NEW FESTIVAL ORGANISER
In September 2025, the Viktor Ullmann Society was founded in Prague. Its founding members are musicologist Magdalena Živná, pianist and composer Jan Dušek, and soprano and musicologist Irena Troupová.
PhDr. Magdalena Živná, president of the society
An internationally renowned musicologist, music manager, publicist, and translator with more than 30 years of professional experience in the field of international cultural projects. Co-founder of the Ullmann Festival (2018) and its program director until 2024. Translator and co-publisher of the Czech edition of German musicologist Ingo Schultz’s monograph “The Restless Central European Viktor Ullmann” (NAMU and NOEMI Arts&Media, Prague 2024).
MgA. Jan Dušek, Ph.D.
Composer, pianist, and teacher at HAMU, winner of numerous composition awards. Long-time interpreter of works by Viktor Ullmann and other artists persecuted by Nazism (e.g., Czech composer and resistance fighter Rudolf Karel). At his piano recital during the third year of the festival, he gave the world premiere of his sonata Waiting for Dawn, inspired by the work of Viktor Ullmann.
Mgr. Irena Troupová
Soprano, musicologist, teacher at JAMU. In addition to her work in the field of early music, she has long been involved in the rediscovery of vocal works by both 19th-century German composers from the Czech lands and 20th-century authors who were forcibly silenced by the Nazi regime. In 2015, she recorded and released (together with Jan Dušek) the first CD in the Czech Republic of Viktor Ullmann’s complete songs for soprano and piano, and in 2021, she released a CD with the complete song oeuvre of Hans Winterberg, a Prague native who was completely unknown in the Czech Republic at the time, thus introducing him to the world.
The main goal of the Viktor Ullmann Society is to continue organising the Ullmann Festival, an international music festival with its program centred in Prague, building on its seven-year tradition. However, each year one of the European cities where Viktor Ullmann worked during his lifetime will be added to the program, and Ullmann’s birthplace, Cieszyn in Poland and Český Těšín in the Czech Republic, where the festival was born, will remain part of the festival program.
OTHER SOCIETY ACTIVITIES
In addition to this main activity, the Viktor Ullmann Society will also engage in other related activities: research, lecturing, organisational, publishing, educational, and recording activities in the field of promoting the work of composer Viktor Ullmann and Jewish and non-Jewish artists artistically related to him who were victims of Nazism. This will involve, in particular, collecting available documentation on Ullmann’s life and work, both from the period of his lifetime (1898-1944) and from the reception of his work after World War II, from both domestic and foreign sources (and, selectively, the same activities relating to the work of related artists). It also occasionally organises professional and scientific conferences, publishes scientific and popular works, and conducts educational activities (lectures, guided tours, discussion evenings, etc.). An important part of the Society’s activities will also be the targeted building of partnerships with similarly focused organisations at home and abroad. Currently, the Society cooperates with, for example, the German music association Musica Reanimata, the Austrian organisation Exil.arte, the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, the Terezín Memorial, the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Prague, and others.