Two Remain • Program Note
In 2005, Gene Scheer and I started an incredible, indelible, life-changing journey with Music of Remembrance and its artistic director, Mina Miller. She commissioned us to create a work about the persecution of gays during the Holocaust, which became a stage work called For a Look or a Touch and received its premiere in 2007. In 2012, she invited us to create a stage work based on the life of the Polish dissident and Holocaust survivor Krystyna Zywulska, and this became the one-act opera Another Sunrise. Mina then invited us to create a song cycle based on Zywulska’s lyrics, written while she was a prisoner in Auschwitz as way to survive the brutality of her life there. That became Farewell, Auschwitz (2013), using Zywulska’s Polish lyrics in free, poetic translations by Gene Scheer.
With those three big pieces already in existence, Mina had the idea of combining all three to create a full-length evening. At first, we considered it might be the three pieces on the same program. But never scared of a big challenge, we decided instead to reconceive Another Sunrise and combine it with the songs of Farewell, Aushwitz for the first act of an opera, leaving For a Look or a Touch as the second act. This work received its premiere in 2016 as Out of Darkness. But it needed a lot of work. So we revised it extensively, added several new characters, plot twists and music to the first act and reconceived the entire evening.
The final work received its first production at the Atlanta Opera in 2018, directed by Tomer Zvulun. Feeling that the piece had reached its final incarnation, we renamed the work Two Remain with Act One titled “Krystyna” and Act Two titled “Gad.”