A new opera coming to San Francisco seeks to use music to express the torment that words alone cannot for descendants of Holocaust survivors — and to show how the late Elie Wiesel helped one man begin to heal.
“The Dialogue of Memories” will premiere this month in a three-city tour through Music of Remembrance, a performing arts nonprofit. The May 20 performance at the Presidio Theatre is sandwiched between the opera’s Seattle and Chicago dates.
The production, written by composer Tom Cipullo and journalist Howard Reich, draws on Reich’s real-life friendship with Wiesel, one of the most prominent survivors and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
The opera opens with a striking line: “I suffer from an event I have not even experienced.”
From there, it traces the journey of Reich — the son of survivors — as he confronts the long-suppressed trauma of his mother, Sonia Reich, who refused to ever discuss her Holocaust experiences with him.
Reich said that through his conversations with Wiesel, who died in 2016 at age 87, he was able to gain clarity about his own family’s experiences.
“I had the great privilege of spending four years with Professor Wiesel, interviewing him in Chicago, New York and Florida, with my tape recorder rolling. And it turned out those were the last four years of his life,” Reich told J. “As the son of survivors, speaking to this very admired survivor, this was a chance for me to ask questions of Professor Wiesel that I could not ask of my parents because the subject was too fraught.”
Those conversations became Reich’s 2019 book, “The Art of Inventing Hope,” but he still felt that the written word did not fully capture his experiences.
“Reading a book, as essential as it is, is by definition a solitary experience,” he explained. “I was alone with Professor Wiesel in all of those uncounted sessions for four years. I wanted other people to see and feel and hear what it’s like to be in the room with him, what it’s like to have that interaction, how he thinks, how he poses questions, how you go back and forth.”
Reich, a music critic for the Chicago Tribune for much of his career, said he believed that opera could allow an audience to experience Wiesel like he did and perhaps gain some of the same insights and healing that Reich did.
“As powerful as words are, when you marry them with music, they become even exponentially more powerful,” he said.
In the “The Dialogue of Memories,” Wiesel appears as an active presence questioning, guiding and challenging Reich. Their exchanges form the emotional core of the work, alongside the figure of Reich’s mother, who moves between past and present as her story gradually emerges.
Rather than a literal retelling of Reich’s book, the opera focuses on its central ideas. With far fewer words than a book, Reich said, the score expresses the emotional undercurrent of questions that have shaped his life.
Reich said those questions include: “How do we, as children of survivors, deal with this legacy? How do we live up to the expectations our parents have for us without suppressing our own dreams? What is our responsibility going forward?”
Those are dilemmas faced not only by children of Holocaust survivors, but by later generations inheriting the weight of history, he said.
Reich’s own family story underscores that tension. His mother, who died last year at 94, resisted ever speaking about her past with him. In 2001, she began to suffer from late-onset post-traumatic stress disorder and began fearing that people were coming to kill her. Reich set out to learn her story in order to understand her diagnosis.
Like many survivors, he said, she found the trauma too painful to revisit, leaving him to piece together her history through investigative reporting and interviews with others. Reich discovered that his mother was one of fewer than a hundred of the 12,000 Jews of the small town of Dubno (in then-Poland and present-day Ukraine) who escaped machine-gun execution by the Germans.
Reich relayed his experience learning his mother’s story in a 2006 memoir and 2010 documentary. His mother declined to read or watch either.
“She didn’t need to see it; she lived through it,” Reich said. “I’m the one who needed to know.”
The opera arrives 10 years after Wiesel’s death, at a time when firsthand Holocaust testimony is disappearing as the youngest survivors have entered their 80s.
Mina Miller, Music of Remembrance’s founder and artistic director, is also the child of survivors.
While “The Dialogue of Memories” is based on Reich’s personal experiences and conversations, Miller said, there is something ubiquitous about his story.
“My parents didn’t talk about their experience, but I could appreciate the visceral power of memory,” Miller said. “Howard’s story really resonated with me because even though we have different mothers, I could sense what he was experiencing. And in that sense, it was universal and something important to address.”
Musically, “The Dialogue of Memories” departs from traditional grand opera.
Cipullo told J. that the opera is a chamber work on a “human scale,” with a cast of three and a five-instrument ensemble rather than a full choir and orchestra.
The intimacy mirrors the private conversations that inspired the piece, inviting audiences into a space that feels immediate and deeply personal, he said.
“At the beginning I was intimidated by Wiesel’s words, which are so magnificent — what could music add to them,” Cipullo said. “Opera is crystallized emotion. And when you’re dealing with a topic that is so overwhelmingly emotional, I think that’s a topic that music alone, of all the arts, can delve into.”
Cipullo said he hopes audiences will hear Reich’s story and be inspired by Wiesel’s words in a new way.
“Music goes to this place beyond words,” he said. “It’s an extra special equipment too, for living, for forgetting ourselves and straightening out those parts that are inside us.”
IF YOU’RE GOING
“The Dialogue of Memories” 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 20, at the Presidio Theatre, 99 Moraga Ave., S.F. $39-$72.