicate, Wolff says. It’s more about plugging raw emotions into music by pivoting from one mood and dynamic shade to another. “With staccato and slurred phrases, small motifs are pitted against each other,” Wolff explains. “And that is something completely new in the compositional style of the mid-18th century and had a huge impact on European music.”

Pianist Danny Driver, who has recorded two albums of keyboard sonatas by C.P.E., says the music have felt like a roller coaster to people listening at the time.

“The most striking thing about it is the very quick change of character and the very quick change of harmony,” Driver says. “It’s like a stream of consciousness internal dialogue in a way.”

While listening to C.P.E.’s F-sharp minor sonata, Driver noted some of the composer’s quirky characteristics:

“Well, here you’ve got this rather manic, energetic fantasia-like passage that suddenly, abruptly stops. And then, a lovely aria melody comes in, like a singer with a light accompaniment. And because the juxtaposition happens so quickly we’re left guessing as to what comes next. Are we going to carry on in this sort of vein? And again, the way the harmony suddenly changes, he just changes a single note in a chord that completely turns the emotional effect upside down.”

Hans-Christoph Rademann, who’s just released an album of C.P.E.’s sacred choral music, says that Bach’s restless, radical new style fits within history — with the upheaval of the Seven Years’ War, the shifting of nations and the Enlightenment, which encouraged individualism.

“I think it was a question of this time,” Rademann says. “The time was also a time of change and new ideas. And this music, it was a new feeling, a very good feeling.”

Writing a dull piece of music didn’t seem to be part of C.P.E.’s playbook, even if he did fall into that peculiar crack between the old-fashioned Baroque period of his father and the newfangled freedom of the Classical era, which would star Haydn and Mozart.

In his double concerto, C.P.E. actually bridges that gap. It’s for harpsichord — old school — and fortepiano, the keyboard of the future. Driver, who performed the concerto recently in London, says the two instruments chase each other’s tails.

“It’s literally, from the very first movement, one bar piano, one bar harpsichord, a little bit of orchestra, then something else. The exchange of ideas is so quick,” he says.

The music is old but Driver insists it’s relevant: “It’s not postmodern, but it almost feels postmodern in the sense that there’s this sort of collation of different ideas and different feelings all sort of rolled into one. I think it’s of today as it was of its time.”

And who would have thought that all those weird juxtapositions and breakneck mood swings in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach’s son C.P.E. would end up, some three centuries later, making a surprisingly apt soundtrack for our fractured, multi-tasked, 21st-century lives.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Although not a household name, Ashley blazed an individual path in opera throughout his career, which spanned five decades. Far from resembling any traditional form of opera, Ashley’s works are constructed of intricate speech-song recitations on a vast array of topics — from Renaissance consciousness to The Wall Street Journal. He composed his operas not for the stage, but for television — a foreshadowing, of sorts, of MTV.

“I put my pieces in television format because I believe that’s really the only possibility for music,” the composer told author Kyle Gann in his recent biography of Ashley. The American tradition, Ashley said, is not tied to the great opera houses of Europe: “La Scala’s architecture doesn’t mean anything to us. We don’t go there. We stay at home and watch television.”

Among Ashley’s more notable operatic experiments were The Park and The Backyard, episodes from his first TV opera Perfect Lives (1977-80), itself a panel in a large trilogy tracing the consciousness movement in America and commissioned by the Kitchen in New York. His evocative and enigmatic lines, in deadpan recitation over electronic drones and Indian tabla drums, gave the music a timeless and improvisatory feel. The recording became something of a cult hit among Ashley insiders and at some more adventuresome college radio stations. A sample from almost any moment in the two 20-minute works includes seemingly odd but ultimately memorable lines such as, “Fourteen dollars and twenty-eight cents is more attractive than fourteen dollars because of the twenty-eight. No one likes or dislikes zeros.” (In my days as a radio producer in Ann Arbor, Mich. in the early 1980s, Robert Ashley fans identified themselves by reciting one of his colorful lines like “The feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air” then waiting for an equally esoteric response.)

Ashley was born March 28, 1930 in Ann Arbor and graduated with a degree in music theory from the University of Michigan. He worked at the University’s Speech Research Laboratories before organizing the ONCE festival of contemporary performing arts in the early 1960s and the resulting music theater ensemble called the ONCE Group. In 1969, Ashley was named as the director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College where he created the first public access music and media facility. For ten years, beginning in the mid-1960s, Ashley toured with the experimental Sonic Arts Union, which included composers Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma. In 1984, the BBC televised Ashley’s complete Perfect Lives in seven half-hour episodes. It’s since been seen in Austria, Germany, Spain and the U.S.

Along with some 17 operas, Ashley wrote film scores, chamber music of all stripes, works for tape, for solo piano and free-thinking pieces like Night Sport, for “improvising voice and various distractions.” Although his music was performed around the world, Ashley always seemed to be a composer on the fringe, one rarely recognized for his brilliance and humor, and often either misunderstood or outright ignored.

