How can a composer once hailed as one of the brightest voices of his generation vanish from our cultural memory?
Karol Rathaus (1895–1954) helped define the sound of European music between the wars, his works championed by legendary conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Erich Kleiber. Yet today, few know his name. This film is our attempt to change that — to bring Rathaus’s music and story back to the world.

Born in Ternopol (then part of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Ukraine), Rathaus grew up between identities: Jewish by origin, shaped by a Polish-dominated childhood, and steeped in Austro-German musical culture through his education in Vienna and Berlin. By the early 1930s he was on a clear path to international prominence. The rise of the Nazis abruptly ended that ascent. Forced to flee Germany, Rathaus spent years in Paris and London before finding a new and permanent home in New York, where he became the first professor of composition at the newly founded Queens College. Once central to European modernism, his music faded into neglect — though it remains a striking and original voice in the history of 20th-century music.

This film is not only a portrait of one remarkable artist, but a tribute to an entire generation of Jewish composers whose lives were uprooted by the Nazis. Like Rathaus, many escaped Hitler’s Europe only to see their careers collapse in exile, their work nearly erased from cultural memory. Our narrator, Sergei, is an alumnus of the very school Rathaus helped establish. Through his search for Rathaus’ lost legacy, the film explores how exile reshaped these artists’ lives  and why their voices still matter.