The Ullmann Festival, an international music festival, was established in 2018 in the twin cities of Český Těšín and Cieszyn (formerly Austro-Hungarian Těšín) and aims to commemorate the local native Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944), an Austrian-Czech-Jewish composer who has been internationally recognised for many years. Along with him, it also commemorates his artistic companions of the Czech and German languages, who were an important part of the musical culture of interwar Czechoslovakia, as well as those who – Jews and non-Jews alike – were persecuted by the Nazi regime.
The external impetus for the festival’s creation was the 120th anniversary of the composer’s birth. This anniversary was first commemorated on January 18, 2018, with a jubilee concert organised on the Polish side of the city. In Český Těšín, the first edition of the ULLMANNOVSKÉ SLAVNOSTI festival took place in November of the same year, organised on the initiative of the Municipal Library in Český Těšín and its then-director, Jana Galášová, with the participation of Polish and Austrian partners. Following the success of this cultural event, the organisers decided to continue the tradition and hold the festival every two years.
Following this two-year cycle, three more successful editions of the festival took place in 2020, 2022, and 2024, gradually establishing it on the musical map of the Czech Republic and Europe. Due to its growing popularity and efforts to make the work of Viktor Ullmann and related composers accessible to a wider audience, fundamental changes will take place from the fifth edition of the festival, planned for 2026: The main organizer of the ULLMANN FESTIVAL will be the newly founded Viktor Ullmann Society, and the festival will be centered in the capital city of Prague, where most of the concerts will take place. Each year, one of the “Ullmann cities” in Europe where Viktor Ullmann worked during his lifetime will be added (in 2026, it will be Ústí nad Labem, where he was the opera director at the Municipal Theatre in 1927-28). Ullmann’s birthplace, the Polish-Czech town of Cieszyn, also remains part of the festival program.
The new organiser of the Ullmann Festival, the Viktor Ullmann Society, would like to thank all previous organisers and partners of the festival, both from the Moravian-Silesian Region and from across the Czech Republic and abroad, for their organisation and support and for creating this commendable tradition. We want to continue to develop it successfully.