Motivational Mondays: The Most Beautiful Music You Were Never Supposed To Hear...

Photo by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, October 11, 2025

It's been a rough couple of weeks around my circle ... and it's Monday, and we have to get back at it.

Sometimes even I wonder if it is even going to matter... it's been a rough few weeks. I know better, but the thoughts do cross one's mind.

But music we were never supposed to hear reminded me: keep going.

Josef Weiss was born in Hungary in 1864, and was a student of Franz Liszt ... his talent was apparent early, and so advanced was he as a pianist and composer by the early 1900s that he was the first person to write music for German-language films.

Imagine that -- in the home of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, someone thought Josef Weiss should be the composer, at this early stage of film in Germany, to contribute new music ... but then again, Weiss was the great-grand student of Beethoven. He had modernity, but also that deep connection to the great German masters centuries before.

But that made no difference three decades later. Josef Weiss was Jewish, and the same country for whose films he wrote beautiful music arranged his death in the Holocaust, in 1945.

The Nazis did their best to eliminate all Jewish art and music from the public eye, everywhere that they occupied. Josef Weiss's music survived, however, because of whose student he was, and how many decades he was a well-known composer and pianist before the Nazis. The film that he wrote music for in 1913 was brought back to the public eye in 2013, and thus, his music was rediscovered and is now being re-recorded and held in honor.

Against heavy odds, the voice of Josef Weiss still sounds in the world ... a beautiful reminder of the triumph of good over evil, and a reminder: all the good we do matters, even though in the short term evil may obscure it, and even though even under the best of circumstances, one can simply be overlooked and forgotten.

Do all the good you can anyway.

No good is ever wasted.

The voice of truth will sound again.