As the American pianist Roger Peltzman brings his one-man play Dedication to London, he talks to Erica Worth about how his own mother’s traumatic past has made him a better pianist
The lights go down, the stage is stark, and onto it walks a solitary, casually-clad figure. Over the course of an hour – by use of drama, humour, powerful images and musical performances of everything from blues to Chopin – pianist Roger Peltzman recounts his family’s tragic history fleeing the Nazis in war-torn Europe. Peltzman describes the plight of his mother and her family: the Sterns. Having fled Berlin for Brussels in 1933 to escape persecution, they went into hiding when Germany invaded Belgium. One January night, the Schutzstaffel (SS) turned up to arrest the family, but Peltzman’s 17-year-old mother quickly made her way to the bathroom and narrowly escaped via the window onto a snowy roof. As she hid, her family was taken away. Her brother Norbert Stern – a talented pianist who had enrolled at the Brussels Conservatory of Music and who won numerous competitions – was among them. She never saw her family again. Norbert was just 21 years old.
It’s been a busy time for Peltzman, who currently teaches the piano in New York City. First staged and filmed in New York in the summer of 2021 (due to pandemic-related delays in live performance opportunities), Dedication has since been screened at some of the world’s top film festivals and last summer made its live theatre premier at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, garnering 4-star reviews from the critics.
Peltzman explains his raison d’être for the show: ‘For much of my life – starting as a child – I had feelings of guilt and depression,’ he says. ‘Until relatively recently I had no idea why.’ He continues: ‘My mother – who through luck and cunning survived the war and eventually moved to the US – had no reservations about talking about her escape or about her family. With photos of family members scattered throughout the house, I began to feel what you might call the presence of absence in my life. Some indescribable void.’
The ties that bind
In the second half of Dedication, Peltzman recounts his coming to terms with second generation survivor trauma and the role of music in helping to manage wounds that will never fully heal. Drawn into the story of people he never knew, he develops a ‘relationship’ with his uncle, Norbert. ‘I began to search for Norbert and my grandparents. I wanted to know about Norbert’s budding career. His repertoire, his teachers. And I wanted the exact details of their arre
