His Music Survived. He Will Never Be Forgotten.
80 years after a Jewish composer was murdered by the Nazis, the Louisville Orchestra performs his timely piece of history
By Abigail Pickus
Am I the only one who rang in 2025 with a heaviness in my heart? So much promise, such new beginnings, and yet here we are, carrying over the detritus of a year weighed down by division, warfare, and sinat chinam (senseless hatred.)
And all the while I can’t help but see the haunted face of 19-year-old Liri Albag from the propaganda video Hamas released earlier this month. In the first sign of life in over a year, there she is, dressed in her IDF fatigues, her eyes ringed by dark circles. At the end of the 3-minute video, she places her head in her hands and sobs. What horrors has she endured? And how much longer can she bear it? It’s been nearly 500 days since Liri has seen daylight, since her parents have hugged her, since she’s walked this earth as a free person.
I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom lately; the freedom to live life on our own terms, the freedom to come and go as we please; the freedom to create.
Over 80 years ago, another Jewish person’s life was uprooted by evil. Viktor Ullmann, a Czech composer, was sent by the Nazis to the Theresienstadt Ghetto (“Terezin”) outside Prague. Despite the overcrowding, disease, terrible conditions and psychological stress of not knowing — and later knowing — what would befall them, the ghetto was a hothouse of creativity. Some of the period’s most famous European artists, writers, musicians and actors were interned there over the four years it served as a waystation to the death camps. And because of them, art reigned: concerts were performed, cartoons were sketched, even a 60,000 volume lending library was assembled.
For Ulmann, Theresienstadt was ironically one of the most fertile periods of his career. While imprisoned, he wrote numerous music reviews and 16 compositions, including a one-act chamber opera called, Der Kaiser Von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis). A farcical tale about a power hungry, tyrannical ruler and his obsession with war, the opera was rehearsed but closed down by the Nazis before it could be performed. While Ulmann was initially going to bring all of his pieces with him on the train bound for Auschwitz, at the last minute he had a change of heart and gave them to a friend for safekeeping. It would prove to be a serendipitous choice, as the works survived — but Ulmann did not. He was 46 years old.
While the opera’s debut performance didn’t occur until the 1970s in Amsterdam, various orchestras have performed it around the world since then.
“This is an extraordinary piece of music,” Louisville Orchestra’s Executive Director Graham Parker, told me. “While Ulmann is not as well known as many of the others [artists interned in Theresienstadt], as one of the Recovered Voices performances, this work gives oxygen to people who died but whose music lives. It’s a testament to their survival.”
As a native Chicagoan, I wasn’t familiar with the Louisville Orchestra, which has deep ties to the local Jewish community. And it turns out, this particular opera is especially close to home: one of its former concertmasters was a child prodigy violinist who, at age 14, rehearsed Der Kaiser von Atlantis in the ghetto.
When I learned that the opera would be paired with an original composition by the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, Brittany J. Green, which likewise tells the story of power and power dynamics being misused by totalitarianism, but from a Black perspective, I felt that considering the current tensions between Jews and people of color around the world — this was too important a performance not to share.
According to Parker, Der Kaiser Von Atlantis marks the end of a four-year programmatic cycle at the Louisville Orchestra that explored Jewish life and creativity, and the intersection of Black and Jewish history. It’s a timely opera and one that reminds us that while life is fleeting, art lives on.
ABIGAIL PICKUS has written for JUF News Chicago, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and The Jewish Week. She ran the Nextbook literary series at the Chicago Public Library.
