Der Kaiser von Atlantis review – the opera that survived Auschwitz
Weren’t we all inventive in lockdown? We took to clogging each other’s email inboxes with links to smart ass movies (curse that “send to all” button). The Scottish broadcaster Andrew Cotter left us amused (for a while) with his mutts, Olive and Mabel and their drawing-room antics, voiced over with deadpan commentary from their owner.
Cotter’s style riffed off BBC World Snooker’s sotto voce whispers. Welcome back to the 1980s. Back in the day, the Snooker champion Steve (interesting) Davis and runner-up Dennis (interesting specs) Taylor, spent forever each May Bank Holiday weekend potting coloured balls on someone’s green dining room table. The interest inevitably faded – as it clearly has for Olive and Mabel.
Then a star appeared, Janey Godley, the comedienne who does a brilliant impersonation of Nicola Sturgeon. Her Hogmanay impression of Wee Krankie twerking to WAP had Scots rolling in the aisles (I have no idea what “twerking to WAP” involves). The story was reported in the Scottish Sun, so “WAP” seems to be an important thing to which one “twerks”.
For the puzzled English, “Wee Krankie” is the vertically-challenged female of the husband-and-wife comedy duo The Krankies. They enjoyed considerable panto and TV success in Scotland in the 1970s and 1980s. Mrs Tough (who plays Wee Krankie) is an astonishing look-alike to the Scottish First Minister. Ms Godley has enhanced her comedic reputation by exploiting the uncanny resemblance. In election week, this is all you need or want to know about Scottish politics.
For months I enjoyed Ms Godley’s daily Krankie impersonations on BBC Scotland. Then, fellow Reaction columnist Gerald Warner burst my bubble. He insists I have been tuning in to Sturgeon’s daily Covid finger-wagging lectures. Naively, I had assumed the repeated punch line, “and today we have identified two more cases in Clachnacuddin,” was Godley’s running Krankie joke. A stoater!
However, some lockdown offerings are no joke. Cue the opera company: Deutsche Oper am Rhein, which is currently showing an opera by a real lockdown composer – Viktor Ullman – Der Kaiser von Atlantis. You can watch it here.
Viktor Ullman was locked down in times more challenging than our Covid year. In 1943, he was detained in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, where he wrote this searing operatic critique of dictatorial government. Heroically, he aimed it straight at Hitler. Ullman’s work still very much resonates. Today Der Kaiser’s Emperor Overall is a dead ringer for the likes of Vladimir Putin. Will we ever learn?
Ullman was eventually muted forever in Auschwitz for his pains. He is one of Germany’s forbidden composers whose potential to reshape the music of the latter half of the 20th century was snuffed out. It is an immeasurable loss.
The plot of Der Kaiser von Atlantis is as following: Faced by mechanised death on an industrial scale presided over by Emperor Overall of Atlantis, the characters Harlequin and Death, who represent humanity, find that “life can no longer laugh and death can no longer cry.” They are reduced to helpless onlookers in a world “which has forgotten how to delight in life and die of death.” When the Emperor declares war to reassert his authority, death feels that he has been robbed of all dignity, rebels and refuses to serve the Emperor any longer.
After death loses its horror, life veers off its conventional rails. What power does a murderous despot have if no one in his empire can die any more? Executions cannot be carried out; soldiers cannot kill each other — the dead simply rise to fight again in an immortal combat.
A Soldier and a Maiden confront one another as enemies. But, unable to kill each other, their negative thoughts turn to love. They dream of distant places where kind words exist alongside “meadows filled with colour and fragrance.” A military Drummer attempts to lure them back to battle with the sensual attraction of the call. The Maiden responds: “Now death is dead, and so we need to fight no more!” She and the Soldier sing: “Only love can unite us, unite us all together.”
Soon the entire country is overcome with bitter protests by the living dead against the immortality that has been imposed on them. Death offers to end his strike if the Emperor agrees to make a sacrifice “as the first to suffer this new death”. The Emperor says his farewells and follows death.
