Opera takes the United Nations: a message from the Holocaust to a world in disarray
The Emperor of Atlantis, written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, was staged in Geneva in March as part of a production that didn’t intend to save the world, but to imagine a new way of co-existing.
The echoing chambers of the Palais des Nations in Geneva turned this month from a space for heavily scripted negotiations into an unlikely home for the baritone notes of opera. At a time when the very architecture of global governance is under strain and World War III is not unthinkable, a two-part opera, partly composed in the depths of the Holocaust, held up a mirror to an imploding order.
Directed and conceived by Belgian-Luxembourgish stage director Stéphane Ghislain Roussel, with music by Latvia-born Eugene Birman, the production of In Virtue Of and The Emperor of Atlantis situates that mirror within both contemporary and historical frames. The first part draws on the European Convention on Human Rights; the second, The Emperor of Atlantis, was composed by Viktor Ullmann in Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp.
The result for audiences in Geneva is a poignant reminder of what is at stake if the systems designed to protect humanity fracture and diplomacy fails. “I definitely see this show like a mirror,” Roussel tells Swissinfo between rehearsals. “Politics at the moment is about changing the language, misusing it. I am really horrified by what is going on right now.”
Walking in virtuous circles
Set in the United Nations, with the audience seated like delegates, the performance of In Virtue Of follows Brazilian baritone Michel de Souza as he navigates a text based on a version of the European Convention on Human Rights which has been stripped back, reordered and destabilised. Musicians – dressed as a panel of judges – accompany him with a score shifting between order and dissonance. Language transforms from a tool for building consensus to a mess of caveats that erode basic rights.
“When you start [eroding basic human rights], you start really to diffract the world and reality,” says Roussel, pointing to parallels with the growing normalisation of extremist ideologies that would once have been unthinkable in mainstream public space and the redefinition of terms like racism to incorporate White racism. “A neo-Nazi can have a manifestation on the street and it’s no longer really prohibited. It used to be ten years ago – now it’s almost accepted.”
Roussel’s sensitivity to language and its implications for the possibilities of shared views and values is rooted in his upbringing. Raised in Luxembourg in what he describes as a privileged, internationally oriented environment, he grew up within a European milieu shaped in part by his parents’ professional world, where cross-border exchange and institutional culture were part of daily life.
In the schoolyard each day, he would hear about ten or 12 different languages, he remembers. “But we shared a certain kind of vision, without even naming it, of what it means to be together through the fact that we speak different languages.”
Institutional opera
Initially trained as a musician and musicologist, with the violin as his instrument, Roussel sees music itself as a form of language, though not necessarily a universal one. He later moved into stage directing, bringing a strong awareness of how sound, text and meaning interact.
The first iteration of In Virtue Of took place four years ago in Luxembourg, in venues including the former seat of the European Parliament. The piece emerged at a time marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, when a sense of shared global vulnerability briefly boosted the idea of collective responsibility amid concerns about rising authoritarianism.
Since then, Roussel has reworked the production while adhering to his original idea of staging it within institutional settings. “What is special here in Geneva is that the UN is not only European,” he says. “It’s really a global vision, a worldwide vision of how community and nations can create communication and a kind of common ground of political stability.”
Vinicius Marignac, a junior portfolio manager at Gama Asset Management who attended the performance, relished the rare chance to experience an opera inside the UN itself. He also enjoyed the boundary-blurring staging choices, like placing characters among the audience. “I am a fan of that,” he says, as security guards, both actors and real, watch the audience depart.
A haunting voice from the Holocaust
For Roussel, the diptych or two-part structure is essential as In Virtue Of paves the way for The Emperor of Atlantis. The opera, a thinly veiled allegory of totalitarian power, was never performed in Ullmann’s lifetime; rehearsals were halted by Nazi authorities before he was deported to Auschwitz.
