Viktor Ullmann’s last opera, The Emperor of Atlantis, was written while the composer was imprisoned in the ghetto of Terezín (Theresienstadt), shortly before he was deported to Auschwitz. Jakub Klecker, conductor at the National Theatre Brno, introduces this uniquely powerful work.
Can you introduce yourself, and talk about your current musical role and responsibilities?
As part of the Musica non grata project, I staged Viktor Ullmann’s operas The Broken Jug and The Emperor of Atlantis with the opera company of the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava. This was as part of the Opera of Terezín Composers cycle, in which the company also staged Hans Krása’s Betrothal in a Dream in 2022. Pavel Haas’ opera The Charlatan will premiere this autumn.
My musical activities are currently spread between conducting and teaching. Since 2007 I have been the principal conductor of the Janáček Opera Ensemble of the National Theatre Brno, and I also hold the post of Head of the Department of Conducting and Opera Direction at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts. During the season I also enjoy a number of nice collaborations with symphony orchestras and opera houses. I fondly recall the staging of a new production of Dvořák’s The Jacobin at the Brno Opera (October 2023), the premiere of which was broadcast live around the world on the Opera Vision platform and is still available to watch online.
For those who haven’t come across it before, can you give a brief introduction to Viktor Ullmann’s Emperor of Atlantis?
The one-act opera The Emperor of Atlantis or The Disobedience of Death was written in the Terezín ghetto between 1943 and 1944, in collaboration with Petr Kien. Only twenty-four years old, Kien was a hugely talented poet and artist, a pupil of Willy Nowak at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, who had been deported to Terezín in 1941, a year before Viktor Ullmann. It tells the story of the Emperor, who arrogates to himself the right to decide life and death – and so Death decides to teach not only him but all of humanity a lesson by making it impossible for anyone to die, leading to enormous chaos, and most importantly, enormous suffering. In order to reverse Death’s decision, the Emperor must sacrifice himself first, which he eventually does.
The Emperor of Atlantis was never performed in Terezín. The planned performance was postponed several times until rehearsals were completely halted by the Nazis in the autumn of 1944. Viktor Ullmann, like Petr Kien and many other Terezín artists, was deported to Auschwitz on 16th October, and murdered in the gas chamber on 18th October. The manuscript of the opera was saved by Emil Utitz, a professor at the German University in Prague, who was also interned in the Terezín ghetto, where he worked as a librarian, and survived the war. The opera was first performed in 1975 by the British conductor Kerry Woodward (in his own arrangement) with the Netherlands National Opera. Ullmann never heard any of his three surviving operas – The Fall of the Antichrist, The Broken Jug and The Emperor of Atlantis – and none was performed during his lifetime.
The opera was one of several works composed while Ullmann was interned at Terezín. How did this context affect the nature of the opera?
This is evident both in the subject matter and, of course, in quite practical areas, such as the orchestra, which is very chamber-like and works with instruments that Ullmann had at his disposal in Terezín. An important role is played by the alto saxophone, which substitutes its timbre for the middle register usually represented by the horns. Also important is the harmonium, to which Ullmann entrusted three such almost threatening chords in the opera, which appear whenever he wants to convey something essential. There are areas of colourful interest, with the orchestra accompanying the singers with various tremolos or delays on long notes, and the chamber setting of the work thus further contrasts and enhances the powerful story. There are jazzy, blues-infused moments, which are a kind of liberation from the difficult situation that forms the story line.
The central musical motif of The Emperor of Atlantis is the Lutheran chorale Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress is Our God), and the composer also used the distinctive Death motif from Suk’s symphony Asrael. Elements of commedia dell’arte are used here, which gives the opera another interesting dimension, a certain distinction of each character. And it is certainly interesting that Ullmann wrote the character of Death for the singer Karel Berman, who was one of the few Terezín artists to survive Auschwitz and after the war became a soloist at the National Theatre in Prague. The Terezín Memorial even has a manuscript of Berman’s transcription of the part of Death, accompanied by several drawings.
