du Closel, Amaury (1956-2024)

Conductor and composer Amaury du Closel founded the Forum Voix Etouffées (Silenced Voices Forum) and worked tirelessly to revive the music of artists persecuted by Nazi and totalitarian regimes

A Viennese at heart, Amaury du Closel was born on February 6, 1956, in Saint-Cloud.

He studied composition with Max Deutsch, conducting at the Royal Conservatory of Mons with Alexandre Myrat, and took master classes in Vienna with Karl Oesterreicher and Sir Charles Mackerras. During the 1984/85 season, he held the position of assistant conductor of the Nancy Symphony and Lyric Orchestra. In 1985, he won the 2nd International Conducting Competition “Masterplayers” in Lugano.

As a conductor, Amaury du Closel has conducted more than 80 ensembles in Europe and Asia. In the 2022-23 season alone, he has performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Berlin Philharmonic with the Berliner Symphoniker, toured many European countries (Italy, Germany, Austria, Lithuania), and participated in several festivals, including Les Folles Journées de Nantes and the Festival de la Chaise-Dieu.

In 2018, he created the French orchestra Les Métamorphoses, with which he has given nearly 120 performances, including new productions such as Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata and Les Noces de Figaro (Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro), in association with the company Opéra Nomade, of which he has been the musical director since 2000.

Alongside his career as a conductor, Amaury du Closel is also renowned as a composer: his catalog includes some thirty works, including pieces for orchestra, various chamber music pieces, and melodies. One of his works, Nahem, premiered in 2008 by the Klangforum Wien, pays tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, whose memory he is determined to preserve in the field of music.

He also composed the music for the silent films La Dixième Symphonie by Abel Gance and Michel Strogoff by V. Tourjansky. His latest piece, Stolpersteine, composed in 2021, will be released on CD in 2023 (Music & Politics, KMI).

Finally, as a musicologist, in 2005 he published Les Voix étouffées du Troisième Reich (The Silenced Voices of the Third Reich), published by Actes Sud, which won the Prize for Best Essay from the Syndicat de la critique musicale (Music Critics’ Union), and for which he was awarded the Goldenes Ehrenzeichen (Golden Medal of Honor) of the Federal Republic of Austria in 2005 and the Verdienstkreuz am Bande (Merit Cross on Ribbon) of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2021. This commitment was translated into action in the same year with the creation of the Forum Voix Etouffées, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of composers and musicians who were victims of European totalitarianism in the 20th century, primarily Nazi barbarism, on a European scale.

In 2009, the Forum Voix Etouffées received the European Commission’s Golden Star Award for the excellence of its memorial work and remains one of the main projects of the CERV program (European Commission’s “Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values” program), one of the pillars of which is the fight against discrimination.

It should be noted that Amaury du Closel’s commitment to rediscovering these composers culminated in a concert at Auschwitz in April 2009, which was the subject of the documentary “Élégies d’Auschwitz” by director Frédéric Cristea.

Amaury du Closel died on October 7, 2024, in Le Puy-en-Velay.

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