Among the more inspiring musical revelations of recent years has been the rediscovery of so-called entartete Musik (“degenerate music”), the works of composers banned by the Nazis. An exhibit in Düsseldorf in 1988, commemorating one mounted fifty years before by the Nazis was the revival’s catalyst. Shortly thereafter, the Decca Record Company began a series of recordings, and now the term entartete Musik has become an artistic badge of honor, as is frequently the custom these days with former terms of abuse.

In 1994, Decca released a recording of an opera titled Der Kaiser von Atlantis, a blatantly political fantasia in which a mad emperor (the kaiser of the title) attempts to wage total war, an act that infuriates a personified death, who then ironically thwarts the emperor’s plans. The composer was Viktor Ullmann, a Czech Jew, who though by no means among the most famous musicians of his era, was nonetheless a known and respected figure. Michael H. Kater, in The Twisted Muse, an essential book on composers and the Third Reich, wrote of Ullmann that “No one has served as a finer symbol of the pride and suffering of these Jewish musicians.” A disciple of Schoenberg, Ullmann was both a prolific composer and a respected conductor, but, after the Nazi seizure of Czechoslovakia, he became subject to brutal racial laws, and in September 1942 he was sent to Theresienstadt, the so-called Paradise Ghetto. It was there that Ullmann composed Der Kaiser von Atlantis,to a libretto