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“KaiserRequiem”: When Mozart smothers Ullmann Vienna
Volksoper
06/16/2026 - & June 19, 23*, 26, 28, 2026
Viktor Ullmann: Der Kaiser von Atlantis, oder Die Tod‑Verweigerung
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem, KV 626 (excerpts, arr. Omer Meir Wellber)
Daniel Schmutzhard*/Trevor Haumschilt-Rocha (Kaiser Overall), Josef Wagner*/Alexander Fritze (Der Tod), Seiyoung Kim (Harlequin), JunHo You (Ein Soldat), Wallis Giunta (Der Trommler), Mira Alkhovik (Bubikopf), Marie Ryba (Spital 34)
Chor der Volksoper Wien, Roger Díaz-Cajamarca (chorus master), Orchester der Volksoper Wien,Tobias Wögerer*/Michael Papadopoulos (conductor)
Andreas Heise (stage director & choreography), Sascha Thomsen (sets, costumes), Johannes Schadl (lighting), Anne do Paço (dramaturgy)
D. Schmutzhard (© Ashley Taylor)
There are evenings whose seriousness of intent one would like to salute before saying anything else. “KaiserRequiem” at the Volksoper is one of them. Conceived as a commemorative project for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it brings together Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis, composed in Theresienstadt in 1943/44, with excerpts from Mozart’s Requiem, framed by choreography and played without interval. It is an undertaking of obvious conviction, immense labour and no small ambition. But ambition alone does not solve the artistic problem it creates. And here that problem is fatal: this fusion does not illuminate Ullmann’s opera. It weakens it.
That is the decisive point. Der Kaiser von Atlantis is not a torso in need of completion, nor a fragment that requires Mozartian solemnity to acquire metaphysical weight. It is a complete work of its own—bitter, wiry, grotesque, jagged, sarcastic, often blackly funny, and all the more devastating for the concentration of its means. Its idiom is unstable by design: cabaret rubs against expressionism, march against parody, Mahler against jazz, irony against terror. Ullmann and his librettist Peter Kien created, under conditions that remain almost impossible to fathom, a chamber work of startling theatrical precision and poisonous clarity. It can be read beyond its immediate historical moment, yes—but it cannot be detached from the pressure of that moment without losing something essential. In “KaiserRequiem,” that loss is not incidental. It is built into the concept.
Omer Meir Wellber’s arrangement interweaves sections of Mozart’s Requiem with Ullmann’s score, using the former as connective tissue, emotional amplification and, ultimately, as a frame of consolation. One can admire the craftsmanship of the transitions; musically, some of the seams are indeed managed with impressive fluency. But the more smoothly the evening moves between Ullmann and Mozart, the clearer its imbalance becomes. Mozart does not converse with Ullmann here so much as absorb him. The rough grain of Ullmann’s music, its brittle instrumentation, its abrupt tonal shifts and cabaret‑edged acidity, are repeatedly swallowed by the larger, warmer, more saturated aura of the Requiem. What in Ullmann should sting, scrape and disturb is rounded off, elevated, generalized. The work’s singularity is not sharpened by the juxtaposition. It is softened by it.
And that matters because Der Kaiser von Atlantis depends on sharpness. It depends on profile. Its grotesque fable of Kaiser Overall, who proclaims a war of all against all, and of Death, who goes on strike in disgust, is not merely “about death” in some broad, ecumenical sense. It is a work of mockery, terror and concentrated defiance. Its emotional climate is not one of pious lament but of corrosion, parody and spiritual exhaustion. Mozart’s Requiem, however sublime in itself, changes the temperature of the evening entirely. It imposes a different rhetoric—solemn, monumental, consolatory—on a piece that resists precisely that kind of transcendence. Ullmann’s score is not enlarged by this halo. It is muffled by it.
One can hear and see the consequences throughout. The opera’s revue‑like dramaturgy, with its quicksilver shifts of tone and perspective, is flattened into a broader commemorative pageant. Passages are cut, recontextualised or partially submerged within a sound world not their own. Characters lose contour. The score’s wiry theatrical pulse slackens. Instead of a work whose very fragility is part of its force, one gets a carefully curated memorial collage in which Ullmann increasingly serves as thematic material for a larger concept. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the evening trusts Mozart more than Ullmann—and that is precisely where it goes wrong.
Andreas Heise’s staging and choreography push in the same direction. The visual world—dark, bunker‑like, hemmed in by black‑grey walls—is austere and relentlessly depersonalised. The singers are doubled by dancers; movement is meant to carry the drama where words and music leave off. In itself, this is not an illegitimate strategy, and there are moments when it yields images of real force. The ballet hurls itself into the piece with impressive physical commitment, especially in the scenes of mass movement and pain, and the chorus is integrated with admirable discipline. But the production pays a price for its insistence on total fusion. The doubling of figures by dancers, the homogenised costume palette, the angular, reduced movement vocabulary—all this blurs distinctions rather than sharpening them. Ullmann’s characters, who should emerge with grotesque vividness, become increasingly schematic. The production has atmosphere in abundance, but atmosphere is not the same as dramatic definition.
This is especially frustrating because the evening contains a number of performances that deserve a more focused frame. Austrian baritone Daniel Schmutzhard is the production’s most compelling presence. His Kaiser Overall has bite, vocal authority and a sharply judged sense of rhetorical emphasis; he refuses the easy route of cartoon villainy and instead gives the role weight, menace and a flicker of self‑awareness. In a production that often dissolves character into concept, Schmutzhard insists on dramatic specificity, and the evening is considerably stronger whenever he is at its centre.
Austrian bass-baritone Josef Wagner, admired one day earlier as the four villains in the Volksoper’s production of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, brings real gravitas to Death, sung with an impressively dark, steady tone and a welcome absence of mannerism. His scenes with Schmutzhard are among the few moments when the evening truly grips as theatre rather than merely as commemorative installation. And among the women, Canadian mezzo Wallis Giunta stands out for the vividness of her contribution: vocally alert, emotionally present, and notably resistant to the flattening effect of the production. She gives shape and edge to music that too often risks disappearing into the surrounding concept. One wished the evening had trusted such individuality more.
The remaining cast members and the Volksoper chorus throw themselves into the project with commitment, and the orchestra under Wellber plays with polish and conviction. No one on stage or in the pit can be accused of indifference; the problem is not execution but conception. One senses throughout how much intelligence, care and emotional investment have gone into this production. But all that labour cannot quite disguise the fact that the central artistic decision is misguided.
For Ullmann’s opera does not emerge from this encounter strengthened, deepened or newly revealed. It emerges diminished. Its hard edges are smoothed, its chamber intensity diluted, its grotesque theatricality translated into a language of solemn memorialism that sits uneasily on it. The irony is hard to miss: a work born in extremis, forged out of scarcity, danger and imaginative resistance, is here overwhelmed by a richer, grander, more universally legible masterpiece. Mozart’s Requiem remains Mozart’s Requiem; Ullmann, by contrast, pays for the encounter.
“KaiserRequiem” is therefore an evening to respect rather than to admire. It contains striking stage pictures, committed ensemble work, and several excellent vocal performances—above all from Daniel Schmutzhard, Josef Wagner and Wallis Giunta. But as a response to Der Kaiser von Atlantis, it finally proves self‑defeating. The Volksoper wanted to honour Ullmann by placing him in dialogue with Mozart. In the end, it mostly demonstrates how little Ullmann needed the help.
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