“And let it be set down, Bob was one of the most amazing composers of the 20th century, and the greatest genius of 20th-century opera,” Gann writes on his blog. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take the world to recognize that. And it hardly matters. He knew it. That the world was too stupid to keep up was not his problem.”

The world premiere of Ashley’s final opera, Crash, will be performed along with two of the composer’s other works at the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York April 10-13.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

He celebrated yesterday by fulfilling a long-standing promise he’d made to the Today show: If he earned gold in Sochi, he’d come to their studio with his fiddle.

After his big win, he pulled out a student standard, the opening measures of Vivaldi‘s Violin Concerto in A minor. He confessed that his command musical performance gave him some pause: “I think I maybe was more nervous for that,” he said laughingly. “It’s been a solid three years since I’ve played the violin.”

And if you’re hungering to hear more of the concerto, check out a vintage performance by Itzhak Perlman.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

However, no one asked either of those opera stars to perform athletic feats. Leave those to 35-year-old British violinist Vanessa-Mae, who is scheduled to ski for Thailand in the women’s giant slalom Tuesday, Feb. 18.

First marketed as a child prodigy in the late 1980s, Vanessa-Mae later found huge success as a crossover musician with an overtly sexy image. In 2006, London’s Sunday Times put her at the very top of its list of the U.K.’s wealthiest young entertainers. Her fortune, then estimated at £32 million, beat out the likes of Coldplay‘s Chris Martin and actors Orlando Bloom and Daniel Radcliffe.

Yet Vanessa-Mae has long dreamed of a second life as an Olympic alpine skier. And she’s found an interesting way to fulfill that desire.

In the latest international rankings for women’s giant slalom, Vanessa-Mae comes in only at No. 2,253. “I am British, but realistically there is no way I could represent my own country,” the violinist told The Telegraph in 2010. “But because my natural father is Thai, they have accepted me.”

Now racing under the name Vanessa Vanakorn, she was born in Singapore to a Chinese mother and a Thai father. She was raised in England by her mother and her British stepfather, Gavin Nicholson, whom her mother later divorced.

According to her official Olympics bio, Vanessa-Mae has been looking for a way to realize her Winter Games aspirations for more than a decade. A previous attempt to ski for Thailand at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City was deflated when the Thai government asked her to forgo her British citizenship.

However, the Thai authorities were eventually placated, and in January 2013, the violinist announced she would be taking a hiatus from her music career to train more seriously in the Swiss ski town of Zermatt, where she moved in 2009.

Qualifying this time around did not come easily, though. Vanessa-Mae only met the Olympic criteria — “by a whisker,” according to her manager — after racing in Slovenia last month in a last-ditch bid for eligibility in Sochi.

As she told Reuters at the time she took her hiatus last year, “I have no delusions about a podium or even being in the top 100 in the world … Just to qualify for the Olympics in my hobby would be a dream come true for me.” She is one of two athletes representing Thailand in Sochi; the other, Kanes Sucharitakul, will be in the men’s slalom and giant slalom competitions.

Vanessa-Mae’s press over the last couple of years hasn’t been all sunshine and roses. In October 2011, she was one of the entertainers castigated by international human rights organizations for performing, reportedly for $500,000, at Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov‘s 35th birthday bash, along with actress Hilary Swank, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme and singer Seal. (The Chechen strongman has been accused of kidnapping and torturing his political opponents as well as carrying out extrajudicial executions.) Unlike Swank, who famously apologized and said she donated her fee for appearing at the same event to charity, Seal remained defiant and Vanessa-Mae never publicly responded to the outcry.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

But the tale of star-crossed sheepherders who fall in love on a rugged Wyoming mountain originated long before the film, as a tightly focused short story by Annie Proulx that was published in the New Yorker in 1997.

Now Proulx and Pulitzer-winning composer Charles Wuorinen have brought Brokeback Mountain to the operatic stage. The entire production from Madrid’s Teatro Real is being offered for free video streaming at Medici TV, beginning Friday at 2 p.m. ET. It will remain available for 90 days.

In an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, Proulx, celebrated for her colorfully succinct style of writing, said she relished the chance to craft her first opera libretto and the opportunity to expand on her protagonists a little. Wuorinen said he saw the operatic potential in the story after seeing the film: “It’s a contemporary version of a universal human problem. Two people that are in love, who can’t make it work and it ends badly.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Original post, Feb. 6: It was a perfect success story: A composer overcomes his deafness to become a widely beloved cultural icon. No, we’re not talking about Beethoven. This was the story arc for 50-year-old Mamoru Samuragochi, one of Japan’s most popular contemporary composers, whose music became a best-selling album and is heard in the video games Resident Evil and Onimusha.

Not only has Samuragochi, who says he has been almost completely deaf since age 35 because of a degenerative illness, enjoyed having concert music attributed to him heard around the world, but Japanese Olympic figure skater Daisuke Takahashi is also scheduled to use the Samuragochi-credited Sonatina for Violin in his short program in Sochi later this month.

