Although the actual composition of “Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk)” took only three years, the subject has haunted Shulamit Ran for nearly 40 years, ever since she first saw S. Ansky’s famous play — also titled “The Dybbuk” — as a young girl in her native Israel.
“It’s the kind of play you don’t forget, so passionate and full of drama — it left a very powerful impression. The moment where out of Leya’s beautiful, delicate body comes the voice of her dead beloved — this is an extraordinary moment that remains with me to this day,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago composer, refering to the heroine of both play and opera.
Beyond the theatrical thrills Ran took away from her first exposure to “The Dybbuk,” the Ansky drama — inspired by Eastern European Jewish folklore — spoke strongly to her heritage as an Israeli Jew. Ran held onto the memory throughout her adolescence and into adulthood; it was almost as though she was fated to lend her own musical voice to this mystical, occult tale of what she terms “a great and unusual love” from beyond the grave.
Fate, in this instance, had a little help from Lyric Opera of Chicago.
No sooner had the Lyric installed the University of Chicago composer as its fifth Brena and Lee Freeman Sr. composer-in-residence in the spring of 1994 but Ran met composer Hugo Weisgall, then director of the Lyric’s composer-in-residence program (he died in March). Weisgall himself thought “The Dybbuk” would make a wonderful opera and put Ran in touch with his friend Charles Kondek, who had supplied him with the libretto for Weisgall’s “Esther,” which the New York City Opera premiered in 1993.
Ran and Kondek hit it off, and immediately they began to hammer out a synopsis of what would become “Between Two Worlds.” The first act was presented in a private workshop performance last June and the entire work finished in February.
Ran’s first opera will receive its world premiere next weekend in a fully staged production by the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists at the DePaul Merle Reskin Theatre. Arthur Fagen will conduct, with staging by Jonathan Eaton and a production design by Danila Korogodsky and Christine A. Solger.
For every composer, tackling a first opera involves a quantum leap of creative energy, not least because so many elements must come together in musico-dramatic harmony. But the 47-year-old Ran points out that she already has a body of vocal works to her credit and that, moreover, many of her nonvocal pieces have subliminal dramatic scenarios — they are, in a sense, closet operas.
“It’s not that I’ve written such a huge amount of vocal music but that each work came at a key point in my artistic evolution,” she explains. With hindsight, she now can see that each piece signified an important signpost on the road to writing an actual opera. “If in the past I thought of instruments as characters, now I have real characters to work with, and singing ones at that.”
Creative solutions
In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a wandering soul believed to enter and control a person’s body. In Ran and Kondek’s opera the central figures are the beautiful Leya (sung by Mary Jane Kania) and the student Khonnon (Matthew Polenzani), who were promised to each other before birth. After Leya’s father breaks the marriage contract and finds a wealthier match for her, Khonnon dies in despair and his spirit — the dybbuk — inhabits the grieving Leya before the wedding. A ritual exorcism violently casts out Khonnon’s spirit, who returns to claim Leya as his rightful bride. The lovers are reunited “in the endless night of the endless world between worlds.”
Boiling down a very long and talky four-act play involving some 35 to 40 roles into two concise operatic acts was just one of many challenges facing the composer and librettist. Ran remarks that for her to accept the ruthless cuts necessary to adapt Ansky’s play to the leaner, distilled version that is the opera, it helped to be married to a surgeon (Dr. Abraham Lofton, of Sycamore, Ill.).
No stranger to Lyric, Kondek — who wrote the libretto for former resident composer Lee Goldstein’s “The Fan,” produced here in 1989 — admits he approached the task with no little trepidation.
“The major problem is that `The Dybbuk’ is a classic piece of Yiddish folklore,” says Kondek, who lives with his family in New Jersey. “It’s like doing something with `Hamlet,’ which also is so famous and so complete in itself. The Ansky play is so imbued with kabbalah (a system of Jewish theosophy based on a mystical reading of the Scriptures) and Jewish tradition about which I admittedly knew very little.
“But after re-reading the play several times, I found that at the heart of it is this simple story about young lovers who cannot express their love to one another because of the mores of the society in which they live. And of course there are the themes of death and redemption — perfect for an opera.”
One seemingly insurmountable problem was how to deal with the character of Khonnon. A romantic leading man who dies in the first act makes no sense whatsoever in opera. Kondek found his solution in the world between worlds that was the original title of the play and that Ran and Kondek chose as the title of their opera. It is a realm only suggested in the play but brought front and center in the opera — the strange limbo between reality and the supernatural where the living and dead intermingle.
