Emperor of Atlantis by Viktor Ullmann

Conditions for the performances ranged from the attic of one of the barracks, with a piano accompaniment, to staged presentations with an orchestra. The camp's assemblage of cultural figures included singers from some of Europe's leading opera houses; even so, casting was problematic, and amateurs and children frequently took part in the productions. Ullmann's opera reflects these realities of musical life in the camp - the opera is scored for chamber ensemble with instruments including an alto saxophone, a banjo, a harmonium, and a harpsichord, and seven singers - and offers a string of masterly solutions to the problems posed by those realities.

Ullmann started with a libretto by the poet and painter Petr Kien, an allegory on the Nazis' disregard for human life. Death and Harlequin (who represents life) both no longer fulfill any function in the Empire of Atlantis, where Emperor Overall (an allegory for Hitler) values neither. As a result, the living have ceased to live and the dying have ceased to die. The Emperor tries to put a positive spin on things, declaring that his soldiers are now invincible, but in reality his armies lie wounded and bleeding, in an agony that Death cannot end. Death offers the Emperor a bargain: He will resume his work if the Emperor will be his first victim. The Emperor agrees, and the work ends with a reminder: "Thou shalt not take Death's great name in vain."

Ullmann immediately demonstrates his mastery, using his unorthodox orchestra to delineate the opera's different characters as the Loudspeaker introduces them in the prologue. He also creates several original combinations out of the ensemble, such as the use of flute, saxophone, and banjo in the brief prelude that follows the prologue. The prologue begins with a four-note motive - a rising and a falling tritone to the words "Hallo, hallo" - taken from Czech composer Josef Suk's Asrael Symphony (itself a work about the angel of death) that recurs throughout the opera. This is the first of many musical references that crop up during the work. Ullmann often turns to jazz: Death laments the modernization and dehumanization of warfare in a "blues," and the trio for the Emperor, Harlequin, and the Drummer Girl (the Emperor's mouthpiece) is a shimmy, a kind of up-tempo dance, dominated by the "Hallo, hallo" motive. Ullmann's use of jazz-derived material Kurt Weill's musical theater pieces of the late 1920s and early 1930s. One of the longer numbers in the opera comes at the close of Scene One. It begins with the Drummer Girl co-opting the Loudspeaker's "Hallo, hallo" motive to read a decree from the Emperor in an aria that closes with a minor-key reference to the German national anthem, followed by passages of accompanied recitative framing a passacaglia. The passacaglia, a baroque form based on a repeated bass pattern, underlines the solemn nature of the text at that moment, as the Drummer Girl announces the beginning of the "holy struggle." The scene ends with Death breaking his saber in response to the Emperor's declaration of war, rendering the living unable to die.

Ullmann uses a distorted minuet for the transition into the rarefied world of the Emperor, who, holed up in his castle, has surrounded himself with "one million cannons" and "walls without windows." The ensuing aria for the Emperor, with its heroic posture and luxuriant melody, reminds the listener of another Emperor, the one in Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) by Richard Strauss, a composer whose ties to the Nazi regime were certainly known to Ullmann. There is some redemption for the Emperor when the posturing, Straussian tone of this first aria gives way to something much more personal, and much more poignant, in the Emperor's farewell, after he accepts death. This final aria is much closer to the valedictory world of the final song of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth).

The opera's finale, an eerie, but still somehow comforting, harmonization of the old Lutheran chorale "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" (A Mighty Fortress is Our God), underscores the work's power and relevance, both as an indictment of the low value placed on life by the Nazis and as an affirmation of the rich cultural soil that tyranny tried to salt.

Rehearsals for the opera took place during the summer of 1944, with a premiere scheduled for October. The authorities refused to allow the work to be performed, and the premiere would never have taken place anyway: Most of the people involved in the opera's creation, including Ullmann, were among those transported to Auschwitz in October 1944. Ullmann died in the gas chambers there on October 16. He had been planning another opera, based on the story of Joan of Arc, and had already written the libretto.

The manuscript of Der Kaiser von Atlantis found its way into the hands of Dr. Hans Adler, who himself had been interned in Theresienstadt. Adler emigrated to London in 1947 and published his massive study of the "model ghetto" in 1955. In 1975, the British conductor Kerry Woodward, who was researching the musical legacy of Theresienstadt, discovered that Adler had the manuscript; on December 16 of that year, Woodward led the opera's world premiere at the Bellevue Theater in Amsterdam.