The historical weight of The Emperor of Atlantis is amplified by the improbable survival of its sources. Heidy Zimmermann, a curator at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, explains that the composer’s manuscripts were preserved through a chain of unlikely transfers after the war. They ended up in Switzerland due to Ullmann’s connections to the anthroposophical movement, a spiritual and philosophical movement founded by Rudolf Steiner, who helped bring archival materials from London.
Zimmermann began working on the archive material in 2018 and intensified her research following the tempo of global events, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine and then the Israel-Hamas conflict. “All of a sudden it became so relevant,” she says of The Emperor of Atlantis, conceived as a one-act opera with music by Ullmann and a libretto by Peter Kien.
“It now speaks to an audience and also to a community which is interested from different sides, from the musicological side but also from a wider historical interest,” Zimmerman adds.
Born in Cieszyn, then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and today a Polish city at the border with the Czech Republic, Ullmann was a pupil of Arnold Schönberg and enjoyed brief fame in the 1920s and 1930s. He was appointed conductor in 1930 in Zurich, where he deepened his interest in the theories of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Even though his family had converted from Judaism to Christianity before he was born, Ullmann was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 and then to Auschwitz, where he was killed in 1944. Many of his compositions were lost during the war, but his manuscript of The Emperor of Atlantis survived and is now in Switzerland.
Manuscript of horrors
Displaying facsimiles of the sources, Zimmermann points to the material conditions in which Ullmann’s work was created. Parts of the libretto were typed on reused administrative form. The paper originally used to register prisoners arriving at the ghetto, listing names, origins and, in some cases, dates of death. Art is written literally over the bureaucratic record of persecution.
“Its resonance with current events is truly striking,” says Martial Debély, a retired social worker. “It is important to know the context to grasp the power of this piece, of this composition. That’s the power of art.”
The opera itself is about both satire and survival. Its libretto mocks authoritarian power while imagining a world in which the figure of Death refuses to cooperate with mass killing, hence its original title: Death Strike. “It’s a rather direct satire of Nazi Germany,” Zimmermann says.
The humor is evident from the opening scene. When Death asks Harlequin what day it is, he replies that he no longer keeps track since he no longer changes shirts every day. Death quips that he must be “stacked deep in the last year,” a clear reference to life in the camp, where prisoners could neither wash nor change clothes.
For Zimmermann, “it’s the classic function of Jewish humor, Jewish wit”. “How do you survive a bad situation? You make jokes of it.”
The opera, she adds, is important on three levels. First, as an example of this historical moment, “creating art in a Nazi camp, what that means, how that can be”; second, as a universal piece of music and opera, which is relevant today even when detached from its origin; and lastly, it’s also a “fascinating piece of music”.
Music resonating the times
The score engages with a variety of musical styles. Listeners are regaled with Wagnerian operatic arias sprinkled with spoken passages, folk-like melodies, and musical quotations familiar to audiences of the time. Lullaby motifs such as Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf add to a soundscape that blends high and popular culture. The opera culminates in a chorale recognisable from Christian tradition.
De Souza also plays the emperor of Atlantis. His performance serves as a thread linking the two parts of the opera, which also unfold across separate stages. Audiences move from the Palais des Nations to the Comédie de Genève, a short public transport ride away. Leaving behind the confusing contemporary institutional language, stripped of its original ideals and meanings, they then plunge into the darker historical reality of Ullmann’s work.
“The fact that you leave the theater and move somewhere else is a muscular activity in itself,” Roussel says. “The more you bring people to feel things, the better you can help them or accompany them to be human, to be in life.”
The opera’s universal themes, and their resonance with the present moment, were not lost on the audience. “Peace is the best thing,” says Tidiane Souare, an Ivory Coast native who has been in Geneva for three years and is training to become a landscape gardener, after watching both performances. “When there is peace, we all grow up, we all have families. If there is war, we won’t make it. There will be migration.”
Roussel rejects the idea that art can save the world. However, he says, “art is part of the process of reestablishing a new way of living together.”
Edited by Eduardo Simantob & Virginie Mangin/dos
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.