CAMBRIDGE - There were orchestras in Theresienstadt. Several of them. The Nazi concentration camp, a "model ghetto" intended to convince the world that the Jews were being treated humanely, had enough musical activity to merit the services of a music critic. His name was Viktor Ullmann.
He was also a composer, a former Schoenberg student, who experienced in Theresienstadt a kind of creative spring, churning out lieder, piano sonatas, a string quartet, a melodrama, and most famously, an opera. "By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon," he wrote. "Our endeavor with respect to art was commensurate with our will to live."
Ullmann's opera - "The Emperor of Atlantis" - is perhaps the best-known musical work created in the camps. Even so, it remains music heard about more often than heard. Much credit therefore goes to OperaHub, the very young and plucky chamber opera company that staged two free performances this weekend. I attended one Friday night in a modestly appointed hall in First Church.
The work's libretto by the poet Peter Kien is inseparable from the conditions of its birth. Its two main characters are Death, who is frustrated that his job has become senseless, and the Emperor Overall, who has declared a total war. Death protests by going on strike, meaning that nobody can die, not even those suffering deeply. He returns to his post only after the Emperor agrees to sacrifice himself.
The music is full of dark lyricism and tart dissonance, a brew of high and low styles indebted to Schoenberg, Berg, Mahler, and Weill, but with an impressive integrity all its own. And in case Kien's allegory needed underlining, Ullmann deploys a set of thinly veiled musical references including a satirized version of the anthem of the Third Reich.
Sensibly directed by Brittany Duncan and Jordan Rodu, OperaHub's production had no frills. In fact, there was no stage, no lighting, and minimal sets, but the group did muster a 13-piece orchestra, including saxophone and guitar, under Rodu's direction. Performing the work in English translation, the cast of early-career singers - Jeramie Hammond, Kyle Ferrill, Lexa Ferrill, Rebekah Alexander, Spyridon Antonopoulos, and Adrian Packel - exuded competence and sometimes more. There were nits to pick but that seems beside the point here. I have nothing but admiration for an idealistic company that takes on such challenging, significant repertoire. Friday's age-diverse audience seemed duly grateful.
That said, approaching this work as a listener is not simple. Its very existence surely represents a kind of moral victory in the face of unthinkable odds, but as the scholar Shirli Gilbert has wisely cautioned, there is also a dangerous romance to the narrative of art as spiritual resistance, in that it tempts us to project some kind of redemptive meaning onto a historical event that was senselessly, irredeemably tragic.
"The Emperor of Atlantis" was rehearsed but never performed during the war. Ullmann and most of the others involved were murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Surely Primo Levi's observation applies to music as well: "Our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man."
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
