From the Viktor Ullmann Foundation website:
“Ullmann’s last work, written on scraps of lined paper, was composed and dedicated to three of his four children, Max, Jean and Felicia. There are five movements and the work was completed on 22nd of August 1944. (The youngest child, Pavel Ullmann was born in Prague on the 21st of November 1940 and he died on the 14th of December 1943 in the Terezin ghetto; Max – Maximillian Rudolf, born in 1932, did not survive and perished in Auschwitz 1944) The Seventh Sonata ; Allegro; Alla Marcia, ben misurato; Adagio, ma con moto; Allegretto grazioso; Variationen und Fuge uber ein hebräisches Volkslied, draws its inspiration from Ullmann’s most personal references, and is full of autobiographical musical quotations, for example from Gustav Mahler’s ‘Song of the Wayfarer’ and Richard von Heuberger’s ‘Der Opernball’. In the grotesque ‘allegretto grazioso’, the Scherzo and Trio of Ullmann’s Seventh Sonata, ‘Der Opernball’ is quoted as if in a dream, but offers no respite even in fleeting distraction, from the grim and violent reality of life in the Terezin ghetto. “Leise ist mir noch Hoffnung spatter Wiederkehr…” — “Silently there is still hope (in me) for a late return…” Viktor Ullmann writes at that time. The climax of his last work is the fifth movement, the Theme, Variations and Fugue based on the melody of Yehuda Sharett’s Zionist song, composed in Berlin in 1932. Each of the minimalist eight variations weave in and out of Sharett’s ‘Song of Rachel’ which is the setting of a poem by the Russian Jewish poet Rachel, in which she imagines herself as namesake to the Biblical matriarch: “Behold, her blood flows in my blood, her voice sings in mine – Rachel who tends Laban’s flock, Rachel mother of all mothers.”
Widely sung by the pioneers settling the land of Israel, Ullmann may well have come across this song from members of the Zionist youth movements in Terezin. Ullmann also finds the similarity in this melody to the Slovak national anthem ‘Lightning is over the Tatra’ which was banned by the Nazi’s and the Hussite Hymn – ‘Ye who are God’s Warriors’, combining them as with great flair to appear as an audible illusion of one single song. He quotes J Cruger’s Chorale ‘Nun danket alle Gott (Now thank we all our God) and the name of B-A-C-H and there is even an allusion to Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ in the glorious and final resolution of Ullmann’s epic seventh sonata. The Fugue ends majestically and triumphantly in the key of D Major, with greatness of spirit and the best of humanity. What possible better testament to a life lived with an intense search for Truth, than one that is lived to the very end with such courage and heroic commitment to real artistry, musicianship and human dignity?”