What impression did the work make on you when you first heard it?
This opera made a big impact on me during my independent study, when I first opened the score and read the individual parts, imagining what this writing must have entailed for Ullmann. You feel very intensely how much hope music gave people in Terezín, how it helped them not to think about all the horrors of the outside world that they were confronted with every day.
Ullmann also had very strong and fundamental memories of the First World War, which he had fought on the front line as an artilleryman. At the very end of the piece, the Emperor sings “and the war is over and there will be no war” and everyone asks themselves, “Why was the war fought in the first place? Why did we do all this if we didn’t want to?” Even people who did not experience the war leave the theatre deeply affected, all the more so if they know the context of the creation of this work and the fate of its creators, who put their hope in life into this opera, only to both die in Auschwitz.
What is it like to perform? Are there notable difficulties in staging the work?
We staged the opera in a Czech translation by Jaromír Nohavica. Ullmann left several versions – two ideas of the finale have survived and the final aria of the Emperor was composed afterwards – so we worked together to find the best possible final shape for the singers and the audience. As we are performing the work on the same evening as another one-act opera, The Broken Jug, I also decided to increase the size of the string section. I am convinced that for larger theatres this decision is the right one, and in relation the other instruments (winds, alto saxophone, piano, percussion) the sound balance is better.
I remember with great pleasure the whole rehearsal process in collaboration with my great colleague, the Slovenian director Rocco. I think our ideas about the interpretation of the work were in unity from the first moment, and we tried to convey our wishes and visions to all the performers on stage and in the orchestra pit. The result was an interesting and powerful production that was received by the audience and critics with great understanding and admiration.
Do you have a favourite passage in the opera?
Certainly in this work, as in all the others I have ever conducted, I have my “personal” place, but it changes from time to time, especially in the process of rehearsals, as the opera matures and evolves. So I can’t say exactly. At the moment I’m probably most struck by the Emperor’s aria and the subsequent ensemble of all the soloists at the very end of the opera. But otherwise, I think it’s good for us performers when our feelings for a piece or the situations we experience through it change. Every reprise of an opera is different.
What guidance would you give to listeners and performers new to Ullmann’s music?
As far as the opera The Emperor of Atlantis is concerned, the opera will hit you all the more strongly if you get to know the circumstances in which it was written, and the life of Viktor Ullmann. There is also a hidden context that the viewer does not hear a priori, but which affects the immediate experience of the work. For example, Ullmann works with numerical symbolism. As for his music in general, we see the influence of Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander von Zemlinsky, with whom Ullmann worked closely between 1920 and 1927 at the New German Theatre in Prague (today’s State Opera), I also see Gustav Mahler influences in his music, and even the influence of Italian opera – verismo. In The Broken Jug the surfaces are very impressionistic, and in comic or ironic moments it is like hearing Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. And yet it is still very distinctive, original, new music.
Ullmann was a man of many talents, a brilliant writer deeply immersed in the search for the meaning of life, a member of the anthroposophical movement, and a visionary who in the mid-1930s had already managed to write a work like The Fall of Antichrist. An extremely interesting, complex personality, whose musical legacy is gaining unprecedented relevance, especially in recent times.
Why should one come to hear a performance of Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis?
Because Viktor Ullmann’s music is, in my opinion, world-class and because they will certainly be struck by the message of this work, which, as I have already said, is gaining renewed relevance in our times. The Emperor of Atlantis shows the absurdity and sheer senselessness of war, which is often backed by fanatical individuals. And what is perhaps even more significant and disturbing for me: Ullmann, after all the vicissitudes, has put in at the end a boundless faith in humanity and faith in life, which, I think, must have cost him a great deal of strength that we cannot even imagine. When I think of the life situation in which he wrote The Emperor of Atlantis, this is what touches me tremendously.
This article was sponsored by the Year of Czech Music.
