Dreyfus: Prisoner of Devil's Island
Music & Lyrics: Bryan Kesselman

A New Music Theatre piece based on the infamous Dreyfus Affair.

Professional and World première in London on Wednesday 18th November 1998 at St Giles, Cripplegate, as part of the 9th London International Jewish Music Festival.

The story is that of the infamous Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, and has been researched from contemporary sources.

In 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Officer in the French Army, was wrongly found Guilty of Treason and sentenced to Military Degradation and Life Imprisonment on Devil's Island a former leper colony off the North-East coast of South America, near the Equator. At his Court-Martial, a secret dossier was illegally shown to the judges, but not to the defence.  Thus began the Dreyfus Affair, which caused anti-Semitic riots on the streets of France, condemnation throughout the world, and, by its influence on Theodore Herzl, led to the development of Zionism.

Some people genuinely believed Dreyfus to be guilty, and justly sentenced.  But there were those to whom injustice evidently meant nothing. To save the honour of their Army and its Minister of War, the General Staff consistently lied, and created forgeries in order to keep Dreyfus a life-long prisoner on Devil's Island although they knew him to be innocent.

In 1898, Émile Zola wrote his famous open letter to President Faure, J'ACCUSE...!  The rest, as they say, is history.        

Among the amazing characters who were involved in these events, figures Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of Anthropometry - a very complicated system of measurements, used (with great inaccuracy) for identifying criminals before fingerprinting came into use. The French press disparagingly called it, "Bertillonage."  He was called as a handwriting expert (which he was not!) at both of Dreyfus' court-martials, where he was described as having used, "absurd and entangled arguments with outrageous vocabulary like a necromancer's spells." These arguments seem to have been taken most seriously, however, by the judges.

On the face of it, the issues appear to be injustice and anti-Semitism. But that is to miss the point. Prejudice, be it anti-Semitism, apartheid, or any other manifestation, is abhorrent to most of us, and it becomes doubly evil when mixed up with the judicial system.  The fact that prejudice reared its ugly head in such an enlightened country as France, the land of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, was a great shock to the world.

The Dreyfus Affair leaves us with a sobering message on the subject of human rights, which is as relevant today, in the new millennium, as it was 100 years ago.

The first performance of Maccabee, a dramatic cantata, music and lyrics by Bryan Kesselman took place on March 17th 2003 at the Elliott Hall, Harrow Arts Centre, Hatch End, Middlesex.
Bryan Kesselman
Link to Maccabee page
Maccabee
To purchase my reduction for one piano of the Overture to The Mikado, follow this link.
For further information contact
Name: Bryan Kesselman
Email:
bryan_kesselman@yahoo.co.uk