It was the Olympic visibility that triggered an astonishing revelation Wednesday: Samuragochi suddenly announced that not only had he not written the Sonatina, but most of his music written in the past two decades was composed by someone else. Thursday, a 43-year-old composer in Tokyo named Takashi Niigaki stepped forward to say that he has been Samuragochi’s ghostwriter since 1996. A composer also named Takashi Niigaki is credited as composer-in-residence for the celebrated Bach Collegium Japan and its Ensemble Genesis, though NPR has not yet been able to confirm that it is the same individual.

Adding to the general confusion were allegations of another fraud that Niigaki put forward during a 90-minute press conference he held in Tokyo Thursday: that maybe Samuragochi isn’t deaf, either. Niigaki — who says he has been paid about 7 million yen (roughly $69,000) to write for Samuragochi — says that he has had regular conversations with Samuragochi, in which the other man listened to and commented upon his work, and said in the press conference that the purported deafness was “an act that he was performing to the outside world.” Samuragochi’s lawyers say, however, that they believe that he is indeed deaf.

Over the past two decades, Samuragochi had become a major human-interest story at home and abroad. In a 2001 Time magazine profile that trumped him as a “digital-age Beethoven,” he was quoted as saying that his deafness had proved a “gift from God.”

Niigaki said at his press conference that he had wanted to come clean earlier, but that Samuragochi threatened to commit suicide if he did so.

In the meantime, Samuragochi found commercial and critical success. His Symphony No. 1, “Hiroshima” became a best-selling album in Japan, and in 2013, the Japanese public broadcaster NHK aired a documentary about him called Melody of the Soul, in which he was shown meeting with survivors and relatives of people who perished in the 2011 tsunami. The “Hiroshima” piece in particular had become a pop culture touchstone during Japan’s rebuilding efforts.

Samuragochi is signed to the Japanese label Nippon Columbia, which operates internationally as the Savoy Label Group. (Disclaimer: My husband, Joshua Sherman, was vice president of sales for SLG in the U.S. and directed A&R for Savoy Jazz/SLG until 2010.) After the revelations, Nippon Columbia released an initial statement saying that it was “surprised and extremely angry.” Update: Nippon Columbia has since stopped distribution of Samuragochi’s CDs, DVDs and downloads, and his publisher, Tokyo Hustle, has canceled the scheduled release of three more scores and retracted permissions for its existing “Samuragochi” catalog, saying that the copyright owner is “unknown.”

The mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui, has said that the city will have to retract the citizen’s award it had given Samuragochi in 2008.

Although Samuragochi wasn’t well-known in the U.S., music attributed to him did get performed by American ensembles, including this 2013 performance of Requiem Hiroshima by the acclaimed Young People’s Chorus of New York City, directed by Francisco J. Núñez:

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Now it’s getting its U.S. premiere at the Houston Grand Opera. The opera is based on a story by a Holocaust survivor, with music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a composer who lost his entire family in the Nazi death camps.

Writer Zofia Posmysz, an Auschwitz survivor, was in Paris in 1959 when she feared she heard her former Nazi prison guard nearby. She was wrong. But that seed became this story, wherein her experience is reversed: On a 1950s cruise ship, a passenger — a former guard — thinks she sees her former prisoner.

The husband knows nothing of his wife’s Nazi past. Scenes on the ship unfold on the white upper deck, Auschwitz sequences play out in the shadowy lower deck of the prison hell, where the same scene shifts back in time.

Polish-born Weinberg wrote The Passenger in 1967. The young Jewish musician escaped Warsaw in 1939 and settled in Moscow, where he studied with Shostakovich. He wrote incessantly. David Pountney, who directs the Houston production of The Passenger, says Weinberg composed 22 symphonies, 17 string quartets, ballets, film scores and seven operas.

“He was primarily writing to justify his survival,” Pountney says. “I’m sure that’s why he wrote such a massive amount of music. He never stopped, [as if to say] ‘I’ve been saved. I’m the only one who survived. I have to use every minute to justify that.'”

Weinberg considered The Passenger his masterpiece. But a 1968 premiere was scrapped. Weinberg couldn’t get anyone to produce it. Then, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, music publishers in need of money began offering their works abroad. Pountney says they sent out leaflets describing pieces he’d never heard of.

“You know, it was one of those bits of paper on its way to the wastepaper basket, and luckily I said ‘What? Friend of Shostakovich? Auschwitz? What is this?'” Pountney seized the opportunity and first presented a full production in 2010.

“We premiered it in Austria, so we’re kind of performing it to grandchildren of perpetrators,” he says. “And some of the grandchildren of the victims, of course.”

Posmysz was in the audience, but Weinberg died in 1996 and never saw the work performed. Pountney contacted Patrick Summers, Houston Grand Opera’s music director and conductor. The two had worked together before, and Summers agreed to stage the work even though it’s not easy on audiences.

“It’s unrelentingly dark,” Summers says. “There’s no point in trying to pretend it isn’t.”

The opera offers little relief, but it does what art’s supposed to do, Summers says. It changes the way we see things and provides no easy answers.

“It asks us as an audience one thing,” He says. “It just asks us, begs us, to remember.”

The Passenger is performed Sunday. The same production moves to New York City in June.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.