A Gallows Opera

By Lawrence Malkin

Confronted by a vision of hell, does one stand in silent reverence for suffering or praise the spirit that surmounted it? Last week a Dutch audience faced this dilemma at the premiere of an opera, The Emperor of Atlantis, which was written in a concentration camp by two Jews. At the end, after a few seconds' pause, the listeners burst into applause for a work that stands on its own as a music drama of great power.

The one-hour chamber opera was composed in 1944 inside Theresienstadt, a "model" camp. The piece was in rehearsal but was banned after a similarity between the Emperor and the Fuehrer was detected. Composer Viktor Ullmann, prolific in prewar Vienna, and Librettist Peter Kien, a young painter and poet, were later sent to Auschwitz, where they died. Their manuscript was rediscovered in London three years ago by British Conductor Kerry Woodward, who presented it with The Netherlands Opera Company in Amsterdam.

The authors turned their nightmare world into a German gothic tale: the Emperor of Atlantis (Baritone Meinard Kraak) has declared a holy war on mankind. Death, overworked, goes on strike. With no one dying, the kingdom is about to burst, and the ruler has to make a deal with Death. "We human beings cannot live without you," the Emperor says and consents to become Death's first victim if he will return.

The sardonic snap of the libretto's gallows humor is virtually untranslatable except through the music. Ullmann's eclectic style produces a constant interplay between the melancholic and the light comic in Germany's rich musical tradition. Death, in the shabby uniform of a Central European functionary, could be a sadly tired Wotan. The Emperor's edicts are sung in the piercing soprano of the German cabaret.

The Emperor of Atlantis resembles another expressionist work, Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins, but it goes beyond Weill's elegant cynicism. The final chorale, describing death as part of life's "delight and woe," is sung to A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, while the orchestra counters with a cabaret tune of incredibly sweet pathos. From this juxtaposition emerges a requiem for a civilization literally going up in smoke, but the hymn's chords reassert the promise of redemptive life.

Lawrence Malkin

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