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KaiserRequiem at Volksoper Wien (Photo: Ashley Taylor)

'Death, where is thy sting?' When Kaiser Overall, the Emperor of Atlantis, declares universal war, Death goes on strike. Confusion reigns. The sick and the suffering have no means of release until Death strikes a bargain. He will resume his labours on one condition: the Emperor himself must be the first to die.

Viktor Ullmann’s opera was composed in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt in 1943. It made it as far as rehearsals, but the Nazi authorities interpreted the role of the Kaiser as a satire on Adolf Hitler and banned its performance. In October 1944 Ullmann was deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed in the gas chambers.

Ullmann’s pithy score is flecked with jazz influences and features a chamber ensemble including such diverse instruments as a banjo, saxophone, harpsichord and a wheezy harmonium. It only lasts 50 minutes, so how do you present it on stage? After his ingenious 2022 mash-up of Iolanta and The Nutcracker, former Volksoper music director Omer Meir Wellber welds Mozart’s Requiem onto Der Kaiser von Atlantis: a requiem for the dead, written by a composer who died before it could be completed, paired with a work about the abdication of Death itself.

Movements of the Requiem are interspersed throughout the opera, expertly stitched by Wellber – a true dialogue between the two works. In a joint production by the Volksoper and the resident Wiener Staatsballett, opera and dance are equally melded. Each character – Death, Overall, Harlequin, the Drummer, Bubikopf – has a dancer double; the singers tackle some of Andreas Heise’s contorting choreography themselves, including robotic hand gestures, while the dancers recite repeated lines.

Sascha Thomsen’s set features bleak, grey walls into which light boxes slide open to reveal various characters. His costumes are equally grey, but with flashes of lime green which accentuates movement. At the start, Death wears elements of forbidding black armour but his appearance softens over the evening as his role becomes more sympathetic: 'I am the one who brings salvation from suffering,' he explains to Overall, 'not the one who makes you suffer.'

KaiserRequiem at Volksoper Wien (Photo: Ashley Taylor)

Josef Wagner brought a gravelly bass and biting diction to the role of Death, shadowed by dancer Martin Winter, symbolically breaking his sword to signal his refusal to go on working.

Daniel Schmutzhard’s heroic baritone rang out with tremendous power as Kaiser Overall. Bright-voiced soprano Rebecca Nelson was excellent, particularly in the lovely duet with JunHo You’s Soldier, while Wallis Giunta rattled out her patter as the Kaiser’s Drummer, accompanied by militaristic gestures, with a penetrating quality to her clear top notes. Tenor Seiyoung Kim brought wit and boyish charm to Harlequin.

The artists of the Staatsballett executed their movements with vigour, most of their work taking place during the choral movements of the Mozart, although the Kaiser’s ministers tapped out his orders en pointe. The Volksoper Chorus was outstanding – it’s wonderful to hear a proper operatic chorus unleashed on repertory like this and they sang with full-throated conviction, packing a punch in the Dies irae and hissing sibilants in the Rex tremendae. The Lacrimosa closed the performance, carrying moving vocal power.

In the programme book, choreographer and director Heise states that he did not want to set Kaiser as a concentration camp opera. Despite the satire in the piece, the resulting production is slick, sensitive and respectful… but therein lies the problem: two works that carry such a weighty message didn’t have the same impact as the Iolanta/Nutcracker pairing. Perhaps natural caution about the subject matter prevented a bolder, grittier interpretation. There are more depths to be plumbed here. Death, where is thy sting, indeed?