Two students at the University of Michigan perform at a recording session in Ann Arbor, Mich., with Contemporary Directions Ensemble recording “The Most Beautiful Time of Life,” as it's translated from German to English.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The University of Michigan plans to livestream the performance of a musical arrangement not heard in concert since prisoners performed it at Auschwitz during World War II.

University officials said numerous livestream requests came from around the world after The Associated Press published a story about the discovery of the manuscript for “The Most Beautiful Time of Life.”

The piece was arranged by three prisoners and discovered by music theory professor Patricia Hall at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in Poland. It was a popular song in the early 1940s under its original German title.

The livestream is planned for 8 p.m. Friday. The arrangement will be performed at the school in Ann Arbor by the Contemporary Directions Ensemble, which has also recorded the piece.

Hall believes the piece, a popular fox trot of the day, was performed in 1942 or ’43 by the prisoners in front of the commandant’s villa for Sunday concerts for the Auschwitz garrison. Although the prisoners didn’t compose the songs, they had to arrange them so they could be played by the available instruments and musicians.

Based on the prisoner numbers on the manuscript, Hall has so far identified two of the three arrangers: Antoni Gargul, who was released in 1943, and Maksymilian Pilat, released in 1945 and later performed in the Gdansk Symphony Orchestra. They were Polish political prisoners.

While survivors and museum officials have said the musicians received more food, had clean clothes and were spared the hardest labor, museum director Piotr M. A. Cywinski recently said in a statement that they experienced “an element of humiliation and terror.”

Hall said they weren’t immune to the greatest horrors of the camp.

She said that it has been documented that about 50 prisoner musicians were executed.