Can music escape culture?

It is not common to see the name of Viktor Ullman appear on concert programmes. It has never been, in the last eighty years. Ullman was a composer of Czech origins, very much at home in the harmonic landscapes of Mahler and Zemlinsky—not so much in those of Schönberg and Second Viennese school, despite an early interest in them. He joined Schönberg’s class in 1918 but left it after a year, dissatisfied with the composing style of the Second Viennese School. A tormented personality, he never enjoyed the reputation as a composer that would let him live off his own compositions. He had to make a living in other ways, first entertaining the possibility of practicing law, a topic which he studied to no conclusion in Vienna, then working as a bookseller in Stuttgart and finally resorting to giving music lessons and writing as a journalist on musical topics, once he moved back to Prague after the Nazi came to power in 1933.

The name of Viktor Ullman is arguably remembered because of the fact that the last two years of his life he spent in the camp of Theresienstadt, a ghetto and concentration camp north of Prague where artists, creatives and special prisoners were imprisoned for sinister reasons. It was here that the Nazi put on shows and artistic productions that could be fed to the international press to stage a distorted humanised version of their murderous intentions. Ullman wrote about one third of his compositions in the two years of captivity between 1942 and 1944, including his opera Der Kaiser von A tlantis, conceived with the librettist and fellow inmate Peter Kien and written between 1942 and 1943.
In the surviving testimonies, and contrary to what one might imagine, Ullman considerably valued the opportunity to focus on his compositions that the ghetto life allowed him. In his own words: “I have composed quite a lot of new music here in Theresienstadt, mostly at the request of pianists, singers and conductors for the purpose of the Ghetto’s recreation periods. It would be as irksome to count them, as it would be to remark on the fact that in Theresienstadt, it would be impossible to play a piano if there was none available. In addition, future generations will care little for the lack of music paper that we presently experience. I emphasise only the fact that in my musical work at Theresienstadt, I have bloomed in musical growth and not felt myself at all inhibited: we simply did not sit and lament on the shores of the rivers of Babylon that our will for culture was not sufficient to our will to exist. And I am convinced that all who have worked in life and art to wrestle content into its unyielding form will say that I was right.”

Ullman never wrote a second symphony. What is today known as his Second Symphony is an orchestration, made by his friend Bernhard Wulff, of his seventh sonata for piano solo, which Ullman completed in 1944 and is one of the last compositions he is believed to have worked on. The score of the Seventh Sonata was full of annotations on how to orchestrate it, including what instruments to use and where, which made people believe that ultimately the symphony is the form he had in mind for the music. It is a piece in five movements with many contrasting elements and some haunting features which seem to frame the piece as a critique of culture itself. Long before philosophers and historians would question “whether it was possible to conceive any art after Auschwitz”, Ullman seems to have come to a similar dilemma himself, though at the time of his composing he still didn’t know that he would die himself in Auschwitz, in the gas chambers part of Crematorium III. Some of the questions the music asks are: is it possible to consider music as a consolatory art form, when this very form is also praised and appreciated by evil? And again, what are the connections between high art and inhumanity? Is a musician who continues to write music in the face of barbarity worthy to be considered human? What is the point of doing it?
Ullman had already identified the extent of the damage done by National Socialism in mining the foundations of the same Kultur that so many like him (and so many like us to this day) believed to be the beacon of human progress. In realising that the myth of progress was stained with the blood of those deliberately excluded from it, there was no way to find sanity other than sabotaging music from inside, creating a picture of a picture, a symphony of a sonata or anything that would allow the composer to establish some sort of distance between himself and his art.
The most striking movement of this symphony is certainly its last one, a set of variations ending with a fugue that seems to reference the classical style only for the purpose of deliberately mocking it. The movement sets off on a tune by Yehuda Sharrett and proceeds by including quotes and references to traditional elements, including the sequence of notes corresponding to the name B-A-C-H and the chorale “Now we all thank our God”.