The Paul Sacher Foundation’s Edition of the Surviving Material of “Der Kaiser von Atlantis – oder, die Tod-Verweigerung”

How often have we thought, “If knew then what I know now….”? It’s a revelation that hit me time and again when I thought of the editorial decisions taken during the Decca recording of Kaiser von Atlantis, in Leipzig in 1992. This is a work that is one of the mysteries straddling the worlds of music, theatre and the Holocaust. Viktor Ullmann and Peter Kien’s play, Der Kaiser von Atlantis – oder die Tod-Verweigerung continues as a riddle without an answer. I feel most translations of the title into English are not truly accurate. They vary greatly but my own solution would be, The Emperor of Atlantis or Death’s Refusal to Comply. It is a work that moves between play and opera written in 1942/43 by Peter Kien with music by Viktor Ullmann while both were interned in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, (known in Czech as Terezín). It initially came to prominence in the mid -1970s. The provenance of the work is well known. Ullmann handed it over to the Terezín librarian Dr Emil Utitz before he was deported “to the East” and to his death. Dr Utitz than handed the material to Dr Hans Gunther Adler who then deposited the material at Dornach’s Goetheanum, the centre of the Anthropological movement, before it was transferred to the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel.

And it is the Paul Sacher Foundation that we have to thank for producing Heidy Zimmermann’s edition of all the existing material as high-resolution facsimiles, including all the versions of the text, as well as several important, explanatory essays by Zimmermann, Andreas Krause, Ingo Schultz, John Gabriel and Amy Lynn Wlodarski. An invaluable appendix lays out the four versions of the text side by side with differences highlighted. It comes bound in expensive read fabric, and weighs at least 2 or more kilos. But its size and format are necessary in order to accommodate everything that needs to be seen in order to be understood.

Heidy Zimmermann makes no claim to producing a ‘critical edition’ – as scans of the existent material reveal, that would be impossible. There are too many contradictions and gaps. The only way to mount a staging of this work is through speculation and guess-work as to the composer and playwright’s ultimate intentions.  Indeed, it is not even billed as an opera, but as a “play” – though various versions have it down as a legend, or parable.

In the mid-1970s, Kerry and Julie Woodward managed to obtain the material from Jonathan Adler, the son of H.G. Adler and decided to create a “performing edition” from the conflicting and disparate sources they were given. With so many questions unanswered, the Woodwards brought in the music medium Rosemary Brown. It is unsettling to realise that much of what she relayed to Woodward made perfect sense. She didn’t have a score and could only pass on notes to Woodward referencing the appropriate spots as indicated by Ullmann in her seances. This included the changing pitch of a bell in death’s aria by a half step, a remark passed on by Brown to Woodward that convinced him that Brown’s interactions were something more than smoke and mirrors. As can be seen in the original manuscript, there does not appear to be a bell included in the scoring. In addition, Ullmann as any sort of figure, let alone as a composer, had by this point been totally forgotten. Thirty years after the defeat of Hitler, many of the most notorious death camps lay in the Soviet Sector of Europe, meaning it remained difficult to obtain information on numbers and individuals. Despite this, Brown was able to reveal biographical details that proved correct. Much of Woodward’s material received via Brown has been retained in subsequent performing editions. Interestingly, some instructions from Brown were apparently ignored. For example, against Brown’s advice, Woodward extensively orchestrated the recitatives.

Perhaps the first surprise from these reproductions of the original material is the extent that Ullmann was something of the ‘junior partner’ in this undertaking. Despite the fact that Kien was only 23-years-old when they met, he had already been at the Theresienstadt/Terezín ghetto two years prior to Ullmann’s arrival. Kien enjoyed a privileged position in the ‘free-time’ division with music and performances already under the supervision of Hans Krása and Gideon Klein. Ullmann arrived in Terezín as a German-speaking Austrian, a position in the binary world Czech and German, that was not necessarily an advantage. Kien, Pavel Haas, Hans Krása were all bilingual. And though Kien’s social and family life appears to have been in Czech, his extensive writings, plays and poetry were in German. Even at the age of 23, he was already an established writer with performances of his plays Marionettes, Medea, Bad Dream and On the Border. In addition to his success as a writer – his cycle of poems called Plague had been set by Gideon Klein – Kien was also a gifted artist. He left behind countless portraits and sketches of everyday life in the Ghetto. Kien was outgoing, something of a local celebrity and popular. Ullmann only arrived in 1942 and was a generation older. Also, he was temperamentally, very different. He was a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical movement and brought a humanistic view to issues surrounding questions of existence. In some ways, it’s difficult in light of these documents, and the various versions of the text, to see how this collaboration worked.

