music for International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022
Gideon Klein String trio (terezín 1944), Second Movement
Portrait by Charlotte Buresová. Terezín 1944.
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Gideon Klein, often recognized by survivors as "our own Leonard Bernstein," composed this work just ten days before his transport from Terezín to Auschwitz. It feels accessible and light-hearted, but it also includes references to works by other composers and folk music of his native Moravia, perhaps a message about the loss of European and Jewish culture.
The second movement, haunting and soulful, takes up a melodic theme from a folk song Klein's nanny sang to him in his native Moravia, about a goose grieving the fate of her babies as she falls to her death from a hunter's bullet. It's a personal and sorrowful goodbye. The trio was first performed in 1946 in Prague's Rudolfinum, in a concert organized by Klein's sister, Eliska, and conducted by Karel Ancerl, who was also interned in Terezín. Ancerl wrote, "Where there was a valuable cultural performance, there for sure Gideon Klein was the initiator." Here is the second movement of Klein's String Trio, performed by the Hawthorne String Quartet. |