Der Kaiser von Atlantis.(May Festival, Cincinnati, Ohio)(Viktor Ullmann)(Review)

Der Kaiser von Atlantis, by Viktor Ullmann, at the Cincinnati May Festival.

Among the more inspiring musical revelations of recent years has been the rediscovery of so-called entartete Musik ("degenerate music"), the works of composers banned by the Nazis. An exhibit in Dusseldorf in 1988, commemorating one mounted fifty years before by the Nazis was the revival's catalyst. Shortly thereafter, the Decca Record Company began a series of recordings, and now the term entartete Musik has become an artistic badge of honor, as is frequently the custom these days with former terms of abuse.

In 1994, Decca released a recording of an opera tiffed Der Kaiser von Atlantis, a blatantly political fantasia in which a mad emperor (the kaiser of the title) attempts to wage total war, an act that infuriates a personified death, who then ironically thwarts the emperor's plans. The composer was Viktor Ullmann, a Czech Jew, who though by no means among the most famous musicians of his era, was nonetheless a known and respected figure. Michael H. Kater, in The Twisted Muse, an essential book on composers and the Third Reich, wrote of Ullmann that "No one has served as a finer symbol of the pride and suffering of these Jewish musicians." A disciple of Schoenberg, Ullmann was both a prolific composer and a respected conductor, but, after the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia, he became subject to brutal racial laws, and in September 1942 he was sent to Theresienstadt, the so-called Paradise Ghetto. It was there that Ullmann composed Der Kaiser von Atlantis, to a libretto written by a fellow prisoner, the young poet and painter Peter Kien. In the fall of 1944, Ullmann was sent to Auschwitz and gassed; Kien soon followed. Their opera was luckier. It had its premiere, in Amsterdam, in 1975 and has subsequently been produced in San Francisco, New York, and London (at the Imperial War Museum, no less). It was also among the main attractions at this year's May Festival in Cincinnati, as sure a sign as any of a work's coming-of-age.

The May Festival is among this country's most venerable music events, dating from 1873 and counting Theodore Thomas, later the legendary founding conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as its first music director. The May Festival's concerts are primarily choral and over the years have featured a veritable Who's Who of starry soloists--everyone from Ernestine Schumann-Heink to Kathleen Battle. Most of the festival's events are held in Cincinnati's Music Hall, a grand Victorian pile dedicated in 1878 that looks like a cross between a train station and a large church. But Der Kaiser von Atlantis was performed a few blocks away at the Isaac M. Wise (Plum Street) Temple, an opulent vintage synagogue.

The program on May 20 opened with a selection of Holocaust-era songs in Hebrew and Yiddish, but these were mere curtain raisers and in some ways distracted from the concentrated, unsentimental power of Ullmann and Kien's work. In an effort to give the opera broader appeal, it was sung in English, rather than the original German. The decision was probably the right one, as Kien's libretto is more significant for its point than its poetry. James Conlon, the May ...