The recent interest in composers whose lives were cut short by the Nazis may seem motivated by something other than artistic concerns -- as if the reason for listening to the works were to relieve a long-lasting guilt or give these composers a second chance at posterity. The music of Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krasa, and Pavel Haas is a strong rebuttal to such a charge. All three left a rich legacy and are the focus of a sweeping project led by conductor and Juilliard alumnus James Conlon, beginning this month with a three-concert series in New York.

James Conlon Photo by Mark Lyon

On March 23, Conlon conducts the Juilliard Orchestra and singers from The Juilliard School in Ullmann's satirical, one-act chamber opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis). The following day, he joins forces with the Hawthorne String Quartet and an ensemble of Juilliard students in a program including Ullmann's String Quartet No. 3. Finally, on March 26, Conlon conducts the Orchestra of St. Luke's in Ullmann's Second Symphony and works by Bartok, Zemlinsky, and Pavel Haas. The concerts, which will take place in three separate New York venues -- the Central Synagogue, Saint Bartholomew's Church, and Carnegie Hall, respectively -- inaugurate a multi-year project that will incorporate concerts, symposia, and new recordings, all intended to raise the awareness of the concert-going public.

The series begins with Ullmann (1898-1944), a Prague-based composer and a pupil of Schoenberg and Zemlinsky who spent his last two years at the Theresienstadt concentration camp before his death at Auschwitz in 1944. "I chose Victor Ullman as a symbolic start because he's the most extraordinary figure from this generation," says Conlon. "Many of the composers we'll eventually touch on were displaced or died because of the Nazis, but he actually wrote in concentration camps."

Indeed, the most enduring piece to emerge from Theresienstadt is Der Kaiser, a sardonic, Kurt Weill-like gem about a mad emperor as well as a thinly veiled metaphor of life under the Nazis. Written and rehearsed in the concentration camp, it is scored for seven singers and 13 instruments (including banjo and alto saxophone), reflecting the resources at hand. Before the composer was sent off to Auschwitz, he gave it to a fellow prisoner with instructions to deliver it to a colleague, and a performance eventually took place.

Viktor Ullmann

Der Kaiser has been sporadically revived in modern times, including separate productions at Miller Theater and Merkin Hall in 1998, but hearing it within this rich historical framework will undoubtedly provide fresh revelations. The second program concludes with Ullmann's searing String Quartet No. 3 (Op. 46), a work that progresses from an almost idyllic optimism to soul-searching intensity that brings to mind the late Beethoven quartets.

Another focus of the series is the works of Alexander von Zemlinsky. While Zemlinsky avoided the fate of Ullman and his associates by fleeing Europe to New York, his lushly orchestrated music had been almost totally forgotten by his death in 1942, also a victim of Nazi suppression. Many of his works made a strong comeback during the 1990s, especially his operas Der Zweg and Eine florentinische Tragodie, but many others remain vastly neglected, particularly the two featured in this series: the neoclassical Sinfonietta, Op. 23 (1934) and the Maiblumen blühten überall, for soprano and string sextet (1903-04).

Conlon's ongoing devotion to Zemlinsky's cause -- reflected in five albums for EMI Classics and countless performances -- gives him confidence that audiences can find much to appreciate in this largely unfamiliar music.

"American audiences are often afraid of what they don't know," says Conlon, who has held major posts over the past decade in Cologne, Germany, and with the Paris National Opera. "I came to this music from a passion for Zemlinsky, a passion which itself only dates back about 10 years or so. By slowly making the links from one generation to another, I got more interested in this [school of composers]. One of the ironies is that in America, where there ought to be tremendous interest about this, they're virtually ignorant of a whole generation.

"What I found in the Zemlinsky cycle is that the public didn't know much about it at the beginning, but the more they heard, the more they went with it. After the second or third project they knew they would like it and it started to take hold."

Viktor Ullmann, The Emperor of Atlantis Central Synagogue Sunday, March 23, 7:30 p.m. Music by Zemlinsky, Krasa, and Ullmann St. Bartholomew's Church, 109 E. 50th St. Monday, March 24, 7:30 p.m. For time and ticket information, please see the calendar.

In addition to winning over audiences, Conlon hopes to deepen the appreciation of student musicians. "It's absolutely essential that young people are involved with this project," says Conlon. "One of the reasons this generation of composers has remained unknown is because there were no young people to take it up in the 1940s and '50s. There was nobody there in 1946 to pass it on."

While Ullmann, Krasa, and Haas were all closely acquainted with the music and theories of Schoenberg, their own compositional styles preserved the essentially tonal, late Romantic idiom of Mahler and Strauss. Scholars have argued that had they survived, Schoenberg's 12-tone method may not have exerted such dominance over classical music. "In essence he was the only survivor," notes Conlon. "As they say, the survivor writes history. The survivor can also write the orthodoxy."

"It's a bit of a cliché, but it's often said that these composers were murdered twice," Conlon continues. "They were murdered in concentration camps and they were murdered in the 1950s and '60s because the attitude was that whole generation was old hat. Anything that dealt with tonality in any respect was considered passé. There was an orthodoxy that followed -- either serialism or Stockhausen -- and if music wasn't one or the other, it wasn't to be taken seriously."

Just as Conlon's project hypothesizes whether European musical capitals might have been less hostage to serialism and more open to a range of styles, it also raises questions about music in post-war America.

"That's another aspect that we'll eventually be looking into in this project -- the enormous debt that American music holds to this generation and style," says Conlon. "Broadway and Hollywood benefited because some of these people contributed to our musical heritage. And we disparaged that heritage. Bernard Hermann and the like provided a legitimate form of art and were sullied by commercialism and opportunism. Weill and Korngold had to make due with what they could find."

Conlon says that, despite the current downturn in the recording industry, he intends to record much of the repertoire on the series. An all-Ullmann CD was released in early February on the Capriccio label, which comes complete with a DVD featuring a documentary on the composer as well as a conversation between Conlon and a German journalist. Still, the busy conductor maintains that his own approach to the project is largely free of commercial considerations.

"The question of 'sell' doesn't enter into any aspect of my thinking, except for my decision to start small because I don't want the pressures of box office to play any role in its inception," says Conlon. "The goal is that this music enters the repertory. That's not done in a year or two. It takes a generation. But somebody has to start."

Brian Wise is a Web producer for WNYC Radio (www.wnyc.org) and frequently writes about classical music for The New York Times, Time Out New York, and other publications. He holds a master's degree in musicology from Northwestern University.