Description
Gideon Klein (1919-1945) was a Czech/Jewish pianist and composer. He was forced to abort his musical studies in Prague when the Nazis took occupation and closed all of the higher education institutes in 1939. The Royal Academy of Music in London offered him a scholarship, but anti-Jewish legislation prevented him from travelling. He was deported from Prague to the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto in 1941 where he became one of the major composers at the camp and organised and performed in numerous concerts. Such concerts were permitted as it helped to deceive the outside world of the reality of the terrible conditions in the camp and the Nazi’s real intentions for those incarcerated there.
Klein wrote Wiegenlied for soprano and piano whilst at the camp in February 1943. It is a powerful and highly symbolic art song based on a well-known Jewish lullaby, set in Hebrew, entitled ‘Sh’chav B’ni’ (‘Sleep, my son’). At the time that Klein wrote Wiegenlied a typhoid epidemic had taken hold in the camp and many children were struck down by the disease. In Klein’s setting the word ‘sleep’ is clearly an allegory for death. At the end of the piece the parts are symbolically marked (as they are in Klein’s original version) ‘morendo’ (dying away).
Klein was moved to Auschwitz in October 1944 and died, in unclear circumstances, in the Auschwitz sub-camp Füstengrube on 27th January 1945 – the day that the main Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was liberated.
