A melodrama for speaker and piano, composed by Viktor Ullmann in the Terezín-Theresienstadt Ghetto to Rainer Maria Rilke's poem. 

Philip and Christine Bohlman perform DIE WEISE VON LIEBE UND TOD DES CORNETS CHRISTOPH RILKE (The Chronicle of Love and Death of the Flag-Bearer Christoph Rilke), a melodrama for speaker and piano, composed by Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) in the Theresienstadt Ghetto (Terezín), in the original German. For his text, Ullmann chose the prosepoem by his fellow Czech, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), which circulated widely in Theresienstadt. 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.