ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Viktor Ullman: Der Sturz des Antichrist
Theater Hof and in repertoire, 19 January 2007

Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
posted 14 Feb 2007

All three of Viktor Ullmann’s dramatic works remained unknown and unperformed until many years after his death at Auschwitz in October 1944, but while the last, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, dating from the two productive years in which he was held at the Terezín transit camp, has been widely performed and has taken its rightful place in the repertoire, the two earlier pieces have fared less well. Der zerbrochene Klug, a forty-minute comic courtroom drama, dating from 1942, has been only just once, and his three-act magnum opus, Der Sturz des Antichrist, given its world premiere in Bielefeld in 1995 has only now received a second production, in Hof , northern Bavaria .

It is a world apart from Atlantis. For the later work the librettist Peter Kien, who arrived at Terezín a year earlier than Ullmann, wrote a simple but highly trenchant allegory exploring the current value of human life. It drew from Ullmann, in a setting for thirteen instruments, music of searing intensity, peppered with allusions to his German and Czech musical heritage, which would not have been lost on his cultured audience. Antichrist, by comparison, is a sombre, arcane affair, using a dramatic sketch by Albert Steffan, a leading figure in the Rudolf Steiner movement, which Ullmann would certainly have read during his two or so years’ break from music when he ran its bookshop in Stuttgart . The incentive for an operatic setting came when he was forced to leave Germany in 1933, as both Jew and anthroposophist, and returned to Prague . The work was completed in 1935, but though Ullmann raised considerable interest in the piece even he realised that a staging was unlikely to do the opera – or, indeed, he himself – any good in the current climate.

To the ear, the work often sounds like the opera that Mahler might have written, with a little help here and there from Scriabin, or Debussy, or even Kurt Weill. But it has a flavour of its own, not least because of the inclusion in the woodwind of two bass clarinets (exchanged for basset horns in the third act, though not in this performance), and an organ underpins the rare climactic moments. Mahler, though, would surely have allowed himself more latitude in expressive range. For most of the 90-minute duration of the piece Ullmann does little more than accompany the text, though with extraordinary respect and sensitivity which demand attention, and it never cloys.

And Mahler would certainly have had no truck with this particular drama. It is a rather fanciful but dangerously topical allegory concerning the abuse of authority. The Regent, a dictator who rules a world free of conflict but desires yet more power, has imprisoned three dissenters. The Physicist will go free if he circumnavigates the sun in a spaceship and in doing so frees the earth from gravity, and the Priest too if in a new sacrament he will make bread from stone. The Artist must turn all his effort to glorifying the new order. But he alone refuses, and is incarcerated in a yet darker prison. In Act 2, under the tutelage of the Warden, the Artist undergoes a rebirth and emerges strong enough to challenge the Regent. In the final Act, the Physicist returns from his mission to report that he has discovered a higher authority; the Priest in his futile attempt has become a madman. The Poet proclaims the Regent as Antichrist, and while all three are left for dead on the gallows the Regent takes to his spaceship only to crash fatally back to earth.

The Czech team of Anton Nekovar and Daniel Dvořák (the production is a joint one with the Prague National Theatre) did this fantasy no favours at all, by an altogether too prosaic staging. The clichéd grey walls and fluorescent lamps for the first-act prison might have seemed appropriate elsewhere, and the gaudy red and black drapes and sinister logos for the third act were a stark reminder of the history of the work. The second act, in which the Artist undergoes his Damascene moment saw him dressed only in a loin clothe, and this pointed a clear alternative. But these images were too specific; and at one point – the Regent being dressed in a golden space suit for his fatal flight – bordered on the risible.

The Regent, a part specified for a Heldentenor is particularly suited, like Strauss’s Herod, for retired Tristans, and was taken by just such a singer in Wolfgang Müller-Lorenz, all sinister swagger. Radoslaw Rydlewski and Thomas Rettenstenmer did the best possible with the cipher roles of Priest and Physicist, while Karsten Jesgarz, a youthful high tenor, was especially eloquent in his second-act duologue – the heart of the piece, with the best music - with the solid bass of Michael Lion, the Warden. The Hof Symphony Orchestra in the pit under Karl Prokopetz was excellent, allowed space to breathe, and obviously relished the challenge of the unfamiliar.

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