Nazi concentration camp is perhaps the last place in the world where one would expect to find conditions favorable to the creation of art. And yet, in 1944, art did come from one such camp—a musical work of sufficient interest for it to be performed today, if only sporadically. The work is Viktor Ullmann’s satirical opera Der Tod dankt ab, oder Der Kaiser von Atlantis (“Death Abdicates, or the Emperor of Atlantis”). The manuscript of the opera was discovered in 1972 by the British composer Kerry Woodward, who conducted its premiere three years later. A much-touted revival of the work took place in May at the Wiener Kammeroper (the Vienna Chamber Opera).

The Emperor of Atlantis was composed (although never performed) at Theresienstadt, the “showcase” concentration camp forty miles northeast of Prague where large numbers of prominent Jewish artists and intellectuals were interned on their way to the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen gas chambers. Conditions at Theresienstadt, while appalling enough, were far better than in the death camps. The inmates were permitted books, musical instruments, and amusements. Indeed, the camp’s so-called Freizeitgestaltung (“recreational activity”), which began spontaneously with the smuggling of musical instruments into the ghetto, soon blossomed into a full-fledged cultural life. Theater, cabaret, concerts, opera—all were undertaken with the blessing of the SS, presumably in the hope of maintaining a compliant prisoner population and for the purposes of presenting to the world a “humane” camp that would conceal the real horror of Hitler’s Reich.

Apparently