CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The final work composed by Austrian-born pianist Viktor Ullmann prior to his death at the German concentration camp at Auschwitz will be the focal point of a Feb. 17 concert and lecture at the University of Illinois.
“Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornet Christoph Rilke” (“The Chronicle of Love and Death of the Flagbearer Christoph Rilke”): A Melodrama From the Concentration Camps” will be performed by ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman, one of the world’s leading authorities on Jewish music, and renowned pianist Christine Bohlman. They are faculty members at the University of Chicago.
A student of composer Arnold Schönberg, Ullmann was an integral part of the classical music avant-garde of the interwar period.
Based on an epic poem by poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the half-hour melodrama was one of many works Ullmann composed during two years at the concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt), north of Prague in the Czech Republic, along with many other notable artists and scholars. Ullmann eventually was taken to Auschwitz, where he died in the gas chambers on Oct. 18, 1944.
“This event is a rare opportunity to hear and learn about some of the most remarkable music ever composed,” said Matti Bunzl, the director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society and a professor of anthropology at Illinois.
“Created in a concentration camp under the most inhumane conditions imaginable, it reminds us that human creativity is indomitable,” Bunzl said.
The Program in Jewish Culture and Society and the Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies Initiative are co-sponsoring the lecture and the concert, which will be performed in English and German.
Free and open to the public, the event will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Music Building Auditorium (Room 2100), 1114 W. Nevada St., Urbana.
