Perth Voice Interactive

THE Menora synagogue will stage an opera written by Jewish prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

The Emperor of Atlantis—a dark fable about death and love—was devised by Viktor Ullmann and Peter Kien while imprisoned in Terezin, Czechoslovakia in 1943.

The opera was rehearsed but the Nazis never allowed it to be performed, denouncing it as satirical of Adolf Hitler.

Ullmann and Kien never got to see their finished opera, dying in Auschwitz.

Of 144,000 Jews sent to Terezin, some 88,000 were deported to extermination camps.

Atlantis director Thomas de Mallet Burgess says the opera—the first to be held at the synagogue—has personal significance for Perth Jews.

“I believe this production will be very poignant for the Jewish community in Western Australia.”

“A lot of people I spoke to have family members who were at Terezin,” he says.

“If you combine that provenance with the staging of the play in a synagogue, it really starts to add extra resonance and emotion to the whole thing.

“I believe this production will be very poignant for the Jewish community in Western Australia.”

Bob Kucera, chairman of the friends of Israel, says his Czech father escaped from a prison camp for non-Jewish partisans on the outskirts of Terezin in 1940: “I went back to Terezin a few years ago to trace his steps and ended up walking round the Jewish camp,” he says.

“You could see the bullet holes on the courtyard walls where inmates were shot. It was very emotional and disturbing.”

The Emperor of Atlantis will feature around six actors and 11 musicians, with the synagogue seating around 300.

The 60-minute opera, sung in English, will be shown June 12, 15 and 16. It is the third production by Perth opera company Lost and Found, which specialises in exhuming forgotten operas and showing them in unorthodox venues that relate to the work.

Its last opera, The Human Voice by Frances Poulenc, was performed in a hotel room to just 13 people.

The company was formed in October by conductor Christopher van Tuinen and Burgess, who has staged productions for the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Canadian Opera Company.

The pair received funding from the WA government and Stirling city council.

“We are trying to attract a younger audience and make opera more accessible by immersing the audience in the production,” Burgess says.

He is now trying to raise funds to stage the opera at the Ghetto Museum in Terezin.

“Some people don’t want to talk about the Holocaust and tip-toe lightly around it,” he says.

“I think we have to examine it and face up to it. Ultimately, we end up asking ourselves the same question—‘why did we let it happen?’”

by STEPHEN POLLOCK