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Project
"... deserved the cheers and long standing ovation they received ... no-one was left unmoved." - Jerusalem Post
Lost Childhood
Music by Janice Hamer
Libretto by Mary Azrael
Based on the memoir by Yehuda Nir and his conversations with Gottfried Wagner
Commissioned and developed by American Opera Projects
About Lost Childhood
Lost Childhood is a three-act, full-length opera composed by Janice Hamer, a Philadelphia composer, with a libretto by Baltimore poet Mary Azrael.
Lost Childhood is based on Dr. Yehuda Nir's memoir of his childhood in hiding from the Nazis in Poland during World War II, and on conversations with Dr. Gottfried Wagner, great grandson of Richard Wagner. When Nir's father was arrested in 1941, Yehuda (Julek) was eleven years old. He, his mother, and his teenaged sister Lala were forced to enter the brutal game of survival as the Jewish family moved from place to place disguised as Polish Catholics.
 In the opera, Julek's memory of his "lost childhood" emerges from a conversation he has fifty years later with Manfred Geyer, a German born after World War II, the son of a prominent family of Nazi sympathizers. Manfred and the adult Julek (Judah Gruenfeld) are psychiatrists, colleagues at a professional conference. For the first time, Manfred urges Judah to confide in him about his experiences as a Jew during the war.
For fifty years, Judah has kept silent about this period of his life, and he is reluctant to talk about it, especially with a German. Full of bravado and self-mockery, he gives a brief picture of his family at the start of the war. Gradually, however, Manfred's questioning opens the floodgates, and Judah's memories come rushing back, carrying him deeper and deeper into his past.
Over a period of several days, the two men confront each other and wrestle in private with their own painful memories. A powerful bond develops between them as they face the past and their complex, unexpected feelings about each other.
The characters of Judah and Manfred, though fictitious, were inspired by the friendship of Dr. Nir and Dr. Gottfried Wagner, a passionate proponent of post-Holocaust dialogue between victims and Nazi perpetrators and their children.
Read about the making of Lost Childhood on the AOP Blog!
About the Creators
Janice Hamer (composer) graduated from Harvard and received her Ph.D. at the City University of New York; her main composition teachers were Earl Kim and Thea Musgrave. She lived for some years in England, where her music was performed on BBC radio and in London concert halls. Now residing in Philadelphia, she has taught at Haverford, Bryn Mawr and the Curtis Institute, and currently at Swarthmore. Her awards and fellowships include the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, grants from the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts, Meet the Composer, American Music Center and ASCAP, and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recent performing groups and/or commissions include Orchestra 2001, Dale Warland Singers, BBC Singers, Contemporary Music Forum of Washington, DC, Bowling Green (OH) Festival, I Cantori, Double Image (UK), Pittsburgh Trio, Philadelphia Concerto Soloists, Apple Hill Chamber Players, Tacoma (WA) Symphony, University of Wisconsin Choir, Kharkov (Ukraine) Philharmonic, the US Holocaust Museum ensemble, and Syracuse's Society for New Music.
 Mary Azrael (librettist) is the author of three books of poems -- Victorians, Riddles for a Naked Sailor, and Black Windows, created for the Smith College Rare Book Collection. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Harpers, Chelsea, Harpers, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, and many other journals. She is the founding co-editor of Passager Books and co-edits Passager, a national literary journal with a focus on older writers. She was a Maryland State Arts Council Poet in the Schools, and has taught writing at the Peabody Conservatory, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Western Maryland College. She teaches poetry writing in the Odyssey program at Johns Hopkins University. Azrael collaborated with composer Janice Hamer on the libretto of an award-winning choral work, "On Paper Bridges," based on a Yiddish legend. Her poem "Loving the Aliens" was set to music and performed by composer Chris Mandra for The Synesthesia Project at the American Visionary Art Museum. Her "Three Riddles" (Boosey and Hawkes) were set for children's chorus by Betty Bertaux. She created a sound poem for "Themorus," a kinetic sculpture by Kevin Labadie.
 Yehuda Nir is the author of The Lost Childhood, a memoir of six years in his life as a Polish Jewish boy who, along with his mother and sister, survived World War II. Dr. Nir is an associate professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College and has a private practice in New York City. With his wife, Bonnie Maslin, he is the author of several self-help books. His memoir has been published this year in Italy (Un Diario Di Yehuda) and will be published in Poland in September 2005.
 Gottfried Helferich Wagner was born in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1947, as the great grandson of composer Richard Wagner and the great-great grandson of composer-piano virtuoso Franz Liszt. He received a Ph.D. in musicology, German philology, and philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1977 and a Business Degree from Bocconi University in Milan in 1985. He works internationally as a multimedia lecturer, director (stage, video, radio), music historian, and a writer whose works have been translated and published in 11 languages, including his autobiography, Twilight Of The Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy. His international humanitarian, cultural, and artistic activities have earned several distinguished awards including The Eternal Flame-Anne Frank Award of the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust and The Award of Excellence of the United Nations Society of Writers and Artists in New York City in 1999.
AOP Presentations
July 29, 2007:
Staged workshop of opera
Collaboration with IVAI, Tel Aviv. Janice Levin Auditorium, Tel Aviv Yafo Music Center, Tel Aviv, Israel.
May 18, 2005:
Full Concert Reading
Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. Included discussion with Gottfried Wagner and Yehuda Nir.
May 17 & 19, 2005:
Concert reading of scenes
Part of an evening of new music by On the Edge. The Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Peter Norton Symphony Space, Broadway and 95 th St,, NYC
July 18, 2004:
Reading of excerpts.
Part of the exhibition Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW , Washington, D.C.
May 8 & 10, 2003:
Concert reading of scenes
The Village Temple. 33 East 12th Street, NYC
May 30-31, 2002:
Concert Reading of Act I
Lighthouse International. 111 E. 59 th St., NYC
March 10, 2002:
Concert reading of scenes
Co-production with Manhattan School of Music and Encompass Music Theater, Opera Index, with WQXR’s Midge Woolsey. Manhattan School of Music, Hubbard Hall, NYC
Jan. 24, 26, & 27, 2002:
Concert reading of Act I, scenes 1-3
Lighthouse International & Ann Goodman Hall, NYC
May 10, 2001:
Orchestral reading of scenes
Co-production with New York City Opera. West Park Presbyterian Church, 86th and Amsterdam Ave., NYC. Included panel discussion with Gottfried Wagner.
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