Several performances in memory of the Holocaust are being staged this season at the Vienna Volksoper opera house, which itself fell victim to the tragic events.
When Israeli conductor Omer Meir Wellber, then chief conductor of the Dresden Opera, first heard Viktor Ullmann’s chamber opera The Kaiser of Atlantis, he was struck by the work’s consonance with Mozart’s Requiem. He found a book about Ullmann, who had composed music when he was a prisoner in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
“I was amazed that this man, while in Theresienstadt in 1942-1943, dared to write an opera in which he openly spoke out against the inhumane incitement of war and totalitarianism” Wellber said.
“Ullmann directed the orchestra in the camp’s musical theater and staged this opera there. Of course, the Nazis understood the allegory directed against Hitler and ultimately sent the composer and all the musicians to Auschwitz. But they left one artist alive – the performer who played the role of Death,” the conductor said.
“This story touched me from a dramatic point of view, and I thought, ‘Who composed the most famous music about death?’ Of course, Mozart. He composed Requiem in 1791 in the face of death, and death interrupted his work,” Wellber said.
“I have no doubt that Ullmann knew what a risk he was taking by composing his Kaiser of Atlantis. Here, too, life fights with death – and ultimately death wins. That’s how the idea of combining the two works came to me.”
The implementation of the idea took three years. “At first, I composed several of my own transitional pieces between the two works,” he said, “but then I realized that they were not needed, and I took music from the works themselves for the transitions. I was surprised at how it all sounded so organic, like a single whole.”
The idea was realized on the stage of the Volksoper when Wellber became its chief conductor. Sung in German and Latin, Kaiser Requiem is a dialogue between two works about the most important questions of human existence – life and death.
The world premiere of the opera took place on January 27, 2025, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Since then, it has been regularly performed at the Volksoper to full houses.
“Is there any history in your family connected to the Holocaust?” I asked the conductor.
“There is no personal history,” he said, “as my ancestors arrived in Jerusalem 200 years ago. The older generation on my mother’s side came from Vilnius and Odessa, and on my father’s side from the territory of today’s Czech Republic. So we can say that they escaped their Holocaust.”
He added, “I think our Kaiser Requiem is especially relevant today in light of the European and Israeli fight against antisemitism.”
Upcoming performances in Paris
The next performance of the Kaiser Requiem opera, in concert version, will take place in Paris on May 7 and 8.
Another current production of the Volksoper is Let Us Forget the World, which tells about the life of the theater itself during the Nazi regime. At that time, the theater tried its best to preserve the cheerfulness and carefree spirit inherent in operettas. But the Jewish actors had already been ordered to leave the stage.
The theater tells its own story here, and the fate of many of the characters is tragic. Some of them managed to escape from Austria, and some died in Auschwitz. The co-composer of the music is Israeli conductor and composer Keren Kagarlitsky, who made aliyah from Kyrgyzstan in her early childhood.