The production is ominous, set on a dark stage. White tendrils extend web-like from the centre with The Emperor as the spider of this controlling creation, and his workers are dressed up in robot-like costumes. Messages boom from loudspeakers. A liken to 1984 is easy, except that Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, obviously unaware of Ullman’s opera.
Ilaria Lanzino, an Italian director, debuted as recently as 2017 with the children’s opera, Wunderland. Her Der Kaiser is some way up the “serious” scale and marks her out as capable of turning this genre of parable curiosity, which might risk being dated, into a highly topical work. An earlier 2010 production by Theatre Colón which adopted a too comedic Frankenstein theme, missed the mark.
This is the only surviving opera composed in a Nazi concentration camp. It is tempting to elevate Der Kaiser von Atlantis into an icon in the face of oppression and annihilation. As a humbling example of courage and creative will in dire circumstances, the opera deserves recognition for its unusual position in the repertoire. But, it is much more than a memento mori; the opera specificity and inherent artistic value are still relevant today.
Viktor Ullmann wrote Der Kaiser von Atlantis in the deprivation and horror of Theresienstadt concentration camp to a libretto by Peter Kien. While the work was determined by the conditions of its creation, from its subject to its instrumentation, the dramatic and musical interest transcend the immediate horror of the death camp.
Der Kaiser straightforwardly delivers its missile of a message in just under an hour. The musical language draws on classical and popular styles. At times, we are in German musical theatre, listening to Kurt Weill cabaret music; at others, we hear early Arnold Schoenberg, with whom Ullmann studied in Vienna.
Axel Kober has been musical director of Deutsche Oper am Rhein since 2009. He leads the Düsseldorfer Syphoniker with vigour. Emperor Overall is sung by Irish American baritone Emmett O’Hanlon, who overcomes the age disadvantage of a mere 23 years on the planet, delivering a convincingly old imperial grouch. Bass (Thorsten Grümbel) plays an early version of Alexa, a loudspeaker relaying Emperor Overall’s increasingly delusional rantings to the sceptical masses. He even features a circling blue light in his solar plexus: “Lockdown, maintain distancing, wear your mask, stay in your bubble, worship your NHS”. Boris Overall has clearly been studying his Ullman (downtime from interior design projects permitting).
Death is Australian bass, Luke Stoker; Harlequin, German tenor David Fischer; a soldier, tenor Sergej Khomov; a girl, German soprano, Anke Krabbe; and the Drummer, German mezzo-soprano, Kimberley Boettger-Soller. This is a young, vibrant cast, in keeping with Rhein house practice.
To assess the scale of Ullmann’s foolhardy bravery, listen to the parody of Da Llied der Deutschen, Haydn’s composition celebrating the birthday of Frederick II, which became the national anthem of the Weimar Republic in 1922. We wrongly dub it Deutschland, Deutschland über alles – the first line of the 1840s lyric by August Heinrich Hoffman von Fallersleben. The anthem is delivered frantically in a disrespectful minor key, the increasingly deranged Emperor corrupting its idealism as indeed as he is poisoning the body politic. The slap to the Fuhrer’s face is blatant.
It is astonishing to reflect that Ullmann actually presented the work to the prison camp authorities in the hope of having it performed. Unsurprisingly, they demurred. The opera did not see the light of day until 1975 when the Dutch National Opera presented it.
While incarcerated, death ever hovering in the wings, Viktor Ullman wrote an astonishing twenty-five or so works for voice, orchestra and solo instruments between 1943 and 1944. He was a founder member of a prison camp group of composers and musicians – The Six – who kept the flame of culture alive in the darkest of places and in the bleakest of conditions.
This compelling production still resonates today. As troops mass at their Russian Emperor’s diktat on the Ukraine border, inflated toy tanks and fighter jets are deployed in Potemkin airfields, and pop-up barracks sprout from fields courtesy of Rubal, Ullman reminds us that it takes courage to recognise dystopia and deflate the tanks and mock the tyrants with the gall to deploy them. The legacy of Viktor Ullman’s unquenchable courage is an opera for our time.