Music Graduate Colloquium: Amy Wlodarski, Dickinson College
Presented by Graduate Studies in Music, the Don Wright Faculty of Music Graduate Colloquium series includes lectures by distinguished guests, Western faculty members, and senior graduate students on all fields of research and creative activity in music.
Amy Wlodarski (Dickinson College) - Building the Narrative of Musical Terezín: The Early Reception of Der Kaiser von Atlantis, 1975-80
Admission is free, and all are welcome to join.
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Abstract
During World War II, the Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann completed his opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis while interned at Ghetto Terezín (CZ). In 1944, Nazi officials suddenly suspended rehearsals and deported many participants to Auschwitz, where all but a few were exterminated. Thirty years later, the score resurfaced in London and a belated premiere was mounted by the American-Jewish director Rhoda Levine in Amsterdam. The Levine production then travelled internationally over the next five years throughout Europe, America, and Israel, and with it the story of musical Terezín—a narrative that was, at the time, relatively unknown and therefore open to cultural interpretation and mythologizing. This talk traces the reception history of that one production and examines its political recontextualization over a five-year period (1975-80) in order to understand how the opera (and, by extension, the narrative of musical Terezín) rose from relative obscurity to become a canonical symbol of spiritual resistance within the Holocaust repertory.
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