By Janelle Gelfand
Enquirer staff writer

Andrew Gangestad portrays Death, who goes on strike, in Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis. Ullmann composed the allegory while interned in Theresienstadt, a concentration camp. PHILIP GROSHONG

Viktor Ullmann's opera, The Emperor of Atlantis, composed in the World War II concentration camp of Theresienstadt, is an allegory. But was it only intended for its doomed audience of tortured prisoners - or is its message more universal?

"As we were studying it, the thing that amazed us, was how Ullmann and (librettist) Petr Kien, being in the situation they were in, could write a piece that also touched on the universality," says Nicholas Muni, Cincinnati Opera artistic director. "As horrible as any dictator is, there will always be the possibility of other ones - as long as humankind has impulses toward violence, and as long as there's hatred and intolerance.

"To me that is what I think Ullmann was trying to say."

Muni will direct the company's first performance of The Emperor of Atlantis in a double bill with The Maids by Peter Bengtson (a United States premiere), Thursday and Saturday in Music Hall.

In the story, Emperor Overall reigns over chaos. He declares a holy war, but Death goes on strike, and people cannot die. A soldier and a girl (Bubikopf) from an enemy camp meet on the battlefield. Unable to kill each other, they fall in love. Death goes back to work when the Emperor agrees to die.

There are really two stories, believes Muni. One is the creation of the opera in the terror-filled surroundings of a concentration camp, in which Emperor Overall clearly symbolized Hitler.

"The second is, what occurs in the actual piece," he says. "We came to see them as two different stories."

Removing all World War II context led Muni and his creative team - designer Dany Lyne and lighting designer Thomas C. Hase - to choose a futuristic setting.

"So what you will see is a world that is in a near-future, to link up with what we feel (Ullmann) was saying in terms of cautionary tale," Muni says.

Atlantis, he believes, is a metaphor of "global society." His team has set the cautionary tale in a cataclysmic landscape, with the Emperor's palatial room suspended above. A plasma screen sends out nonstop propaganda "talking about a brighter future, a dream," Muni says. (Audience members who arrive early will see a series of prerecorded video segments.)

In forming his concept for the production, Muni was especially struck by the opera's third scene, in which the Emperor declares "a holy war of all against all."

"To me, it had overtones in terms of what we're hearing today about world terror," he says. "There's not really a country we're at war with. We're at war with an ideology worldwide, and you don't know who you're fighting, in many cases."

Two versions of the opera exist, Muni says. In one handwritten version, the text of the Emperor's final aria is altered from a nostalgic tone of rivers, mountains and flowers, to words warning of murder and war "that will rage anew."

"He was clearly writing a piece that was commenting on his time, but he wasn't only doing that," Muni says. "Our hope is, that by viewing it in language that is from our time, that we have a chance to create a kind of discomfort that's very present, rather than one that we know about historically."

Muni has chosen to link the two operas of the double bill by inventing two non-singing characters: daughters of the Emperor who merely sit onstage.

In The Maids, based on a real-life, 1933 French crime in which two maids murdered their mistress, the same two girls will be seen wandering in the destroyed landscape.

(In this case, the landscape symbolizes the women's psychological mind frames.)

Their alter egos, the maids, will be performing in the room above.

Do the two pieces need to have a connection?

"For us, these pieces have such a large amount of natural connectivity - given the stories and musical styles. We felt it was natural to create one framework," Muni explains.

E-mail jgelfand@enquirer.com