COMPOSER Gideon Klein died in a Nazi death camp at the age of only 26. He wrote his final work, String Trio, in the Terezin ghetto, a waystation for Czech Jews en route to the camps, nine days before he was transported to Auschwitz, from where he was sent to die several months later at Furstengrubbe.
"It's not tragic and dark, it's incredibly energetic, incredibly life affirming and full of optimism," says William Conway, artistic director and conductor of the Hebrides Ensemble, who are performing it this week. "You can't really tell what's about
to happen."
This week, the Hebrides Ensemble is touring music from the Second World War and the Holocaust to nine Scottish venues, in a programme called On The Brink. On stage, the music will be accompanied by a video montage using still images of the ghettos and camps – including concerts that took place there – designed by John McGeogh. They include photographs of grim-faced string-players bent over their music stands, and children in a twirling circle, arms entwined, around a boy playing an accordion.
Klein's String Trio uses Moravian folk themes, and has echoes of Berg and Janácek, two of the greatest 20th-century composers, but retains a distinctive voice. The programme also includes the Passacaglia & Fugue by Hans Krása, another brilliant Czech Jewish musician, also written at Terezin. It's a stark piece written two months before his own deportation and death in Auschwitz. As an older man less fit for work, he was taken straight to the gas chambers off the train.
The music shows Krása knew the writing was on the wall, Conway says. "It's a chilling study of a little melody, a lot of feeling of nostalgia in it. It's the way he develops it, and doesn't allow it to degenerate into weeping sentimentalism, that I find so powerful. The fugue starts off quite controlled and becomes very frenzied."
At the end of the fugue there is a distinctive rumbling cello line. It may hint at an approaching train, it is thought, which so many in the camps realised was their final journey. The compositions of Klein and Krása have been played widely in Europe in recent years, their work rediscovered in Germany, in particular. Conway has hoped to take their work on a Scottish tour for more than a decade.
The On The Brink programme opens with Ravel's setting of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and centres on Béla Bartók's sixth and final string quartet, written in 1939. Bartók was not Jewish, but he was a public opponent of the Nazis, and it is the last piece he wrote in his native Hungary before fleeing for an often unhappy last few years in the USA. The piece is often seen as reflecting his sadness over the onset of war and the death of his mother. "The Bartók is the piece that weeps," says Conway. "The ones that knew they were about to die in a horrible way are the ones who keep very stoic and buoyant."
All four movements of the Bartók quartet open with the direction mesto, Italian for sad. "Life was just beginning to dissolve in front of him, everything that made him happy and comfortable," says Conway. "He got out at the right moment." Bartok died of leukaemia in 1945, aged 64.
Terezin, or Theresienstadt, was a fortress town built in 1780, about 35 miles outside Prague. In 1939, after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Nazi rulers came looking for places to gather Czech Jews before their shipment to the death camps. Terezin became a waystation for the Final Solution, where some 400,000 people passed through en route to the death camps. Chillingly, of some 10,000 children among those gathered there, only a few hundred survived the war.
While it was not a death camp itself, the figures from Terezin are still horrific: more than 30,000 internees died there. In 1942, elderly prisoners were dying at the rate of more than 100 a day, and in 1945 the camp was sealed off during a deadly typhus epidemic. But the camp was also used as a propaganda front, complete with a bank, café, parks and playgrounds, at a time when Hitler's Germany was trying to silence stories of the gassing of the Jews. In the spring of 1944 the Nazis embarked on a beautification programme, which horribly included shipping 17,517 Jews to Auschwitz to reduce overcrowding.
It paved the way for the famous Red Cross visit on 23 June 1944, nearly three weeks after the D-Day landings. Two Swiss delegates of the International Red Cross, and two representatives of the Danish government, concerned about the fate of Danish Jews, toured Terezin, and apparently left without serious complaint. When the visitors arrived, they would have heard the sound of music and young voices singing. Hans Krása's children's opera, Brundibar, written before his internment, was smuggled into the camp and performed repeatedly. The Nazis featured it in propaganda films of "happy Jews".
