Viktor Ullmann was born in the Austrian-Silesian border town of Teschen on 1 January 1898 (baptized a Catholic on 27 January) where he spent his childhood and youth (primary school and first class at the Albrechts Grammar School). In 1909 he moved with his mother to Vienna where he passed his final grammar-school exams in wartime in 1916; from 1914 to 1916 he also took his first music theory lessons with Dr. Josef Polnauer, a former pupil of Schoenberg. After World War I he enrolled as student of law at the University of Vienna, attended the composition seminar of Arnold Schoenberg at the end of the year, and took piano lessons with Eduard Steuermann.

In 1919 Ullmann broke off his studies of law in Vienna, seceded from the Catholic Church and married Martha Koref whom he had met at the Schoenberg seminar. They moved to Prague; Ullmann took composition lessons with Dr. Heinrich Jalowetz who, like Polnauer, was a former pupil of Schoenberg and worked as conductor at the New German Theatre of Prague (director: Alexander von Zemlinsky).

In autumn 1920 Ullmann began to work as chorus master and répétiteur at this theatre, and later (1922-27) advanced to conductor. Apart from that, he wrote several compositions in the 1920s which soon were crowned by remarkable success (among them Seven Songs with Piano in 1923/24, an incidental music for Klabund’s Kreidekreis in 1925, Symphonic Fantasy in 1925, an octet in 1926, the first version of the Schoenberg Variations already composed in 1925, and String Quartet No. 1 in 1927). Except for a later version of the Schoenberg Variations ((Five) Variations and Double Fugue on a Piano Piece by Arnold Schoenberg for piano), all works from this period are considered to be lost.

In 1927 he went to Aussig as director of the opera but left the theatre after one season to return to Prague where he lived without regular employment in the following years. From 1929 to 1931 Ullmann worked as composer of incidental music and conductor at the Zurich Theatre. Impressed by at least two visits to the Goetheanum in Dornach, he began to get enthusiastic about Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical movement. In 1931 he got divorced from Martha Koref; with his second wife Anna Winternitz whom he married in Prague the same year, he moved to Stuttgart where he run the book shop ’Novalis-Bücherstube’ (previously ’Bücherstube des Goetheanums’). On 31 July 1931 Ullmann joined the Anthroposophical Society of Czechoslovakia founded in 1924.

In 1933 Ullmann left Stuttgart with his wife and his 1932-born son Max (Maximilian Rudolf) because of the forthcoming bankruptcy of the ’Novalis-Bücherstube’, and moved to Prague where he lived as a freelance musician, composer, teacher and journalist. He worked at an adult education centre and with the radio, and was active in Leo Kestenberg’s International Society for Music Education as well as in the German and Czech music societies of Prague. Between 1935 and 1937 he attended Alois Hába’s courses in quarter-tone composition.

After the establishment of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia in Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, public performances of Ullmann’s works became impossible. Ullmann began to publish his works himself; the first works were the Schoenberg Variations, Op. 3a and the Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 19.

In 1941 Ullmann got divorced from his second wife Anna. On 15 October he married Elisabeth Frank-Meissl with whom he had lived together since the end of 1940; one reason for his third marriage probably was to escape the transports of Prague Jews to Lodz – if just for a short time – because stateless and unmarried persons were preferred as deportees.

On 8 September 1942 Ullmann, his wife Elisabeth (together with a daughter from her first marriage) and his first wife Martha were deported to the concentration camp of Terezin. Before his deportation Ullmann gave a complete set of prints of the works published by him to his friend Alexander Waulin (* 1894, † 1976), a composer and music journalist of Russian descent, who had prepared the piano reduction of his opera Der Sturz des Antichrist under his direction in 1936/37. Waulin passed these prints to Charles University in Prague in 1965.

In Terezin Ullmann, together with Hans Krása, Gideon Klein and Rafael Schächter, belonged to the leading circle in the music section of the ’leisure activities’ group. Ullmann played piano at concerts and, as interpreter, conductor, critic, director of the Studio for New Music, organizer of the Collegium Musicum and composer, decisively influenced the musical life at Terezin. He composed more than 20 works in Terezin, among others the 3rd string quartet (1943), the 5th, 6th and 7th piano sonata (1943/44), nomerous songs, the opera The Emperor of Atlantis (1943/44) and the melodramma Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1944).

On 16 October 1944 Viktor and Elisabeth Ullmann as well as many other members of the ’leisure activities’ group, among them Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, Peter Kien and Karel Ancerl (the only survivor of this group), were deported to Auschwitz where they were killed two days later.

 Viktor Ullmann Foundation: www.viktorullmannfoundation.org.uk