In German and Latin with German and English surtitles

Stage direction and choreography: Andreas Heise
Music: Viktor Uhlmann, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Musical version: Omer Meir Wellber
Libretto: Viktor Uhlmann, Peter Kien
Stage design and costumes: Sascha Thomsen

Premiere: January 25, 2025

Confronted directly with persecution and extermination by the Nazis, Viktor Ullmann composed Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis) in Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943/44: a harrowing allegory critiquing inhuman warmongering and totalitarian power structures. In October 1944 – along with his co-librettist Peter Kien – he was deported on the so-called “Künstlertransport” to Auschwitz, where Ullmann was gassed to death and Kien died of an infection. Shifting between a contemporary opera, a mystery play and a dance of death, Der Kaiser von Atlantis presents a unique theatrical sound world. 

For the premiere KaiserRequiem, the conductor Omer Meir Wellber has defied convention to interweave Ullmann’s sixty-minute chamber opera with possibly the most famous torso in the history of music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s musical legacy, his Requiem in D minor KV 626 – composed in the face of death in 1791 and interrupted by death. KaiserRequiem is a dialogue between these two works about the great questions of human existence. However, KaiserRequiem is also a collaborative work by all sections of the theatre: the dancers of the Vienna State Ballet as well as the soloists and the chorus and orchestra of the Vienna Volksoper, directed and choreographed by Andreas Heise.