Viktor Ullmann, composer, pianist, choirmaster, conductor and music critic, was one of the victims from among the Prague German Jewish musicians in World War II.
He was born on January 1st 1898 in Tesin, where he also began his studies. From 1914 onwards Ullmann lived in Vienna. He probably finished his secondary school studies there also and between 1918 and 1919 he worked for several months in Schönberg´s composition classes. From 1920 until 1927 Ullmann was one of Alexander Zemlinsky´s assistants in the New German Theatre in Prague (now the Prague State Opera). Artistic collaboration and longtime personal friendship with Zemlinsky, the esteemed head of the Prague German Opera Company, provided Ullmann with a wealth of personal and artistic experiences to draw on in the future. He took advantage of this in the following season, 1927-28, when he was appointed head of the opera company in Usti nad Labem. Together with local and some invited artists, Ullmann managed to stage a truly impressive repertoire there (including operas by Richard Strauss, Krenek and others). During the 1920´s and 30´s he became involved in the anthroposophic movement, his new-found interests taking him to Zürich and later to Stuttgart. But he was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and returned to Prague, embarking on the uneasy road of a free-lance musician. He worked with the music department at Czech Radio, wrote book and music reviews for various magazines, was employed as a critic for the Prague-based Bohemia newspaper, lectured to educational groups, gave private lessons and was actively involved in the program of the Czechoslovak Society for Music Education. At about that time Ullmann made friends with the composer Alois Haba, whom he had known for some time. Ullmann enrolled in Haba´s department of quarter-tone music at Prague´s Music Conservatory and studied there for two years (1935-1937). Up to the first years of the Second World War, Viktor Ullmann was the leading figure in a circle of his Czech and German friends, for whom he gave private music performances, chamber concerts or parties at which the host played various phonograph records. On September 8th 1942 Viktor Ullmann was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Even in the extremely difficult conditions of a Nazi concentration camp he succeeded in maintaining his artistic activity and, together with Karel Ancerl, Rafael Schachter, Gideon Klein, Hans Krasa and others, he wrote a glorious chapter in the camp s cultural life. Ullmann was then deported to the Auschwitz death camp, where he died in a gas chamber, probably on October l5th 1944.
Only part of Viktor Ullmann´s work has so far been found. Before the outbreak of the Second World War Ullmann wrote some forty works, mostly orchestral, chamber and piano compositions and two operas. His literary works and approximately twenty fragments of his almost finished or complete compositions written in Theresienstadt have also been preserved. Since the late 1970s Ullmann´s music has been enjoying revived interest. His opera from Theresienstadt, written on a libretto by Peter Kien and called "Der Kaiser von Atlantis" (The Emperor of Atlantis) op. 49, has been staged several times since then, as have Ullmann´s piano sonatas, Theresienstadt string quartet and songs. In stylistic terms, Ullmann s early compositions bear traces of Schönberg´s influences; his works from the 1930s are polytonal in the classical formal framework, while Mahlerian inspiration is discernible in Ullmann´s remarkable songs.