The Los Angeles Opera has received a $4 million US donation that will help the company produce music the Nazis tried to silence.

The Recovered Voices project will bring the music of composers affected by the Holocaust or banned under the Nazis to the stage over the next few years.

Opera general manager Placido Domingo unveiled the project on Monday in Los Angeles.

Marilyn Ziering, a philanthropist and opera board member, donated $3.25 million US and helped raise an additional $750,000 US toward the project.

Early 20th-century composers, including Alexander Zemlinsky, Kurt Weill, Franz Schreker, Walter Braunfels, Erich Korngold and Viktor Ullmann, will be featured.

These composers were enjoying commercial and critical success in the early years of the century before the anti-Semitic and ultraconservative Nazis came to power.

Some were killed or driven from the country because they were Jewish; some were shunned because they were too modern or "leftist."

"As the shadow of the Third Reich crept over Germany, a generation of musical promise was silenced and deprived of its place in history," said Edgar Baitzel, chief operating officer of the company.

Through the Recovered Voices program, the community can "hear the beauty and power of the music by these long-neglected composers," he said.

First performance in March

The program begins in March 2007, with excerpts from Schreker's The Stigmatized, Braunfels's The Birds and Ullman's The Emperor of Atlantis.

There will also be a complete performance of A Florentine Tragedy, a one-act opera based on the Oscar Wilde play, with music by Zemlinsky, who fled Austria in 1938 because of the Nazi threat.

Music director James Conlon, who has been an advocate of some of Germany's "lost" composers, will conduct all performances.

"We have a special opportunity at LA Opera to present works recovered from oblivion and, at the same time, mitigate a great injustice," Conlon said.

In the future, the Recovered Voices fund will cover the cost of mounting full-scale operas by Zemlinsky, Ullmann, Schreker and Braunfels.