PRESS RELEASE Brno, January 26, 2026
An emperor who usurps the right to decide on the life and death of people, to take their souls. And Death, who is so offended by this that he decides to take revenge on both him and humanity: he will not allow anyone to die. This is the story of the chamber opera The Emperor of Atlantis or The Disobedience of Death. Composer Viktor Ullmann and librettist Petr Kien composed it in 1944 in the Terezín concentration camp. “On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, we revived it. With an orchestra and soloists, we performed the work on stage at the prestigious Austrian festival Ars Electronica. The impressive work was greatly enhanced by large-format visualizations by the festival’s creative director, Cori O’Lan,” said Marie Kučerová, director of Filharmonie Brno.
The film recording of the performance premiered on October 20, 2025, at the Moravian Autumn festival. “We have decided to release it to the public symbolically on International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” Kučerová announced.
The Emperor of Atlantis or The Disobedience of Death was Ullmann’s third opera, with a libretto in German written by 24-year-old Peter Kien, a promising young writer and artist. Both authors rehearsed the work in its entirety in Terezín, but shortly thereafter they perished in Auschwitz and did not live to see the premiere.
The work was saved by Emil Utitz, a professor at the German University in Prague, who worked as a librarian in Terezín. He handed it over to an anthroposophical center in Switzerland, as Kien was a follower of anthroposophy, an esoteric movement that sought to connect humans with the spiritual world through scientifically based, supersensory knowledge. “The work was discovered in Basel by conductor Kerry Woodward, who even attempted to connect with Ullmann during a spiritualist séance,” Kučerová noted. He premiered it with modifications in Amsterdam in 1975, and the opera was thus performed for the first time thirty-two years after its creation. Since then, it has been performed on many stages around the world. “The work carries a strong humanistic message, which is unfortunately still relevant today. The inability to die leads people to love, mutual understanding, and a life of peace,” said Dennis Russell Davies, chief conductor of Filharmonie Brno, who premiered the opera in Germany in 1985 and has now staged it again. The topicality of the theme is also underlined by the publication of the comic book by Dave Maass and Patrick Lay, The Emperor of Atlantis or Death on Strike, which was also published in Czech translation last year.
With the performance of this opera, Filharmonie Brno joins the international dialogue on cultural memory and reminds us that even in conditions of extreme violence and oppression, works of extraordinary artistic and ethical power were created that speak to us today with urgent relevance.
Media contact: Kateřina Konečná, head of PR and marketing Filharmonie Brno, +420 775 426 040, katerina.konecna@filharmoniebrno.cz
