WOLFGANG GRAESER & VIKTOR ULLMANN POLYMATHS A DUAL STUDY: Their Lives & Their Dark Times

Wolfgang Graeser and Viktor Ullmann were both troubled cultural polymaths, who lived during the atrocious turbulences of the early 20th Century. Graeser committed suicide in Berlin in 1928. Ullmann, was incarcerated by the Nazis in the Theresienstadt concentration camp; thence, he was transported to Auschwitz. Graeser achieved lifetime global fame for his solving of the riddle-enigma of Bach’s Art of the Fugue. His chamber rendering and full orchestration of this great work were immediately performed all over the world. Viktor Ullmann, during his incarceration at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, achieved his greatest compositional flowering. It seems beyond a peradventure that he would have known of Graeser’s achievement in respect of Art of the Fugue. Indeed, his last work quotes the name B A C H in notation – just as the last page of Bach’s manuscript also uses this B A C H in notation - in sublime valediction. Viktor Ullmann was also a Poet of some distinction – several of these, in English translation, are significantly included in this book. So it is that this book ‘draws’ together their lives and their achievements; this in the context of the disturbing times in which they lived – the worst in human history - and, in Ullmann’s case, the rapacious and grossly criminal Nazi era; which initiated the worst crimes suffered by humanity and of which Ullmann was, himself, a victim. I t is thus that this book endeavours to demonstrate the miraculous survival of higher culture; despite the worst of assaults on it - and despite the oppression, and even mass-extirpation, of those who sought to evolve that higher culture and to enable its continuing survival. Further, this book avers to the, sometime, transmigration, and merging, of the Arts - the one into the other; here, with significant presentation from the visual arts, most particularly with reproductions of paintings by the artist Deborah Petroz-Abeles (‘DESSA’), all which she composed whilst listening to Viktor Ullmann’s last work; that is, his 7th Piano Sonata/2nd Symphony, which was composed by Viktor during his last months of his concentration camp incarceration and just before he was transported to Auschwitz; where, transported from Theresienstadt, he was murdered, with members of his family and other artists, in October 1944. In the modern era, it could be well said that this miraculous ‘survival of higher culture’ has given us an ‘embarrassment of riches’ in all the Arts; but particularly in respect of music – in that, assisted by efforts of new scholarship, there is so much available to us in live performance and in recordings. In this respect, we owe huge and multifarious gratitude to such as Wolfgang Graeser and Viktor Ullmann. The book ends with the narration of a surprising ‘historical paradox’ – which is what seems to be a German expectation that German culture was to be eliminated by the victorious Allies; who were expected to apply Nazi cultural control cultural procedures ‘in reverse’, so to speak - such as designating elements of German culture ‘degenerate’. In fact, of course, the Allies did no such thing. At all events, it seems that, in late 1944, it was decided to record, that ‘most German’ of Operas, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg – for posterity, no doubt - but in the context of a posterity which was presumed to be very long-distant in its revival after the defeat of Nazidom – this being undertaken in the expectation of the imminent suppression of ‘all things German’, once the Third Reich was defeated under the Allies’ demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ terms. This recording took place, on 28, 29, 30 November and 1, 4, 5 December 1944 in the extraordinary conditions of end of war Vienna, which was soon to be occupied by Soviet troops. Karl Böhm conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Vienna State Opera Choir