Charlotte Salomon - Der Tod und die Malerin (2014)
(A Ballet with Singers in two movements )

‘Keep this safe, it's my whole life’. With these words, the German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon handed over her work ‘Life? or Theatre?’ to a French doctor shortly before her deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp. This saved a work that is unique in the history of art: an autobiography in 769 paintings with accompanying texts, stage directions and references to pieces of music, conceived as a ‘singing play’. Death played an important role in the Salomon family history, and the artist herself found herself haunted by it. Born to Jewish parents in Berlin in 1917, Charlotte Salomon felt the anti-Semitic hostility in Germany from an early age. Her mother's suicide in 1926, her escape to her grandparents in the south of France in 1939 and finally the death of her grandmother changed her life forever and brought the artist to the brink of madness. It was only when she resumed painting that the 23-year-old Charlotte Salomon was able to creatively utilise the fate of her family and the experiences of her life and gain distance from them through this artistic approach. In an almost intoxicating two years of work, she created over 1000 small-format sheets of which she selected 769 and combined them into a cycle of scenes with events and memories from her life.