Examining Life Filled With Power of Music

The award-winning documentary “Never Give Up” chronicles the long, remarkable life of conductor and music educator Herbert Zipper, who died of lung cancer Monday in Los Angeles, just six days before his 93rd birthday. Tonight on KCET, that documentary will receive its television premiere, offering a look at the positive impact of music on Zipper’s life and how he dedicated himself to spreading that message.

Born in Vienna in 1904, and by family and training raised as part of the city’s musical elite, Zipper was not prepared in the late 1930s to suffer the horrors and privations that came to many Austrian Jews at that time: confinement and hard labor in both Dachau and Buchenwald. In Dachau, he organized a secret orchestra, scavenging to build the instruments, holding “concerts” in unused latrines, witnessing to the spirit-lifting power of music.

His father got him a Philippine visa, and on the promise that Zipper would leave Germany, bought his son’s way out of the camps. His fiancee was waiting for him in Manila, where he became the music director of the Manila Symphony. But as the Philippines were invaded, the orchestra disbanded and Zipper landed in prison for noncooperation. A triumphant moment in his life is documented by a photo of the first postwar concert by the reunited Manila Symphony, playing Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony in the roofless, bombed-out Santa Cruz Church.

Terry Sanders’ tightly paced documentary (at 42 minutes, it literally races through the man’s century-spanning life) acknowledges that Zipper’s wartime experience changed his previous careerism into a life of service; as a result, he devoted the past 50 years to young people and to spreading the gospel of music.

In the 1940s, he led the Brooklyn Symphony, where he was among the first conductors to hire women and blacks for orchestral work; later, he continued his pioneering music-education activities in Illinois.

For the last quarter-century he was based in Los Angeles, where he led training orchestras at the Colburn School and later at Crossroads, and took live music into urban schools. (The auditorium at the new Colburn School, under construction on Bunker Hill, will be named Zipper Hall.) His many visits to Asia attested to his unshakable faith in that continent as the world’s musical future.

In all these settings, Sanders shows Zipper exerting a special magnetism on children; his filmed podium appearances display the power of his deep musical concentration and his ability to communicate. This profile of Zipper shows an indomitable musician demonstrating the rejuvenating power of music for people of all ages.

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“Never Give Up: The 20th Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.