Ullmann, Viktor (Josef)

(b Teschen [now Cesky Tesin], Czech Republic, 1 Jan 1898; d Auschwitz [Oswiecim], 18 Oct 1944). German-Czech composer of Austrian birth. The son of an Austrian officer, he entered Vienna University as a law student in 1918. Late in the same year he enrolled in Arnold Schoenberg's composition seminar, having been prepared for its demands by theory tuition he had received from Josef Polnauer since 1914. He had also studied piano with Eduard Steuermann. At Schoenberg's suggestion, he was made a founder-member of the committee of the Verein fur Musikalische Privatauffuhrungen. Ullmann did not complete his university course but moved to Prague in May 1919, and there joined the music staff of the Neues Deutsches Theater under Alexander Zemlinsky, becoming chorus master and repetiteur in 1920 and conductor in 1922. Apart from his work in the opera house he spent his time composing, and enjoyed early successes with performances of the Sieben Lieder with piano (performed 1923), the Octet (1924), his incidental music for Klabund's Kreidekreis (1925) and the Symphonische Phantasie (1925). Also in 1925 he composed the first version of his Variationen und Doppelfuge uber ein Klavierstuck von Arnold Schoenberg, based on Schoenberg's op.19, no.4. His String Quartet no.1 had its first performance in 1927.

In the autumn of 1927 he spent a season as head of the opera in Aussig (now Usti nad Labem), where he gave dazzling proof of his conducting talent. On his return to Prague he remained without a permanent post for a year. Performances of his Concerto for Orchestra, in Prague (1929) and Frankfurt (1930), aroused great interest. The second version of the Schoenberg-Variationen, performed by Franz Langer at the 1929 festival of the ISCM, in Geneva, brought Ullmann to international attention.

He was engaged by the Zurich Schauspielhaus as a conductor and composer of incidental music (1929--31). Coming under the influence of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, he gave up every kind of musical activity over the next two years, and ran an anthroposophical bookshop in Stuttgart 'in order to render direct service to the anthroposophical movement'.

He left Germany after the National Socialist seizure of power, and returned to Prague where, from the middle of 1933, he lived once again the life of a freelance musician. In addition to his teaching, journalism and radio broadcasting, he was active in Leo Kestenberg's Internationale Gesellschaft fur Musikerziehung and in Prague's music societies, both German and Czech. He attended Alois Haba's courses in quarter-tone composition from 1935 to 1937, and built on his 1929 success in Geneva with an orchestrated version of the Schoenberg-Variationen, which won the Emil Hertzka Prize in 1934. He won the Hertzka prize again in 1936 with his opera Der Sturz des Antichrist, based on a dramatic sketch by Albert Steffen, but negotiations to get the work performed in Vienna (1935) or Prague (1937) failed. A number of other works were performed in Prague during the later 1930s, including the Piano Sonata no.1, the Sechs Lieder for soprano and piano op.17 (texts by Albert Steffen), and the String Quartet no.2, which was also given by the Prague Quartet at the 1938 ISCM festival in London. There were, however, no public performances of works composed after 1938 (Slawische Rhapsodie, the Piano Concerto, the opera Der zerbrochene Krug). In the summer of 1942 he was able to give a set of those of his works which he had published himself to a friend for safe keeping.

On 8 September 1942 Ullmann was sent to the Terezin concentration camp, where he soon became one of the leading figures in the music section of the so-called Freizeitgestaltung, the programme of organizing the inmates' 'leisure'. He had an important influence on musical life in the camp as director of the Studio fur neue Musik, as a critic (he wrote 26 reviews: see Schuttz, 'Viktor Ullman', 1993), and as performer and composer. Other prisoners -- the singers Walter Windholz and Hedda Grab-Kernmayr, the pianist Edith Steiner-Kraus and the conductor Rafael Schachter -- gave able performances of his music. The music for a dramatized version of ballads by Villon, the settings of poems by C.F. Meyer op.37, and the Piano Sonata no.6 received several performances before an appreciative audience. Ullmann's Terezin manuscripts were preserved from destruction by Professor Emil Utitz who gave them to H.G. Adler after the war. Ullmann was taken to Auschwitz on a 'liquidation transport' on 16 October 1944, and died in the gas chamber two days later.

Ullmann's development as a composer falls into three main periods. In the first, from 1920 to the early 1930s, the initial influence on his work was that of Schoenberg, but already from about 1924 he looked increasingly to Berg. He testified to his admiration for Wozzeck in a number of letters and articles. The Schoenberg-Variationen combine strict formal construction with playful pianistic verve.

