Kurt Sonnenfeld (composer)

Kurt Sonnenfeld (Vienna, 24 February 1921 - Milan, 22 March 1997) was an Austrian musician and composer of Jewish origin who was interned in Italy in the fascist camps established by Benito Mussolini.

A few weeks later, Kurt faced a long train transfer from Milan to Calabria (over 1,000 km), where he was sent to the Ferramonti internment camp near the village of Tarsia, on the southernmost edge of mainland Italy, in the malaria-ridden valley of the Crati River, in the province of Cosenza.

Among the most significant musicians present at the camp was the Croatian Jew Lav Mirski, conductor and composer, who organised a choir there, a true cultural and liturgical-musical masterpiece, with the intention of building, through music, a new identity for those who had lost it.

Kurt kept up a regular correspondence with them from March 1941 to April 1942, as evidenced by the 26 letters addressed to him, preserved for the rest of his life and now among the epistolary collections of the Rari-Archive of the Library of the Milan Conservatory of Music.

He tried to resume his academic music studies, but was not admitted ‘on account of his age’ to the Milan Conservatory, before a commission formed by Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli, Renzo Bossi, Ettore Desderi and Giulio Cesare Paribeni.