To our Sisters, to our Brothers

This timely operatic double-bill is conceived and directed by Stéphane Ghislain Roussel. His new production of Der Kaiser von Atlantis makes up the second half of the programme. It was written by interned friends, composer Viktor Ullmann and librettist Peter Kien, who later perished in Auschwitz.

The work has renewed significance in 21st century Europe where extremism is on the increase. Exploring what this rising tide means to the European Constitution, the first part of the evening is a world premiere, En vertu de... from in-demand composer Eugene Birman, with the Orchestre de Chambre du Luxembourg and conductor Corinna Niemeyer.

Baritone Michel De Souza highlights the route from democracy to dictatorship as the solo voice in the first piece and Emperor Overall in the second.

EN VERTU DE...

Constructed as a collage of different articles from European treaties, such as the European Constitution or the European Convention on Human Rights, the text of En vertu de... takes the form of a speech delivered with a political touch. Far from being a classic libretto or narration, it adopts a deliberately juridical tone and comes across as a reflection on the primary meaning of a community of different cultures, at once unified and disparate. The non-linear dramaturgy, the theme of the selected articles, the assemblage and different processes involved, such as playing around with repetition: all these things are meant to signify a mise en abyme of the fragility of the European project, at a time when we are seeing a worrying rise extremisms in Europe. Since it is only the English and French versions of the European Convention on Human Rights that are authentic and authoritative, those two idioms used in En vertu de... are, as it were, infested by interjections in other languages. The relationship between the first and the second parts of the evening’s performance emanates from the opposition, the tension and the resonance involved. Juxtaposed with the highly poetic nature of Peter Kien’s libretto is a sort of oh-so-meaningful coldness characterising the constitutional articles – a completely novel feature in an opera libretto.

DER KAISER VON ATLANTIS

Following a prologue during which the Loudspeaker introduces the different characters Harlequin, Death, The Drummer, The Emperor Overall, The Maiden and The Soldier, the story unfolds in four successive scenes: following The Emperor’s declaration of war pitting everyone against each other, Death decides to stop working and as a result, no one is dying. In the end, different episodes working as allegories lead to the conclusion. Death offers to resume his duties, but on  condition that the Emperor is the first to die. Overall agrees, thus leading to a redeeming resolution. A multifaceted and at the same time condensed reflection of a suppressed society living under a dictatorship, the story told in the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis appears somehow like a mirror of life itself in Theresienstadt and of the totalitarian hold of the Third Reich. The end of oppression, the absurdity of war, the death penalty, the freedom and the freedom of expression, the profound meaning of a republic are some of the many themes that are permeating the story. They will build, right after the Second World War, the foundation of the European Union and of its first treaties, among which the European  Convention on Human Rights, signed in 1950, constitutes a milestone.

Like a temporal ellipse, once in our diptych Der Kaiser von Atlantis finishes and the urgency of democracy shines through, En vertu de… could begin again, but signals also in its final words, how extremely fragile the upholding of human rights is.