“What better medium exists to express this extraordinary world than the mystery of music and the ritual of theater?” says director Eaton.
Thus the first scene of “Between Two Worlds” opens with a misterioso chorus of wandering souls — the voices of those who have died before their time — singing fragmented lines over slithery trills in the strings: “Dead, dead, dead. Longing for sun. Still craving love. Wishing, eager, longing. We cradle unborn children and weep.”
Not only did this device give the opera choral scenes that would allow all 13 members of the Opera Center to take part in the show, but it allowed Polenzani, as the hapless Khonnon, to appear at will throughout the opera, plead his own case during the trial scene and join in a passionate love duet at the end.
Frustrated love has, of course, been like mother’s milk to opera since the Florentine Camerata invented the art form around 1600. In “Between Two Worlds” the sheer intensity of Leya’s and Khonnon’s love enables them to reach beyond the realm of the mundane to the realm of the spirit.
And Ran’s music powerfully bridges the chasm that separates these worlds. The composer explains that although she never quotes any Jewish folkloric materials directly in her through-composed score, she does use the orchestra of 25 players to evoke a specific time and place in Eastern European Yiddish culture. “It’s much more fun for me to compose something anew,” she says of her working method. “I work with simple, suggestive materials that allow for more complex combinations later on my scores.”
For example, at the moment when Khonnon hears the news that Leya is to marry someone else, a very slow Hassidic dance tune begins — what many listeners would recognize as Jewish wedding music. The village men slowly begin to dance, eventually growing much more frenzied. “I felt this music had to be absolutely simple to create a dramatic juxtaposition with Khonnon’s later going mad and dying,” Ran says.
Tension-free atmosphere
Bringing a brand-new work to life in the theater can be fraught with creative turmoil and clashes of temperament. But both Ran and Kondek report that, once they had agreed on how to distill the essence of the Ansky play, very early in their collaboration, “Between Two Worlds” took form remarkably smoothly.
Ran’s take on the partnership is short and to the point. “I’m having a really good feeling about the team aspect of this,” she said as the Lyric Center forces were about to enter the final weeks of rehearsal.
For his part, Kondek says, “Although we — Shulamit, myself, Jonathan, Arthur and Danila — are very different people, the process of putting this opera together has been a joy. We discovered a mutual passion for oysters on the half shell: Shaw’s Crab House has been our meeting place. There have been no ego problems or screaming matches whatsoever. Yesterday I gave the director four pages of notes from the rehearsal, and he accepted them gladly.”
Complicating things for Ran during the gestation of the new work have been her other professional obligations — as composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony, a position she has held since 1990, and her teaching duties at the University of Chicago, where she has been a professor of composition since 1973. She’s also the mother of two young children.
Ran was granted a year’s sabbatical from the CSO during the 1995-96 season so she could concentrate on composing her opera, and the U. of C. music department put her on a half-time teaching schedule that she will continue next year while she fulfills several outstanding commissions.
For the Baltimore Symphony next spring she is readying an orchestral piece honoring the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel. Also on her docket is a Viola Concerto for the German violist Tabea Zimmermann, a Piano Trio for the Peabody Trio and — scheduled for the year 2000 — yet another symphonic work, this one for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
It is, of course, a risky business for any composer to predict how long a shelf life a new opera will enjoy; certainly the track record for second or third performances of new operas in our century has not been auspicious. Ran says she will be grateful just for the experience of having done her first opera at a major opera house — grateful, too, for having been bitten by the operatic bug.
Ran and Kondek already are talking about collaborating on a second stage work. Ran chooses to be mum on the subject so as not to jinx it. Kondek will reveal only that their second opera again will be “a Jewish-flavored piece.” Says he, with a good-humored shrug: “Maybe I should convert to Judaism!”
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Lyric Opera Center performances of “Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk)” take place at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. next Sunday at the DePaul Merle Reskin Theatre, 60 E. Balbo Drive. (312-332-2244, ext. 500). In related activities, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies will screen a 1937 film version of “The Dybbuk” at 1 p.m. Monday; there is no admission charge. Danny Newman, Lyric’s longtime publicist, will lecture on the making of the film at noon Tuesday at the institute; admission is $12 and $10, and reservations are required (312-922-4950).
