A chronicle of love and death

Philip V. Bohlman (narrator)
Christine Wilkie Bohlman (piano)

Viktor Ullmann's Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (The Chronicle of Love and Death of the Flag-Bearer Christoph Rilke, 1944) was 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 (1875-1926), 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 of the twentieth century, an allegory in Ullmann's setting for World War II, the Holocaust, and musical modernism.

Virtually unknown, Ullmann's final great work is performed by Christine Wilkie Bohlman (University of Illinois, Chicago) and Philip Bohlman (University of Chicago) in the version reconstructed from the sketches Ullmann completed 10 days before his deportation to Auschwitz in October 1944.

The work will be introduced by Prof Philip Bohlman (University of Chicago).

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Admission free