Cellist and writer Janet Horvath, MFA, delivered the 2025 Goodman Lecture, speaking on the legacy of trauma and the power of music to connect people across faiths and cultures.
Onstage at last Thursday, cellist and writer Janet Horvath, MFA, shared several lifetimes’ worth of reflection.
During her remarks as 2025 Goodman Lecturer and a Q&A that followed, Horvath dove into the impact of trauma on Holocaust survivors, their children, and their children’s children, spelling out the ripple effect on each subsequent generation. She related the arc of her parents’ lives before, during, and after Nazi-occupied Hungary, weaving in pivotal memories of her own childhood and career as associate principal cello of Minnesota Orchestra from 1980 to 2012. Throughout the evening she interspersed spoken word with archival and personal photographs, video recordings of her playing, and excerpts from her book The Cello Still Sings: A Generational Story of the Holocaust and of the Transformative Power of Music.
Horvath learned about her parents’ history as Holocaust survivors in 2009, when a casual question to her father led her to discover that he performed with famed conductor Leonard Bernstein in morale-boosting concerts in the displaced persons camps of Bavaria, Germany. Now elderly, Horvath’s father George painstakingly wrote a testimony of his life during World War II as a slave-laborer in the copper mines of Bor, Yugoslavia. In time, Horvath was able to record her mother Katherine’s story of surviving Nazi occupation, starving and hiding in deserted tunnels and bombed buildings. Once they were able to immigrate to Canada, Katherine became a piano teacher and George became a professional cellist, joining the Toronto Symphony. Both buried their deep trauma and attempted to heal others through their love of music.