“Thou shalt not take lightly the great name of Death”. So, sung to a weird version of the tune of Ein Feste Burg, ends the closing chorale of Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis. To the best of my knowledge there has never been a commercial video release of this work but it was filmed as a BBC/WDR co-production in 1977 and broadcast in both Britain and Germany. I just got my hands on a copy of the BBC broadcast and thought it was well worth writing about.
Beatrice Cenci is an opera by Berthold Goldschmidt; a composer who moved from Germany to London in the 1930s for the usual reason. Beatrice Cenci was written in 1950 but the orchestral style sounds rather earlier. Comparisons with Mahler have been made though I don’t really see that. Richard Strauss or Korngold perhaps? In any event the work didn’t get performed at all until the 1980s and had to wait until the 2018 Bregenz Festival for its first fully staged production directed by Johannes Erat. Curiously, though originally composed with an English libretto it was given in German in Bregenz.
operaramblings 