Our Emeritus Professor Erik Levi features as the Music Consultant for the 2024 Academy Award-winning Holocaust film, 'The Zone of Interest'.
Winning Best International Feature Film and Best Sound in this year's Academy Awards, The Zone of Interest is a 2023 historical drama film written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, co-produced between the United Kingdom and Poland. Loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, the film focuses on the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who live with their family in a home in the "Zone of Interest" next to the concentration camp. Christian Friedel stars as Rudolf Höss alongside Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss.
The Zone of Interest premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, where the film later won the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize, plus the film's soundtrack won, composed by Mica Levi. The score has been nominated by many of world's leading film awarding bodies, where our Emeritus Professor Erik Levi worked closely with the music and sound team as the lead Music Consultant.
About Erik Levi
Erik Levi is Visiting Professor in Music at Royal Holloway, having formerly been Professor of Music and Director of Performance there up to 2015. He studied in the Universities of Cambridge and York and at Berlin Staatliche Hochschule für Musik. An extremely versatile musician, he has interests both in the academic and practical aspects of music, having become a worldwide authority on German music of the 20th century especially during the Nazi era with the pioneering books Music in the Third Reich (1994) and Mozart and the Nazis (2010). He has also worked as a professional accompanist, appearing at the South Bank and Wigmore Hall, the Aldeburgh Festival and on over thirty BBC Recordings. A frequent broadcaster for BBC Radio 3, he also works regularly as a music journalist writing articles and CD reviews for BBC Music Magazine and International Piano. Erik Levi is also Academic Director of the International Centre for Suppressed Music at Royal Holloway, and has organised a number of Conferences on topics that include music and national identity in the 1930s, the composition class of Franz Schreker, Music and Displacement, the impact of Nazism on twentieth-century music, Hanns Eisler and England and most recently Music under German Occupation during the Second World War. The research students he has supervised have submitted PhDs on a wide range of topics including the use of Kitsch and popular culture in opera during the Weimar Republic, Paul Bekker, Alfredo Casella and Italian Fascism, the music of Matyas Seiber, the musical press in Franco’s Spain, Music during the First World War in Britain, and Alan Bush and the London Labour Choral Union.
