The Chronicle of Love and Death of the Flag-Bearer Christoph Rilke January 30, 2012

Special guests Philip Bohlman and Christine Bohlman perform Viktor Ullmann's Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1944), the final work for the musical stage composed in the concentration camps. For the text to this melodrama for speaker and piano, Ullmann (1898-1944) turned to the text of the prose-poem by his fellow Czech, Rainer Maria Rilke, which circulated widely in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt/Terezín. The narrative of the melodrama follows a young man to war in Eastern Europe in the late seventeenth century, where he comes of age but perishes in one of the most profound love-death works in the twentieth century, an allegory in Ullmann's setting for World War II, the Holocaust, and musical modernism. Ullmann's final great work is virtually unknown, and it will be performed in the version reconstructed from the sketches Ullmann completed ten days before his deportation to Auschwitz in October 1944.
Distler Performance Hall. This concert is co-sponsored by the Cummings/Hillel Holocaust & Genocide Education Program and the Tufts Music Department.