Anna Rabinowitz, whose poetry I have reviewed here and here, has collaborated with composer, Stefan Weisman, to create what they describe as an “experimental opera – theatre work” called Darkling which they have released as a two-CD recording from Albany Records. The libretto draws upon a book-length poem of the same name which Rabinowitz published ten years ago, which in turn is built (as an acrostic) upon the poem by Thomas Hardy, A Darkling Thrush.
The Libretto
Like dreams, or memory, Darkling is fragmented and non-linear. To the extent that it constitutes a story, it is a Holocaust story. Polish Jews emigrate to New York between the wars, “[a]lways to feel alien, one foot here, the other in the old country”. There is the image of a woman who leaves for America just three weeks after her wedding. In this action, there is a sense of abandonment and a sense, too, of guilt.
Her father: writing from a deep cave of pain:
Why, why did you
Run off so soon after the wedding without saying goodbye?
A morning her brother pleads,
Take me along.
An afternoon his cousin flees
Warsaw for the woods,
The night they fathom unthinkable
sayings said …
We who have the privilege of hindsight know what follows: the rise of Nazism and the invasion of Poland, the Warsaw ghetto and Treblinka. Whatever fluke of personality caused the woman to flee can also be credited with her survival.
Meanwhile those who have settled in New York endure a suffering of their own, both psychological (survival seems like an act of betrayal) and physical (Jews are ripe for exploitation since, after all, they can scarcely complain about living conditions when at least they have their lives). For women, there is a twofold suffering, as we witness when the woman exclaims: “but oh, the endless speculation / about why I walked cautiously / inside your footprints“. The woman has no footprints of her own except as she makes them for herself, “racing to become / Native to herself” so that no one can later ask of her: “Woman, why were you not you?” It is a struggle for identity compounded by the fact that America places its own demands on the identities of newcomers. As friends and family in Poland are erased from history, the woman must struggle against a multi-tiered erasure of a different sort.
Alongside the image of a woman fleeing is another image, an image of images really: a girl, Anna, poised over a box of photographs and letters from the old country. The photographs are of people she can barely remember, if at all:
Letters: the shoebox is one-third full of letters;\r\nPhotos: a worn leather folder hugs in its\r\nEntrails a small packet:\r\nFriends and relations never named —\r\nStrangers —
Because the friends and relations are never named, they risk the erasure that comes from the failure of memory. “[F]orgetting is a death”. In a sense, forgetting is complicit with genocide. But what if—like a young girl holding a shoebox—you never knew these people in the first instance? or heard their stories but at one or two removes? Then, perhaps, the act of remembering becomes an act of recovery, too. But the challenge is posed like a koan: “how do I quote names I can neither recall nor forget?”
One path to the recovery of forgotten remembrances is to write poems and operas. But as Rabinowitz reminds us, we cannot simply make things up. “[H]istory can be neither / bought,nor stolen, nor faked, / neither borrowed nor slaked—”. The recovery of what has been forgotten must be authentic. History imposes a burden on the poet and the musician to engage imaginatively with what has been forgotten, not to produce fantasy (like the revisionist film, Inglorious Basterds) but to produce places for deep empathy. For Rabinowitz, poems become graves and she laments “I CANNOT MAKE ENOUGH POEMS”. If this were the end of it—to create graves—then Rabinowitz would have left us with a dark poem and a bleak prospect of poetry’s capacity for recovery. However, almost at the end, we find her writing that “each poem is a prayer”.
The Music
In Darkling (the poem) there are periodic allusions to singing, which is not surprising given all it owes to Thomas Hardy’s darkling thrush which “[h]ad chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom”. At first, “[A]lone at night / she will not, / cannot sing”. In America, “I will put a new song in my mouth.” However, as already noted, it is not new singing which is required or demanded of her. It is a singing which will become a prayer, both as an elegy for incomprehensible loss and as a prophetic breath giving life to the dead. The thrush, the singing, the polyphonic quality of the poetry, all these cry out for a musical setting.
In Darkling (the opera) Stefan Weisman has remained true to the progressions found in the poem. He preserves the fragmented “shoebox” of images through spoken word sections in which a variety of speakers fragment the text. The speakers enhance the effort to recover forgotten remembrances by evoking characters both in the old world and the new. The speakers do not pass the words back and forth like a conversation, but in a more associative style that suggests memory itself, as if we, the listeners, inhabit Anna’s mind. A small ensemble (string quartet and four vocalists) reinforces the sense of intimacy. Keeping things small has the practical benefit that the opera is easier to mount, but it must be small in any event. Something more grandiose, the story, say, of the whole Jewish people, would bury Darkling‘s interior struggle. And so the setting is spare.\r\n\r\nIn setting the poem to music, one thing which is lost is the acrostic. Its logic lends a structure to the poem, and offers the reader a reassurance that even in this chaotic movement from emigration, to grief, through the struggle to remember, there is an order which lies hidden but no less real for being hidden. Although the acrostic had to be sacrificed, the music itself retains this underlying logic. While it is beyond me to pore over the score, it would not surprise me if Weisman has embedded in the music similar strategies that give structure to the opera although we, the listeners, remain unaware of it.
For the most part, I would describe the music as “fractured” – challenging and without a tonal centre. Personally, this is as it should be. Having recently attended a large-scale “Holocaust oratorio”, I Believe, by Zane Zalis, I must confess that sugar-coated Broadwayish schmaltz leaves me cold. What I take from Darkling is this: remembrance is not the construction of monuments, but a process, a form of engagement; it is morally taxing; it is existentially exhausting. If Darkling were set as a work we could close our eyes and hum along to, it would undermine itself. Here, the music forces us to walk this journey with Anna, to engage as she does.
Although the score is challenging, that does not mean it is inaccessible. In particular, I was moved by the final extended Dayenu. Just as the poem finds rest in prayer, so the opera finds completion in liturgy. Speakers name atrocities, then the people repeat “Dayenu” – “It would have been enough.” The context turns the phrase on its head. Drawn from the Passover Haggadah, it is traditionally offered as an expression of thanks, but here, it almost falls upon God as an accusation, as if to demand: “How could you allow such things to happen to us?”
The opera follows both the poem and Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush by hinting at (without revealing) the possibility of hope. Why should “[a]n aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small” sing into the gloom except for “[s]ome blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware”? Anna has her blessed Hope too: “Now I remember I breathe / a breath of you each / Day” and “she bears / A leaf a pencil some paper she / has found a leaf”. After Anna closes the shoebox and the voices fall silent, we have these words: “And I was unaware.” Although we may not be able to see it, there is hope.
Darkling is a challenging work. Make whatever effort it demands of you. It will reward you well.