Striking Similarities

“kaiserRequiem”
Vienna State Ballet & Volksoper Wien
Volksoper Wien
Vienna, Austria
January 25, 2025

by Ilona Landgraf
Copyright © 2025 by Ilona Landgraf

kaiserRequiem, the Volksoper Wien’s latest premiere, is a joint production of the State Ballet Vienna and the singers, choir, and orchestra of the Volksoper. The piece intertwines the sixty-minute chamber opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis), composed by Viktor Ullmann in 1943/44, with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem in D minor (K. 626). Both pieces feature death, which overtook both composers while working on them. Mozart died in December 1791 before finishing Requiem. Requiem had been commissioned, and when Mozart died, his wife, Constanze, assigned its completion to Franz Xaver Süßmayr, her husband’s former pupil. Being of Jewish parentage, Ullmann and his wife were deported to the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt (in today’s Czech Republic) in September 1942. It was a showpiece ghetto to promote the allegedly successful resettlement of Jews, so Theresienstadt had a department for so-called “leisure activities,” such as sports, theater, lectures, and reading. Ullmann worked there as a composer, music critic, and musical event organizer. The premiere of his opera The Emperor of Atlantis was scheduled for Theresienstadt’s stage but was canceled after the general rehearsal. Perhaps the piece’s highly political sarcasm, though subtle, did not slip the notice of the ruling powers, but that’s only speculation.
On October 16, 1944, the forty-six-year-old Ullmann and his wife were deported to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and gassed to death two days later. Peter Kien, The Emperor of Atlantis’s librettist, was deported with them. It is unknown if the twenty-five-year-old died in the gas chamber or from an infection. The Emperor of Atlantis didn’t receive its world premiere until December 1975 in Amsterdam. Vienna’s premiere of kaiserRequiem coincided almost to the day with the eighty-year-anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp Auschwitz by the Red Army and Mozart’s 269^th birthday on January 27th.

Primarily because of its critique of Hitler’s mania for extermination, the opera was a hot potato for Ullmann and his creative team in 1944. Hitler’s onstage archetype is the tyrannical Overall, Emperor of a gray and bleak Atlantis, who orders a war of all against all. That annoys Death, who has sole authorization to take the souls. He decides to terminate his service, thereby nullifying executions and killings. Those who should die, therefore, stay alive. To detract from his failure, Overall declares himself the inventor of immortality but feels that his power is broken. Dying has lost its sting, and people are increasingly less afraid of Overall. Soldiers on the battlefield begin to recognize their enemies as fellow humans and remember that there is beauty in life. State-wide uprisings further erode Overall’s regime.
When Death offers to resume work on the condition that Overall agrees to die first, the Emperor agrees. As he repents, his subjects sing Mozart’s Lacrimosa, praying for the eternal rest of a guilty man.

Originally, Ullmann based the final scene on a drama by the Viennese author Felix Braun (1885-1973) that predicted that wars would recur infinitely. Ullmann dismissed this deeply pessimistic outlook and adopted Kien’s. Sadly, today’s raging wars prove Braun right. Passages of the opera’s text strikingly resemble current events and the accompanying propaganda. I wonder if Omer Meir Wellber (who assembled the score and conducted the Volksoper Orchestra on opening night) and Andreas Heise (who directed the opera and choreographed the dance parts) were aware of how relevant and timely kaiserRequiem would be when they set to work.

For Heise, a former dancer who turned to choreography in 2015, kaiserRequiem is his Volksoper debut. He cast almost all the main roles—Emperor Overall, Death, Harlequin, Soldier, Drummer, and the girl Bubikopf—as doubles (with a singer and a dancer) except for Hospital 34. Hospital 34 is a newly invented figure to which Heise assigned parts originally sung by the Loudspeaker (a bass role). The remaining text of the Loudspeaker is contributed by voice-over.
Aleksander Orlić danced Hospital 34, his pointe shoes pounding the floor like a rataplan of drums as he reported to Overall (baritone Josef Wagner and dancer Martin Winter): “Supreme General here. Hospital 34 for the Living Dead was captured by the rebels at three o’clock. Doctors and instructors surrendered en masse. The insurgents carry black flags and display a bloody plow on their coat of arms. They fight without a battle cry, silent and bitter. The General Staff of the Twelfth Army has not yet submitted its report.” Moments later he collapsed like one of Drosselmeyer’s dolls in The Nutcracker that had wound down. Utterly grotesque, Hospital 34 was a laughingstock. The female guard didn’t look fit for service either. Led by the Drummer (mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta and dancer Marta Schiumarini), they paraded on pointe while their arms cut through the air like rudimentary robots.

I cannot comment on the quality of the singing, but I found the rest of the choreography so-so. It would have been inappropriate if the dancers outshone the singers, but they should have added a relevant perspective or meaning rather than act as an accessory. Sure, some scenes focused on dance, but too often they showcased commonplace contemporary choreography. The choreography for the choir was, however, fine. Here, Heise also utilized the costumes to great visual effect. They were designed by Sascha Thomson, who contrasted simple outfits in shades of gray with bright green stripes on one side or green accessories, like shoes, gloves, feather ruffs, and hats. The Harlequin (tenor Seiyoung Kim and dancer Kevin Hena) was the brightest spot, his half-gray, half-green jacket and pants resembling a quartered rectangle. Perhaps the green represented the shimmer of hope in each individual (of which the Emperor was stripped in the end), but I couldn’t help but feel reminded of the uniforms worn by the ticket collectors of Vienna’s City Airport Train (CAT).

A gloomy room with walls made of bulky blocks with a rusty iron surface (design also by Sascha Thomson) represented the Empire of Atlantis. At times, some blocks opened like a sliding door of a shadowbox to reveal a group of people struggling against collapse. “Death’s certain to come any moment now!” the Loudspeaker announced, but the victims climbed to their feet again and again. They later stood crammed together and motionless as if they were the addressees of Lacrimosa’s “grant them the eternal rest, Lord.”

Although Ullmann’s and Mozart’s music differ in character, they combined flawlessly. Meir Wellber described the mélange of jazz, blues, and classical music in Ullmann’s composition as a uniquely Jewish perspective on fate. Lacking a true home, Meir Wellber said, Ullmann could easily adopt German, French, American, or Russian music. Ullmann’s music seemed to characterize everyday life under oppression. There was sadness and hope, acrimony and irony. Mozart’s Requiem, by contrast, opened toward transcendence. It helped to endure and finally overcome Atlantis.

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