Der Kaiser von Atlantis is a work similar to the Diary of Anne Frank. It was written when facts known to us now were unknown to the creative team then. We’re offered hints and clues as to what they actually knew or believed was going on. The difference, however, is Der Kaiser von Atlantis, is obviously full of political satire and if Kien had been able to have his way, it would have been even more explicit. His original title was Der Tod Dankt Ab – The Abdication of Death. Where and how the title was changed to focus on the “Emperor” rather than “Death” remains unclear. Indeed, in the typoscript, where again a number of changes occur, it’s called Der König von Atlantis, rather than Kaiser. The title seems to have undergone a number of changes, suggesting again differences between author and composer. In his original manuscript, Kien called the work Der Tod Dankt Ab – The Abdication of Death, which in his musical score, Ullmann turned into Der Kaiser von Atlantis – oder die Tod-Verweigerung – The Emperor of Atlantis or Death’s Refusal to Comply – this title, however, is struck through and replaced with Der Tod Dankt Ab. The typoscript of the text is changed again to Der König von Atlantis, oder der Tod Dankt Ab. We get close to the present title in the one surviving part, a score written out by Karel Berman, who was to take the role of Death. Here, the work is called Der Kaiser von Atlantis – oder die Todt-Verweigerung. Berman has written ‘Tod” using an archaic spelling. Possibly it was an orthographical slip or an attempt to bring the work closer to Baroque liturgical works where the “Todt” spelling is more common. Less likely is an intended reference to Fritz Todt, the notorious Nazi who used slave labour to build Germany’s Autobahns.

It was clear that after initiating the recording series “Entartete Musik”, a robust and editorially sound version of Der Kaiser von Atlantis would have to be included. The former Soviet Bloc was opening up and the conductor Lothar Zagrosek was appointed principal conductor of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra. Our first opera recordings of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane, Krenek’s Jonny Spielt Auf and Berthold Goldschmidt’s Der gewaltige Hahnrei had all taken place with the support of the publishing houses. After my experiences with the Kurt Weill Foundation and its conflicts with Weill’s publisher, Universal Editions, I decided that it would be impossible to proceed with the recording unless there was a publisher behind the project.

The so-called ‘Performing Edition’ created by Kerry Woodward was exclusively copyrighted and required Woodward to be the conductor of any performance or recording of his edition. Our conductor contracts for the “Entartete Musik” series were with Lothar Zagrosek and John Mauceri. In any case, the Woodward edition had been created with interventions from the medium Rosemary Brown, and to me, at the time, this didn’t seem serious. Unbeknown to me, Schott Music Publishers were under some pressure to create a version for performance around the same time we wanted to schedule our recording. As a result, Henning Brauel and Andreas Krause came up with a version that was based on the original material using a judicious selection between appropriate combinations of text and music. The Woodward edition had based itself largely on the typoscript version of the text, despite the many obvious deviations – he also changed what he believed to be intrusions by censors, so König von Atlantis was restored to Kaiser. However, some points of the Woodward edition were retained. Either this was because they were borne out through further research, or they simply made sense. It would be worth pointing out that Rosemary Brown in her seances with Viktor Ullmann did not have the score. She apparently took down the changes as dictated and passed them on to Kerry Woodward who placed them in the appropriate spots in his performance edition. More puzzling is where Woodward apparently did not follow Rosemary Brown’s recommendation and scored the recitatives rather than leave them secco. In any case, it would seem that even the most sceptical of sceptics would have difficulties explaining how Mrs. Brown was able to detail these points without access to the material. Even Woodward only had loose pages and sheets filled with changes layered on top of one another or scribbled out altogether.

