Book Talk – The Emperor of Atlantis or The Refusal of Death Facsimile

Join us for an evening discussing the material history of Viktor Ullmann and Peter Kien’s ‘The Emperor of Atlantis.’ This one-act opera was composed in 1943–44 in the Theresienstadt ghetto and was rehearsed there, although it was never performed. Viktor Ullmann, the composer, and Peter Kien, the author of the libretto, were murdered in Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944; however, the documents relating to the work miraculously survived. While Ullmann’s manuscripts ended up in Switzerland at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Peter Kien’s handwritten libretto is now held by the Wiener Holocaust Library.

The facsimile brings together the surviving sources and makes them accessible in the highest print quality: central to this is Ullmann’s full score, which bears clear traces of the creative process and revisions; along with Kien’s handwritten libretto, the typewritten copy of the libretto on data sheets belonging to deported Jewish women, and the Book of Death. Five essays explore the history of the work’s creation and publication, musical-analytical and stylistic issues, and the reception of the work over the past 50 years since the premiere in 1975.The exceptional book and its content will be presented by the editor of the facsimile, Heidy Zimmerman, and the son of the man responsible for the sources’ survival, Jeremy Adler.

Heidy Zimmermann has been a member of the research staff and curator at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the Swiss Archive for music of the 20th and 21 centuries, since 2002. She studied musicology, German language and literature, as well as Jewish studies in Basle, Lucerne, and Jerusalem. She earned her PhD with Tora und Shira. Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung des rabbinischen Judentums in 1999, published Berne: 2000. From 1995 to 2002 Zimmermann was a research assistant and lecturer at Basle University. She has published numerous articles on aspects of Jewish Music and on twentieth-century music (sketch studies, notation, Stefan Wolpe, and György Ligeti among others). She co-edited several books, such as Jüdische Musik? Fremdbilder, Eigenbilder (Böhlau, 2004), Edgard Varèse. Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary (Boydell, 2006), Avatar of Modernity. The “Rite of Spring” Reconsidered (Boosey & Hawkes, 2013), and Ligeti Labyrinth: A Guided Tour Through the Oeuvre of György Ligeti (Schott, 2023).

Jeremy Adler is Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Member of the German Academy. He specialises in comparative studies and has published some 40 articles, editions and books on the Shoah and the “Third Reich”, including a critique of the new edition of Mein Kampf, Das absolut Böse, which appeared in 2017. His book on The Wannsee Conspiracy. On the Strategy of the “Final Solution” will be published in 2027. His father, H.G. Adler, was a founding father of Holocaust studies with his monograph on Theresienstadt which came out in 1955 and in an English edition in 1999. H. G. Adler was imprisoned with Viktor Ullmann in Theresienstadt. After the war he preserved the manuscript of several works by Ullmann including Der Kaiser von Atlantis and was instrumental in helping it achieve its international success.

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