Early musical performances at Terezin, Conway says, took place secretly in cellars or attics, punishable by death. One cellist famously dismantled his instrument into strips and later stuck it back together. But as leading Jews were assembled in the camp – film directors, actors, a former conductor of the Royal Copenhagen Orchestra – the Nazis realised the value of entertainment for boosting morale and for propaganda purposes. The official department of the Freizeitgestaltung, or Free Time Activities, was formed to promote cultural ventures from theatre to chess. Joining up was a way to avoid manual labour.
The Edinburgh violinist Daniel Bell, now with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, is among the Hebrides Ensemble performers. He describes Klein and Krása's music as very much a product of the earlier 20th century, experimental and influenced by jazz and other new styles, and central European in the tradition of Janácek.
In Bell's eyes the music doesn't tell any identifiable story of the composers' lives or fate. "It's possible that they were using music as a kind of escapism," he says. "It's not necessary that a composer writes pieces influenced by the situation he's in, it may be that he's mentally trying to escape from it. Art doesn't have to be realism, it can be escapism too. The purpose of the concert is to play music that people want to listen to. It's to remind people of the circumstances of the time, what the composers were going through. One thing you could take away is that music, even in the most extraordinary horrific circumstances, can be written and played. Even in these circumstances human creativity can still keep going."
What is clear to Conway is that the deaths of both Krása and Klein are a particular tragedy among the horror. Krása, who died close to his 45th birthday, was rated a "maestro" by Terezin inmates and seemed poised for international fame if he had lived. His work had been premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Universal Publishers, the music publishing giant, gave him a contract in 1925. He was caught as he tried to leave Czechoslovakia, and interned in Terezin from 1942 to 1944. The concert ends with the tuneful Tanec, Krása's lively and joyful dance. There was a jazz orchestra in Terezin called the Ghetto Singers, and the jazz influence can be heard.
Klein, only 26 at his death, urged Krása to keep writing in the camp. He had been studying piano composition and musicology in Prague until German authorities closed all colleges and universities to Jews. "In spite of these awful conditions he had a very active cultural life and wrote some of his best music," says Conway. "It was felt that he could go very far, he was marked out as someone to watch."
A survivor of Terezin, Charlotte Opfermann, was among those who remembered him. "Gideon was fantastic, a stunningly beautiful person in every sense," she said later, "musically, physically and personally, a man of romantic literature."
• On The Brink is at Bathgate Regal Community Theatre, tomorrow, the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, 18 February, the Tolbooth, Stirling, 19 February, and on tour until 27 February. For more details, visit
www.hebridesensemble.org.ukPROFILES
HANS KRÁSA KRÁSA was born in Prague on 30 November 1899 to a Czech father, a lawyer, and a German-Jewish mother. He studied piano and violin as a child and then studied composition at the German Music Academy in Prague. He worked as a répétiteur at the Neuen Deutschen Theater and studied under French composer Albert Roussel. His first composition, Four Orchestral Songs, was performed in Prague in May 1921, followed by a string quartet, symphony, and the opera Betrothal in a Dream. Performed in Zurich, Paris and Boston it won the Czechoslovak State Prize. His children's opera Brundibar was his last work completed before his internment in Terezin; several works he wrote there, apart from those in the Hebrides Ensemble concert, are thought to have disappeared.
GIDEON KLEINBORN 6 December 1919, Klein took piano lessons from the age of 11. He studied musicology at Charles University in Prague and took private lessons from the Czech modernist composer Alois Haba until Jews were barred from higher education. Klein continued to perform under the pseudonym of Karel Vranek into 1941 but that December was deported to Terezin. There he became head of instrumental music for the official Department of Free Time Activities, performing piano recitals and organising chamber ensembles, while he continued to compose. He was deported to Auschwitz in October 1944 and then moved to the Furstengrubbe concentration camp, working in coalmines until his death in January 1945.