Indeed, our recording project seemed to be riddled with the metaphysical. The studio sessions for Kaiser had been scheduled with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to include not just the recording of the opera, but also Berthold Goldschmidt’s orchestral song-cycle Mediterranean Songs. Goldschmidt was in Leipzig for the first time in sixty-two years. The Leipzig of 1992 bore no resemblance to the Leipzig he remembered or the Leipzig one sees today. The venue of the recording was a church on the outskirts of town surrounded by the chard skeletons of buildings bombed in 1944. The rebuilding of the city-centre during the Soviet era was cheap and crude, and I recall tinted glass structures with green mildew growing up the windows. What had undoubtedly looked modern and promising in the1950s and ‘60s had not been maintained. Residential buildings were largely infested with pigeon lice, making it difficult for Zagrosek to find local accommodation. The neighbourhood of the Paul Gerhardt Church, our recording venue, appeared to have been left untouched since the bombing raids of February 1944. We all stayed in the one ‘Western’ hotel built by the East Germans for the various trade fairs that still took place every year. These events were the only time people from the West were allowed to visit and flights were allowed to land at Leipzig airport. Despite this, the Thomas and Nikolai churches were beautifully maintained for any Bach pilgrims who managed to get through the bureaucratic barriers imposed during the dying days of the German Democratic Republic. In short, the Leipzig that Goldschmidt remembered was not the Leipzig he encountered in 1992. His last visit had been to attend the premiere of Leben des Orest, an opera by fellow Franz Schreker pupil, Ernst Krenek in January 1930.

Goldschmidt was very much a child of the New Objectivity movement. He declared himself an atheist, though he admitted that he didn’t believe in coincidence. He had never encountered Viktor Ullmann, and the story of how his opera composed in Theresienstadt came about was new to him. He made no comments during the recordings, or the rehearsals, all of which he attended. The experience of being in Leipzig after such a long time seemed to weigh on him. When at last the recording of Kaiser was completed and we could begin to work on Goldschmidt’s Mediterranean Songs, he strode toward the conductor’s rostrum to say a few words to the orchestra. As he mounted the rostrum, he looked over the orchestra, went white and shouted before falling to the ground. An ambulance was called and for a while he was surrounded by medical staff. Eventually, he told us that he had a much-loved cousin in Leipzig who had been murdered in the camps. When he mounted the rostrum to speak to the orchestra, he suddenly saw him standing right in front of him. He never mentioned it again. Our recording along with the bombed and post-Soviet remnants of Leipzig were full of ghosts.

But returning to Ullmann and Kien’s Kaiser von Atlantis, questions regarding the intended message of the work still remain. At a time when death was everywhere – even if Theresienstadt was not a so-called Vernichtungslager – extermination camp – one senses the tension between accepting death and trying to defy it. The very subject of how unimaginable a world without death would be plays against the backdrop of death being nearly everywhere.  

It can only be speculated as to where the idea of death deferring his obligations might have come from. One looks towards the ambient sources that would have been familiar to Peter Kien. Hints of sources range from Hugo von Hofmannsthal Jedermann, to Greek mythology, Grimms fairy tales and Berlin street-theatre and cabaret. The Atlantis reference is something that apparently came from Ullmann, as there is no mention of it in the original Kien script. Atlantis was a kingdom destroyed through hubris, yet held a mythic fascination among Nazis. Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, was an SS Unit dedicated to discovering the location of Atlantis as the origins of the Aryan race. Even Hitler was prone to suggest that Atlantis was a Nordic lost Aryan homeland. Such nonsense was a gift horse for satire and parody by the imprisoned inhabitants of Theresienstadt. Having an Emperor of a place called Atlantis, whose thirst for power and blood eventually upends the natural order may have seemed a logical creative evolution for Kien and Ullmann.  

The text underwent a number of changes, much to the frustration of Peter Kien. As already mentioned, it was obvious that he and Ullmann did not always agree on the intended message of the work. The two versions of the Emperor’s final aria are highly contrasted: one version, presumably preferred by Ullmann, envisions a world in the future where nature resumes even after we’ve left, while the other is more cynical and sees this not as the end of a war but merely a pause until the next war flares up. The discarded duet between the Emperor and Death exists only as a text in Berman’s part and suggests again a version that was more in accordance with Ullmann than Kien.

There is so much more that one learns from these reproductions. It’s chilling to see the quality of paper with ink seeping through to the other side of the page, meaning the rest of the work took place using a pencil. The struck-out passages, the changes that are visibly layered over since paper shortages meant re-writing something on a new sheet was out of the question. At first the work appears to have been written on proper manuscript paper, later this is changed to mimeographed staves.  The daily confrontation with hardship and loss is clearly indicated in the material used to create Kaiser von Atlantis. Seeing the material means there are probably many more interpretations that are possible. We can never know the ultimate message intended by Ullmann and Kien. I’m guessing they were, in any case, conflicting.