More than 55 years after the end of World War II, we are still hearing for the first time music written by a lost generation of composers.

        “We owe it to ourselves and to their memory to resurrect this music,” May Festival music director James Conlon says. “It shows that there were a lot of other voices — voices that would have been heard in the 20th century — had it not been for the Holocaust.”

        Today, Mr. Conlon conducts the May Festival premiere of The Emperor of Atlantis, a one-act opera by Czech composer and Holocaust victim Viktor Ullmann. The concert takes place at the Isaac M. Wise (Plum Street) Temple, downtown.

Conductor James Conlon rehearses for the May Festival premiere of The Emperor of Atlantis, (Steven M. Herppich photo) | ZOOM |

        “This is a very moving work. It's touching, partially because you know the circumstances under which it was written, but just on its own merits,” Mr. Conlon says. “It's like a little fairy tale with political satire.”
       

"A model ghetto'

        When he wrote the opera in 1943, Mr. Ullmann was a prisoner in Theresienstadt (Terezin, Czechoslovakia), a concentration camp that became a “model ghetto” for Jews who eventually were sent to Auschwitz and other death camps.

        Mr. Ullmann was “a leading light” in the camp, Mr. Conlon says. “He was very influential; he composed, performed, and he wrote criticism.”

        Mr. Ullmann's librettist was Petr Kien, a 24-year-old Jewish artist and poet from Bohemia. He also was killed.

        Many of Prague's elite Jewish artists were sent to Terezin, (including Hans Krasa, composer of the children's opera Brundibar that was mounted by Cincinnati Opera Outreach in October). They were allowed to pursue their activities; it provided spiritual uplift for those doomed to die.

IF YOU GO

What: Cincinnati May Festival, Viktor Ullmann, The Emperor of Atlantis (Festival premiere); “Birds are Drowsing” by Lea Rudnitska and Leyb Yampolsky; “Blessed is the Match” by Hannah Szenesh and Lawrence Avery; “I Believe” (Ani Maamin), arr. Erwin Jospe; “Ten Brothers” by Martin Rosenberg; ""Bachuri Le'an Tisa” by Gideon Klein. In honor of the 125th anniversary of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. James Conlon, conductor; Ed Stern, artistic adviser; Jennifer Ringo, soprano; Paula Rasmussen, mezzo-soprano; John Aler, tenor; Stanford Olsen, tenor; William McGraw, baritone; John Cheek, bass; Kristinn Sigmundsson, bass; May Festival Youth Chorus, James Bagwell, director; May Festival Chamber Choir, Robert Porco, director; members of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra     When: 7:30 p.m. today     Where: Isaac M. Wise (Plum Street) Temple, downtown     Tickets: Limited tickets ($35-$45) may be available at the door. 381-3300     Read the review: Monday at Cincinnati.Com, keyword: symphony, and Tuesday in Tempo

        The Nazis used the camp for propaganda purposes, as a showcase for the International Red Cross and as the subject of the propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City.
       

Modeled on Hitler

        The central figure of The Emperor of Atlantis (Der Kaiser von Atlantis), a dictator, was clearly modeled on Hitler. Whether the Nazis realized the symbolism or not, performances were forbidden.

        One of Mr. Ullmann's last gestures before he was herded onto a train to Auschwitz was to hand his scores to a friend, Emil Utitz. Miraculously, they surfaced about 30 years later in England. The opera was finally premiered in 1975 in Amsterdam.

        “Survivors threw things in suitcases — it was handwritten and dirty and in Czech — and they didn't know if it was valuable,” says Dr. Racelle Weiman, director of the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Hebrew Union College.

        “Until they realized what they had was brilliant or unique, it took time for the survivors to realize the poetry and art and music that they brought out with them had meaning way beyond that moment in time.”
       

A disastrous loss

        Mr. Ullmann was associated with a famous circle of Viennese composers, who included Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Zemlinsky. He spent his youth in Vienna, where his musical studies included composition classes with Mr. Schoenberg and piano with Eduard Steuermann.

        In 1919, he moved to Prague, where he worked at the German Theater (Deutsches Landestheater) for Mr. Zemlinsky, a composer whose astonishing output has been rediscovered and championed by Mr. Conlon, among others.

        “It was a real school, a tradition, and they were the ones who suffered,” Mr. Conlon says. “They were almost all Jewish ... Schoenberg, Korngold and a few lucky ones got out.

        “There is a tantalizing problem of what might have been, and wasn't. The terrible, terrible loss of life and the loss of art in the last century was, in many respects, a disastrous one for culture.”
       

13 instruments

        Musically, Mr. Ullmann was influenced by the times, by both the lush full-blown music of Gustav Mahler and Mr. Zemlinsky and the cabaret style of Kurt Weill. The opera is scored for 13 instruments, including strings, banjo and harmonium — the instruments that were available in the camp.

        “It's a little work of genius, so simple, so direct,” Mr. Conlon says. “There are 13 instruments, and yet within that he found so much variety, clarity and wit as well as expression. It's a theatrical, powerful work.”

        The plot mirrors the desperation of the prisoners. In the story, the character Death goes on strike until the dictator, the Kaiser, decides to abdicate and accept death. That act frees humanity from suffering and war.

        “You can imagine these prisoners in a concentration camp, just hoping by some miracle that someone would be able to prevail upon this man to give up,” Mr. Conlon says.

        The symbolism that Death is a friend was important for Mr. Ullmann and the other prisoners, he theorizes. “They saw Death as a liberation, a deliverance from the suffering they saw daily,” he says.

        “(Ullmann) obviously felt he was leaving a legacy and telling a story,” Dr. Weiman says. “He became an inspiration inside the ghetto. He kept people's hope going and kept the music going, regardless of the circumstances of starvation and disease.

        “You think of Viktor Ullmann being pleased to see his name and his music being remembered.”
       

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