Before
his fateful transport to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944, Viktor
Ullmann entrusted a collection of his scores, including that
of Der Kaiser von Atlantis, to his good friend Dr. Emil Utitz for safekeeping.
Up until that last moment, however, he had planned to bring
them along to destinations unknown. This mindset led surviving
acquaintances to believe that all was lost of his artistic
endeavors, and this became a common opinion among the scholarly
set. In 1975 British conductor Kerry Woodward, while performing
research on Terezin works, lamented to Terezin scholar and
survivor Dr. H. G. Adler that a work like Der
Kaiser Von Atlantis was lost forever. To Mr. Woodward’s
surprise, Dr. Adler replied that he owned Ullmann’s full collection
from the Terezin years!
 Survivor Karel Bermann's copy of his part as DeathUllmann
had requested of Dr. Utitz to either return the scores at the close of the war,
or to pass them along to Dr. Adler. When Ullmann did not return, Utitz
transferred the collection to Adler as instructed, who then moved to London in
1947. Nearly 30 years had passed until the Der
Kaiser von Atlantis score found its way to public eyes again, to be
reworked by Kerry Woodward after being lent the score by Dr. Adler. Under the baton of Mr. Woodward, the opera
received its first ever official performance in December of 1975 in Amsterdam.
His version was somewhat distant from the original manuscripts, however;
differences included changes in arrangement and instrumentation.
In 1989
a new campaign commenced to restore the work to its original
presentation. Difficulties arose when merging the surviving
documents (one full score and two libretto drafts written
on the back of prisoner information sheets) into a cohesive
whole, for each contained crossings-out, notes, and alterations.
Creating uncertainty as to Ullmann and Kien’s precise intentions,
these divergences also demonstrated the revision process the
opera underwent when subject to review by the Council of Elders.
A reconstructed score, as true to the original as possible,
was debuted by the ARBOS Society for Music and Theater in
Austria on June 12, 1993. The same company held the first
Czech performance of the work, nearly fifty years after the
dress rehearsals of Terezin, on September 24, 1993 in the
Great Hall of the National Monument in Vitkov.
Scene from the ARBOS production of Der Kaiser von AtlantisOver the
past ten years, Der
Kaiser von Atlantis has become one of the predominant
modern operas presented in venues across Europe, and the Americas.
The United States premiere took place on November 19, 1994
through a Terezin festival “Hear Our Voices” at Northeastern
University of Boston. Performances have also been held in
Terezin, Israel, Montreal, Stockholm and Dresden, just to
name a few. A review of the American premiere can be read
here
(reprinted with permission from the Boston Globe).
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