Ullmann, Viktor

Ullmann, Viktor – Klavierkonzert op.25

(b. Teschen, Austria-Hungary, January 1, 1898 – murdered Auschwitz-Birkenau, October 18, 1944)

Preface
Viktor Ullmann completed his Piano Concerto in December 1939, when Prague was already occupied by German troops and the prospect of a performance had long since become an illusion. He dedicated the work to the Hungarian pianist Juliette Arányi (1906–1944). Ullmann’s dedication – “To the venerable mistress of Apollonian piano playing – a Dionysian work”– refers not only to the performer but also to his piano concerto. In the concerto Ullmann plays with the audience’s expectations of a solo concerto—and initially disappoints them. At the beginning, like in a symphony, he treats the piano as an additional instrument, an orchestral piano. Only toward the end of the first movement, it confronts the theme that the trombones had already played at the beginning of the movement, with full force. The piano thus evolves increasingly from a motivic cue-giver into an equal dialogue partner standing opposite the collective, which constitutes the very special appeal of this densely symphonic composition.

After fighting on the Austro-Italian front from 1916 to 1918 and surviving one of the most horrific battles on the Isonzo, Ullmann first received important inspiration from Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna, before working in 1920 first as a choir director and accompanist and, from 1922, as second conductor at the New German Theater in Prague, led by Alexander Zemlinsky. In Prague, starting in 1923, he gradually gained attention as a composer with songs, piano music, and chamber music. Many of these works, such as the First String Quartet from 1923, have unfortunately been lost. After engagements as opera director at the theater in Ústí (1927–28) and as Kapellmeister and composer of stage music at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich (1929–1931), inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s work, he initially turned away from the theater and composing and ran the “Novalis Bücherstube,” an anthroposophical bookstore in Stuttgart, where he also taught at the Waldorf School. In 1933, Ullmann was forced to flee Stuttgart with his wife Anna, née Winternitz, and their son Max, born in 1932—escaping the Nazis, but above all his creditors, as Ullmann had gone into debt to purchase and operate his bookstore. …

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