Moravian-born composer and pianist based in Prague, and one of the most important artists in the Terezín(Theresienstadt) ghetto.

Gideon Klein's music featured prominently in all of the 'Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Jewish Music and Theatre' festivals, organised by Performing the Jewish Archive, in 2016 and 2017. Two of the festivals (UK and the Czech Republic) played host to the world premieres of two works, edited by PtJA researcher David Fligg: Movement for Harp, and melodrama for narrator and piano, Topol (The Poplar Tree).  

Klein was born in the Moravian town of Přerov in 1919. Initially having piano lessons there with Karel Mařik, he then moved to Prague when he was 11 years old, living with his sister, the pianist Eliška (Lisa) Kleinová. Whilst at school, he studied piano at the Prague Conservatory with Růžena Kurzová, and later, as a full-time student at the Conservatory, with her husband the eminent pianist Vilém Kurz. Even as a teenager, Klein was closely involved in the musical activities of the city, and as a pianist, he performed in many concerts. At his graduation concert in May 1938, he performed Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto to much critical acclaim. 

Under German occupation, Klein performed under the pseudonym of Karel Vránek, and he took part in many clandestine house-concerts. Though there is no evidence that his compositions were ever publicly performed in Prague, he composed steadily, and some of these early works are striking in their originality and engagement with modernist language. 

Prior to his deportation to Terezín in December 1941, he entrusted his manuscripts and other personal memorabilia to some non-Jewish friends. Forgotten about after the war, this significant archive found its way back to Klein’s sister, Lisa, in 1990. 

In the Terezín ghetto, Klein became part of the so-called Freizeitzgestaltung, the Free-time Committee, organising and taking part in numerous musical activities. As well as composing music for amateur singers in the camp, he wrote, amongst other things, a significant Piano Sonata, and the Trio for Violin, Viola and Cello, a work which has now found its way into the general chamber music repertoire. 

In October 1944, Klein was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and then shortly afterwards to the Auschwitz slave-labour sub-camp of Fürstengrube. There he was shot by the SS in January 1945. 

To mark Klein's centenary year in 2019, the festival Gido se vrací domů! (Gido's Coming Home!) played host to a number of events in the Czech Republic, between July 2019 and February 2020. It was co-curated by PtJA researchers David Fligg and Lisa Peschel, and co-ordinated by Zdenka Kachlova (http://www.gidofest.com/). David Fligg's full-length biography on Klein, Dopis od Gideona (Letter from Gideon) was launched during the festival. The English version is due for publication in 2022.

A theatrical presentation of the life and music of the composer Gideon Klein, written and devised by David Fligg.

On 27 January 1945, the young Czech Jewish composer Gideon Klein was murdered by the SS in an Auschwitz sub-camp. Prior to that, he was imprisoned in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, where he was at the centre of a unique array of musical and cultural activities.

Though his activities there are well documented, little has been known about his life in Prague before the war. Using actors and musicians, Gideon Klein: Portrait of a Composer draws on recently-discovered archival material and personal testimony, much of it never before having been presented in public, to portray, for the first time, his pre-war life. It is an intimate, poignant, and at times humorous account of artistic and Jewish life in Prague immediately before, and during, the German occupation, and of Gideon’s struggles to survive imprisonment.

Portrait of a Composer was premiered in 2016 on Yom Ha’Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) at Hillel, Madison (Wisconsin), as part of the 'Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Jewish Music and Theatre' festival,  and performed in the UK at the 'Out of the Shadows' festival there the following month. In September 2016, as part of the 'Out of the Shadows' festival in the Czech Republic, it was fully staged, directed by Kateřina Iváková, performed by drama students and the Fama Quartet at the Prague Conservatory, where Gideon had studied prior to the war.  

As part of the Gideon Klein centenary events in 2019,  Portrait of a Composer, in a new dramatisation by Brian Daniels, was performed at Prague's Švandovo divadlo, The Riley Theatre (Leeds), and Berlin's Curt Sachs Hall which was broadcast on German Radio.  

Original dramaturgy by Lisa Peschel, and translations by Hana Trojanova.

