Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke depicts in his text the events and scenes from the final days in the life of an imaginary ancestor, the young standard bearer (Cornet) Christoph Rilke, master of Langenau. We follow the progress of the Cornet against the background of the first Turkish War (1663-1664) through the vastness of the Hungarian plain, are witness to a love episode and finally experience his death in combat with his opponent.
Ullmann selected 15 text extracts from the original collection of 28 for his opera and arranged them in two sections. Through alteration, abridgement and reductions, he produced a coherent, taut and continuous storyline. Although Ullmann’s composition received its first performance in 1944 in a version for narrator and piano in the concentration camp Theresienstadt, the manuscript dated July 1944 reveals that Ullmann had planned his work for a large-scale orchestra. The unfinished orchestration was completed by Henning Brauel in 1994.