Published
Piano Sonata No.7
The orchestration by Wulff was not as unrestricted as you might imagine, as Ullmann had left pencil marks in the score describing how he was intending to orchestrate the sonatas himself. In the case of the 7th Sonata, it was completed, it seems, only three months before his death so the job was never done. Similarly Ullman intended to orchestrate the Variations and Double Fugue on a theme of Schoenberg a fragment from one of the older master’s Op 5 piano pieces. This was an exercise in twelve-tone composition which Ullmann was never really to repeat.
One of the most difficult, profound and unsettling statements ever made about music composed and performed in the death camps came from the violinist Karel Fröhlich, a survivor of Auschwitz, in an interview recorded in New York by Joza Karas on 2 December 1973. Fröhlich unexpectedly declared that the camp-ghetto of Theresienstadt offered the “ideal conditions” for composing or performing music.
Uncertainty was absolute; tomorrow promised death; art was indistinguishable from survival; the ordeal of time had to pass through the ordeal of its most interminable and empty passage. Fröhlich added an “essential factor,” impossible in ordinary societies: “In truth, we did not perform for an audience, because it was continually disappearing.”
The musicians performed before audiences already on the verge of death, people whom they themselves might imminently join when they boarded the train. Fröhlich said: “The absurdity lay in this aspect, at once ideal and abnormal.”
Viktor Ullmann thought the same as Karel Fröhlich, adding the mental concentration imposed on the modern composer by the impossibility of writing down the sounds that obsess the mind. Ullmann died in Auschwitz shortly after arriving at the camp, on 17 October 1944.
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The last work Viktor Ullmann composed in the camp is entitled Seventh Sonata. He dedicated it to his children Max, Jean and Felice, and completed it on 22 August 1944. Then, continuing Fröhlich’s reflection, Ullmann wrote a sardonic copyright notice at the foot of the first page. There is a final humour. Final humour is language at the instant when it exceeds its own limits.“Performance rights are reserved by the composer until his death.”
– Pascal Quignard, “El odio a la música”