"Playing with autobiography" The performer as biographer: Viktor Ullmann’s Piano Sonata No. 7 (1944)

Viktor Ullmann’s Jewish ancestry resulted in his deportation to Terezín concentration camp in 1942, where he wrote Piano Sonata No. 7 within three months of his death in Auschwitz in October 1944. This research focuses on the interpretation of Ullmann’s score as an autobiographical text, and how performance decisions will affect the sense of Ullmann’s ‘self’ presented to the audience, just as a biographer’s literary choices affect a reader’s interpretation of its subject. Additional material(s) submitted with thesis.