BARCELONA,SPAIN.- Next February 27, 2007, Music and the Third Reich: from Bayreuth to Terezin opens to the public in the Exhibition Room of the Fundació Caixa Catalunya at La Pedrera. The exhibition, curated by Pascal Huynh (Cité de la musique, Paris), brings together paintings, drawings and prints, as well as recordings, films, and graphic and documentary material that reveal the key role that music played at the heart of the ideological and stylistic conflicts fuelled by the Third Reich.

Over the last twenty years, cultural institutions from around the world have been working to retrieve the music that was banned and silenced by the Third Reich "musical expression that did not fit within the criterion of "pure German music "", as well as to pay homage to all the commendable composers who fell victim to the national-socialist regime. The Fundació Caixa Catalunya has contributed to this undertaking of the recovery and revision of the collective memory of our time by presenting in Barcelona Music and the Third Reich: from Bayreuth to Terezin, an exhibition that expands, revises and concludes the one organised in 2004 by the Cité de la musique of Paris, under the title "The Third Reich and Music".

The material on display shows the extent to which the Nazi regimen went in order to impose a determined ideal of Germanic musical tradition and creation, while at the same time, brutally silencing the voice of supposed "degenerate music" (mainly jazz and avant-garde music), which was regarded as irrelevant to the national spirit.

In bringing the exhibition to Barcelona, in collaboration with the Cité de la musique, the Fundació Caixa Catalunya decided to expand its contents, enlarging the various sections with a special mention to the music of exile and to the concentration camps, with a section specifically given over to the music of the Czech concentration camp of Terezin (Theresienstadt), in Bohemia, an unequivocal paradigm of the human being's creative capacity under the most extreme and adverse conditions.

The twenty experts who have written the exhibition catalogue address the question of the Third Reich from four perspectives: Traditions and modernities, the national socialist system, Propaganda mechanisms and instruments and Repression and resistance. It also includes a list of the works on display, the audiovisual works and music scores. One edition will be published in Catalan and another in Spanish.