The second phase began in about 1933, when he began to change his style. At this point he took up an intermediate stance, with the intention of 'exploring what remains to be discovered in the realms of tonally functional harmony or filling the gap between romantic and ''atonal'' harmony'. Dissonant harmony which nonetheless retains links to functional tonality and polyphonic writing characterized the structures of the first four piano sonatas and the song cycles of the second half of the 1930s, as well as his most important stage work, Der Sturz des Antichrist. In this opera he followed Berg's example in using the formal types of 'absolute' music (such as sonata form and fugue) as the basis of his structures.

In the final years, the primitive and brutal facts of life in Terezin did not succeed in destroying his creativity. The works he composed there were marked on the one hand by the formal and expressive mastery Ullmann had acquired during the last years in Prague, and on the other by the demands of musical life in the concentration camp, where the pre-eminent need was for Gebrauchsmusik that was both satisfying and accessible. The songs and choruses on Yiddish and Hebrew texts and the music for a dramatized version of Villon's ballads belong in the latter category. The masterpieces in Ullmann's Terezin output are the String Quartet no.3, the settings of Holderlin and Meyer, the melodrama on Rilke's Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke and the one-act opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis.

Like many other artists of the interwar years, Ullmann was a victim of National Socialist racial and social policies. His works had been highly regarded in Prague's musical life, but when the German army entered Czechoslovakia in March 1939 they had come immediately under the ban on performances of Jewish music. The majority of his manuscripts were destroyed during the Protectorate.

Thirty years passed after his violent death before the process of rediscovering his work began with the Amsterdam premiere of his chamber opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (1975). Performances of other works followed, primarily of works composed in Terezin, but also of the piano sonatas and some of the song cycles, as well as some of the orchestral pieces (Variations op.3b, Slawische Rhapsodie op.24, Piano Concerto op.25). Since then, with premieres of the Rilke melodrama (1994), Der Sturz des Antichrist (1994) and Der zerbrochene Krug (1996), all Ullmann's major works have been rescued from the cache of suppressed and forgotten music that was taboo for so many years after the war.

WORKS
(selective list)

stage
Op: Peer Gynt (H. Ibsen), op.6, 1928/42 [lost]; Der Sturz des Antichrist (A. Steffen), op.9, 1935; Die Heimkehr des Odysseus, op.33, ?1941 [lost]; Der zerbrochene Krug (H. von Kleist), op.36 (Prague, 1942); Der Kaiser von Atlantis (P. Kien), op.49b, 1943
Other: Der Kreidekreis (Klabund), incid music, 1924 [lost]; music for a dramatic setting of F. Villon's ballads, 1943 [lost]

instrumental
Orch: Symphonische Phantasie (movt 3, T, orch, after F. Braun: Der Abschied des Tantalos), 1925 [lost]; Conc. for Orch (Symphonietta), op.4, 1928 [lost]; Variationen, Phantasie und Doppelfuge uber ein kleines Klavierstuck von A. Schonberg, op.3b, 1933 [version of op.3a]; Slawische Rhapsodie, op.24, a sax, orch (Prague, 1940); Pf Conc., op.25 (Prague, 1940); Don Quixote tanzt Fandango, ov., 1944, inc.; Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (melodrama, R.M. Rilke), nar, orch, 1944, inc.
Chbr: Str Qt no.1, op.1, 1923 [lost]; Octet, op.2, ob, cl, bn, hn, vn, va, vc, pf, 1924 [lost]; Str Qt no.2, op.7, 1935 [lost]; Sonata, op.16, quarter-tone cl, quarter-tone pf, 1937 [pf part lost]; Sonata, op.39, vn, pf, 1938 [pf part lost]; Str Qt no.3, op.46, 1943
Pf: Variationen und Doppelfuge uber ein Klavierstuck von A. Schonberg [op.19/4], op.3a, 1925 [lost], rev. with 5 variations, 1929, rev. with 9 variations, 1934; 7 sonatas: no.1, op.10 (Prague, 1936), no.2, op.19 (Prague, 1939), no.3, op.26b (Prague, 1940), no.4, op.38 (Prague, 1941), no.5, op.45, 1943, no.6, op.49a, 1943, no.7, 1944; cadenzas for Beethoven, Pf Conc. no.1 and Pf Conc. no.3, op.54, 1944

