Amy Wlodarksi, Musical Historiographies of Spiritual Resistance: The International Reception of Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis
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Edith and Fred Donner Lecture
Amy Wlodarski (Dickinson College)
Musical Historiographies of Spiritual Resistance: The International Reception of Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis
In specific response to the common tendency to frame the musical performances of Terezín as spiritual or cultural resistance, some critics have urged scholars to look more critically at “when the history of the Holocaust [was] invaded by an enthusiasm for redemptive memory—and why” (Lawrence Langer). This talk approaches the challenge by tracing the international postwar reception of one of the earliest high profile works from the ghetto: Viktor Ullmann’s Holocaust opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Drawing from a wealth of archival collections, oral histories, and historiographical studies, I contextualize the discrete moment in which the performance narrative deliberately shifted for the work and consider the value of such intentional historiographical work for future productions and scholarly investigations.
Amy Lynn Wlodarski is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Dickinson College, where she currently directs the European Studies Program located in Bologna, Italy. She is the author of George Rochberg, American Composer: Personal Trauma and Artistic Creativity (University of Rochester Press, 2019) and Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (Cambridge, 2015), for which she received the Lockwood Prize from the American Musicological Society. Her scholarly work has been published in leading musicological journals--including the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society--and her article on the testimonial aesthetics of Steve Reich’s Different Trains was awarded the Lowens Prize from the Society of American Music. Wlodarski regularly contributes to edited volumes on musical topics relating to trauma, memory, loss, and genocide, and she has actively participated in public musicology projects related to the Holocaust, including productions by the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Opera, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Her service to the field includes her current position at Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society—widely recognized as the flagship journal within the discipline. Her current book project explores the international reception history of Viktor Ullmann’s opera, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, which was written in Ghetto Terezín in 1944 and first performed thirty years later in Amsterdam. Her talk today is related to research conducted for that project.