This lecture by Prof. Alexander Carpenter focuses on two string trios, composed by Arnold Schoenberg and Gideon Klein.  Schoenberg composed his String Trio op. 45 in California in 1946, while the composer was recovering from a near-fatal heart attack—the work documents the experience of this trauma and the struggle to overcome death.  Klein, a young Moravian-Jewish composer, wrote his String Trio during his interment in the Theresienstadt ghetto, completing it in the early autumn of 1944, just as the Nazis began a final series of deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau (which included Klein, who was murdered shortly thereafter).  Why did these two composers choose—at almost the same moment—the somewhat unusual genre of the string trio to document traumatic events and their respective encounters with death?  The genesis of Schoenberg’s Trio is reasonably well known; Klein’s remains shrouded in mystery.  This lecture uses interpretations of Schoenberg’s op. 45 and his efforts to express a complex relationship with death to shed light on Klein’s Trio and his experiences at Theresienstadt.  It also proposes a new interpretation of the enigmatic third movement of Klein’s Trio: namely, that it seeks to document—as symbolic reportage—the liquidation of the camp even as it offers a critique of the camp as a Nazi façade and registers Klein’s resignation in the face of imminent death.   

Prof. Alexander Carpenter is a musicologist, music critic, and rock musician. At present, he is the Director of the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies ad Edmonton campus of the University of Alberta.

14. Mai 2025, 18.30 Uhr, ÖKF-Bibliothek, AUB
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Im Anschluss, um 20 Uhr, findet im Spiegelsaal der AUB ein Konzert zum Vortrag statt: Das Kreisler-Trio spielt Schönberg und Klein. Anmeldung

Inhaltliche Nachfragen: Assoz. Prof. Priv.-Doz. Dr. Ursula K. Mindler-Steiner