i. Allegro
ii. Lento
iii. Molto vivace
Gideon Klein was born in Moravia in 1919, and, like Zykmud Schul, he studied with Alois Hába at the Prague Conservatoire. In December 1941, along with thousands of other Prague Jews, he was deported to Terezín. It was thus in the environment of a prison camp that Klein reached maturity as a composer in his early twenties. In 1940 he had been awarded a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but was prevented from taking this up by the Nazis. He was also an extremely gifted pianist, and gave performances in Terezín of works such as Beethoven’s Sonata Op.111, Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces Op.11, and Janáček’s I.X.1905. The String Trio, finished in October 1944, was to be his last work. It’s a piece of great energy and assurance, and stylistically it’s a fascinating mixture of music inspired by Czech dance rhythms, but also by the more expressionist works of the Second Viennese School. Even by the traumatic standards of music written in Terezín, the circumstances in which Gideon Klein composed his String Trio are shocking: by October 1944, when he completed this piece, Klein had witnessed the death of Schul, and nine days after finishing the Trio, he, too, was transported to Auschwitz, along with Pavel Haas, and two other composers – Viktor Ullmann and Hans Krasa. Klein was subsequently moved to a coal-mining labour camp near Katowice. He died on 27 January 1945, but the precise circumstances of his death are uncertain: he either perished in the mining camp, or as one of many fellow-Jews who lost their lives on a brutal forced march made to accompany the fleeing SS.

Nigel Simeone © 2011