When the composer Thomas de Hartmann moved with his wife Olga to a deserted house in Garches, near Paris, during the Second World War, he found a 1768 copy of Jean Racine’s plays in, of all places, the hen house. He began to read Esther, which tells the story from the Hebrew Bible in which the eponymous queen reveals her hidden Jewish identity to the Persian king, risking her life, in order to save the Persian Jews from annihilation. 

De Hartmann was immediately struck by the similarities between the story and the Holocaust, and the events unfolding around him. “Oh, this time which we are living through, is it not the time of Purim (the biblical episode of Esther and Mordecai)? I began to be enticed to write a musical tragedy on the text of Racine,” he noted in his memoir.

The result was De Hartmann’s 1946 opera-oratorio Esther, much of it written during wartime, often by candlelight, as the excellent booklet notes by Evan A MacCarthy note, and orchestrated in New York, where Thomas and Olga later moved....