vocal
Choral: Oster-Kantate (C. Morgenstern, Steffen), op.15, choir, 6 inst, 1936 [lost]; Sym. Mass, op.13, choir, orch, org, 1936; Huttens letzte Tage (C.F. Meyer), lyrische Symphonie, op.12, T, B, orch, 1937 [lost]
Songs: 7 Lieder mit Klavier, 1923 [lost], rev. with orch, 1924 [lost]; 7 kleine Serenaden (Ullmann), op.6, choir, 12 insts, 1929 [lost]; Lieder (O. Brezinas), op.21, ?1930 [lost]; Elegien (after Steffen), op.8, S, orch, 1935 [only no.2 remains]; 7 Humoresken (Morgenstern), op.11, v, nar, pf, 1936 [lost]; 6 Lieder (Steffen), op.17, S, pf (Prague, 1937); [6] Geistliche Lieder (after various authors), op.20, S, pf (Prague, 1940); 5 Liebeslieder (R. Huch), op.26a, S, pf (Prague, 1940); 3 Sonnets (Barrett-Browning, Rilke), op.29, v, pf (Prague, 1940); Liederbuch des Hafis, op.30 (Prague, 1940); 6 Sonnets (L. Labe), op.34, v, pf (Prague, 1941); 3 Lieder (C.F. Meyer), op.37, Bar, pf, 1942; Der Mensch und sein Tag (H.G. Adler), op.47, v, pf, 1943; 3 jiddische Lieder, op.53, S, pf, 1944; 3 Lieder (F. Holderlin), 1942--3
Other pieces based on Yiddish and Hebrew texts, as well as poems by Trakl, Steffen and Adler, 1942--4
MSS in CH-DO (works composed in Terezin); CZ-Puk

BIBLIOGRAPHY
T. Veidl: 'Viktor Ullmann: der Lineare', Auftakt, ix (1929), 77--8
V. Helfert and E. Steinhard: Geschichte der Musik in der Tsechoslovakischen Republik (Prague, 1936, 2/1938 as Die Musik in der Tsechoslovakischen Republik)
M. Bloch: 'Viktor Ullmann: a Brief Biography and Appreciation', Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, iii (1979), 150--77
J. Ludvova: 'Viktor Ullmann', HV, xvi (1979), 99--122
J. Karas: Music in Terezin 1941--1945 (New York, 1985)
I. Schultz: 'Viktor Ullmann: Jude, Anthroposoph, ''entarteter'' Musiker', Anthroposophen und Nationalsozialismus, ed. B. Hansen (Flensburg, 1991), 5--26
H. Klein, ed.: Viktor Ullmann: Materialien, Verdrangte Musik, ii (Hamburg, 1995) [incl. V. Ullmann, 'Der fremde Passagier: ein Tagebuch in Versen mit einem aphoristischen Anhang', 101--25 and 'Der 30. Mai 1431, Oper in zwei Akten: Textbuch', 147--77]
I. Schultz: '''... ich bin schon lange ein begeisterter Verehrer Ihres Wozzeck'': Viktor Ullmann und Alban Berg', Musiktheorie, vii (1992), 113--28
I. Schultz: 'Viktor Ullmann: zwei Prager Karrieren', Der judische Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte Bohmens und Mahrens: Regensburg 1992, 42--53
M. Kuna: Musik an der Grenze des Lebens: Musikerinnen und Musiker in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern und Gefangnissen (Frankfurt, 1993)
I. Schultz: 'Victor Ullmann: pozapomenuty zivot hudebnika znicene generace' [Viktor Ullmann: the forgotten life of a musician of a shattered generation], HV, xxx (1993), 3--10
I. Schultz, ed.: Viktor Ullmann: 26 Kritiken uber musikalische Veranstaltungen in Theresienstadt, Verdrangte Music, iii (Hamburg, 1993)
I. Schultz: Verlorene Werke Viktor Ullmanns im Spiegel zeitgenossischer Presseberichte, Verdrangte Musik, iv (Hamburg, 1994)
Viktor Ullmann: Dornach 1994
'[...]es wird der Tod zum Dichter': Berlin 1995
H.G. Klein: 'Eine Werkliste Viktor Ullmanns aus dem Jahre 1942', Musica Reanimata-Mitteilungen, no.14 (1995), 1--9
I. Schultz: 'Der Prolog zum ''Kaiser von Atlantis'': ein Schlussel zum Verstandnis der Theresienstadter Oper von Viktor Ullmann', Musica Reanimata-Mitteilungen, no.17 (1995), 1--19
U. Prinz, ed.: Viktor Ullmann: Beitrage, Programme, Dokumente, Materialen (Kassel, 1998)
 

INGO SCHULTZ