David Fligg leads this walking tour of places in Prague associated with Gideon Klein. (A Performing the Jewish Archive event)

Based on recent research of the places in Prague associated with the composer and Pianist Gideon Klein, this tour visits:

--The apartments where he lived

--The former premises of the Prague Conservatory where he studied

--The former Jewish Orphanage, now the Lauder Jewish School, where he rehearsed Hans Krasa's Brundibar

--The cafes which he frequented

--His final address, which now have commemorative Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) placed outside, in remembrance of Gideon and his mother, Ilona.

Researcher

David Fligg

Melodrama for narrator and piano by Gideon Klein This short, yet intense and moving melodrama for narrator and piano, was composed in July 1938. It should be stated that because Klein’s handwriting is not totally legible, the date of composition might be a year later, 1939. In either event, this dark and brooding work reflects uncertain times.   It was not performed publicly until the 'Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Jewish Music and Theatre' festival in the Czech Republic, where it was premiered in Pilsen in September 2016.  It was the last composition of Klein's school years, completed before he left on a month-long tour of Italy, and before embarking on full-time study at the Prague Conservatory. Topol (The Poplar Tree) is the most interesting piece from this period to engage with texts, in this case from the poem Krajina (‘Landscape’), by Vilém Závada (1905-1982).  At the end of the fair-copy manuscript, Klein wrote “These were good times”. In paler ink than the rest of the manuscript, these words might have been added at a later date. Music for narrator and piano was not an especially new idea; there are examples by Schubert, Schumann and Liszt, amongst others. However, Klein might have encountered some of the melodramas by the Prague-born composer Josef Bohuslav Foerster (1859-1951), one-time Director at the Conservatory in the inter-war years. In his piece, Klein consolidates the modernist style found in so much of his music at this time. But more so than any of the music to date, Topol demonstrates far more control on how structure arises from the material itself. In this case, the unity is achieved by the harmonic language with complex chords of major sevenths and minor ninths. It marks a further step towards a more mature compositional style, made all the more moving by the inclusion of inscription at its end, a portent of a vanishing existence. 

This work will be published by Baerenreiter in August 2022 under the title Krajina (‘Landscape’), along with a new edition of Klein's Piano Sonata, edited by Ondřej Pivoda.

TOPOL (THE POPLAR TREE) [Text: Vilém Závada, with the original title Krajina (Landscape)]

(English translation by Hana Trojanová)

Spilled plain

Small houses are floating on it like little white boats

A clod clods

Clods sparkling whiteness of clouds is rushing ochre boulders past the horizon

In the doorway of pain last drops congealed into crystals

And the wood of statues hurriedly phosphorescing

A Gothic silhoutte

This is a vignette resounding through the history like an oyster on the shore sounds through the sea

This is the horn sound turned into sadness and wrapped all in itself caught fire all over the distance by a sorrowful prayer

It is ablaze

Composed by Gideon Klein when he was 15,  premiered in 2016 as part of Performing the Jewish Archive.

  

In October 1935, the 15 year-old Gideon Klein started to compose Four Small Pieces for harp. It was written for the harpist Marie Grünfeld,  close friend of the Klein family. The first piece and the opening of the second are in fair copy, but the third and fourth are left in draft. The slow first movement is entirely complete, carefully notated, although Klein refrains from the complex task of including the pre-tunings, leaving that to the harpist instead. In terms of harp technique, the music is not demanding, but the musical language is decidedly modernist, chromatic and freely atonal. Arpeggio-like dialogue between the hands, and some arabesque-type right-hand figuration, ensures that the music is idiomatically harp-like. By contrast, the incomplete second movement, Rondeau á la Couperin, creates a charmingly archaic feel, entirely neo-Baroque rather than mere pastiche, with echoes of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin which the young Klein, himself a prodigiously talented pianist, would have surely been familiar with. 

Edited by David Fligg from the manuscript in the archives of the Jewish Museum, Prague, this piece received its world premiere at the 'Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Jewish Music and Theatre' festival in Leeds in June 2016, and a subsequent performance in Pilsen during the 'Out of the Shadows' festival in the Czech Republic in September 2016.