The Emperor of Atlantis, written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, was staged in Geneva in March as part of a production that didn’t intend to save the world, but to imagine a new way of co-existing. The echoing chambers of the Palais des Nations in Geneva turned this month from a space for heavily scripted negotiations into an unlikely home for the baritone notes of opera. At a time when the very architecture of global governance is under strain and World War III is not unthinkable, a two-part opera, partly composed in the depths of the Holocaust, held up a mirror to an imploding order. Directed and conceived by Belgian-Luxembourgish stage director Stéphane Ghislain Roussel, with music by Latvia-born Eugene Birman, the production of In Virtue Of and The Emperor of Atlantis situates that mirror within both contemporary and historical frames. The first part draws on the European Convention on Human Rights; the second, The Emperor of Atlantis, was composed by Viktor ...
