Alexander Carpenter: String trios as Intimations of death?
This lecture 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.
Alexander Carpenter is a musicologist, music critic, teacher and musician. He is the Director of the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and Professor of Music in the Department of Fine Arts and Humanities at the U of A's Augustana campus. Dr. Carpenter teaches courses in music history and theory, aesthetics, aural skills, film music and popular music, in addition to a bi-annual place-based learning course on Viennese musical and cultural history (taught in Austria), and an annual interdisciplinary liberal arts seminar on zombies in popular culture. At Augustana, he has served as Director of Music and as the Chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Humanties.
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