Concert: Cornet, Viktor Ullmann’s Legacy from Theresienstadt

A concert with Dan Franklin Smith (piano) and Gregorij von Leitis (recitation) presenting the last compositions, which the Austrian-Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann was able to finish in the ghetto and concentration camp Theresienstadt, before he was transported to Auschwitz and killed there. His melodram “The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke” for recitation and piano is hauntingly beautiful. In Theresienstadt, Ullmann wrote: “We did not sit moaning at the Rivers of Babylon and our will to be creative was as strong as our will to live.”

Free and open to the public. RSVP online through Eventbrite.

Despite degrading living conditions, despite hunger and pain, despite fear in the face of terror and death, many artists were able to be creative even in the concentration camps. Their art helped them to endure the daily suffering. One of those artists was the composer Viktor Ullmann. Ullmann’s will to be creative was admirable. During his two-year-internment in Theresienstadt, Viktor Ullmann composed some of his most beautiful song cycles, a few piano sonatas, and – most of all – his masterpiece, the opera The Emperor of Atlantis, for which Peter Kien, another inmate and a very talented graphic artist and poet, wrote the libretto.

The Cornet is the last composition that Ullmann was able to finish in Terezín, before he was deported to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944, where he and his wife Elisabeth were killed two days later. His music was rescued by a friend who survived the camps. The Lay of Love and Death of the Cornet Christoph Rilke is based on a text by Rainer Maria Rilke, from which Ullmann chose twelve pieces. Rilke tells the haunting story of a young soldier who experiences love and death in one night. Ullmann’s composition is a rare combination of recitation and piano. The music underlines the dramatic action, comments on it, illustrates it and thus intensifies the effect.

Viktor Ullmann stands as and example of the type of individual courage needed in the face of the greatest odds. He managed to turn the cruel and the bitter into the poignant and the profound. When handed imprisonment, hunger and hopelessness, he gave back inspiration in works that transcended his circumstances and continue to invigorate, embolden, celebrate and nourish the human condition to this day. The adamant will to live, the unshakable hope, that the good will prevail, no matter how horrible the attempts are to crush it, this is the message of Ullmann’s music from Theresienstadt.

This event is organized by the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York and Elysium – between two continents,
in cooperation with Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews. Generous support provided by ČSOB, Member of KBC Group.

From Bohemian National Hall.