In 2012, Howard Reich received a daunting assignment: to interview the writer, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who would be awarded the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize at a public event later that year.
Then the paper’s jazz critic, Reich clocked a short phone interview with Wiesel for the announcement story. During the call, Wiesel turned the tables and asked Reich what he did at the Tribune. After he answered, Wiesel pressed further: “Then why are you doing this story?”
Reich then made an admission that would have been unimaginable even a decade earlier: He was the son of Holocaust survivors. His father and Wiesel had been liberated from Buchenwald together; his mother, who died in 2025, was plagued by PTSD that intensified in the early 2000s. Reich wrote about her experience in a 2003 Tribune column, which became the book and documentary film “Prisoner of Her Past.”
“That not only was the first time that my friends and colleagues at the Tribune found out that I’m the son of survivors, but kids I went to school with in Skokie told me, ‘Hey, I’m the child of survivors, also’ — and I was 49 years old when that story ran,” Reich, now 72, recalls. “I cannot tell you how little this subject was discussed as I was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.”
The code of silence that surrounded the Shoah is nearly unimaginable today, when Holocaust education can, in some cases, even take the form of an opera. Reaping from his own writing, Reich supplied the libretto for “The Dialogue of Memories,” a one-act arriving at the Studebaker Theater on May 23 and 24.
In about an hour of music and text, “The Dialogue of Memories” weaves together details from both “Prisoner of Her Past” and Reich’s “The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel,” published three years after the writer’s death in 2016. The Seattle-based Music of Remembrance will present the production, just as it did 2024’s “Before It All Goes Dark,” another opera based on Reich’s writing.
This time, Reich is not only the opera’s librettist but a character onstage, portrayed by the tenor Dominic Armstrong. (That’s been an occasional source of amusement among the creative team: Armstrong is nearly a foot taller than Reich.) His mother, Sonia, is also a character, as is Wiesel, whom Reich credits with “chang(ing) the world’s perception of survivors more than anyone.” He acts as a sort of sage counsel throughout the opera, helping Reich navigate his mother’s trauma.
“It was a privilege to get to ask Elie Wiesel the questions I never could, or never did, ask my parents,” Reich reflects.
Wiesel is most known for the 1958 book “Night,” drawn from his incarceration in Nazi concentration camps alongside his father. His father died at Buchenwald in January 1945, sick and beaten by both a camp officer and other inmates. He wrote unsparingly of the guilt and loss of faith that followed, giving voice to those who lived through the Holocaust and the millions more who inherited its horrors.
He later used his platform to oppose other genocides worldwide, whether in Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda or Cambodia. His views were not without controversy. Near the end of his life, Wiesel drew criticism, including within Israel, for criticizing then-President Barack Obama’s opposition to Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem.
Reich considers “Dialogue of Memories” the natural next step in a career spent inching closer to the “radioactive” center of his family’s life, the Holocaust. That radioactivity first spiked in the late 1970s, with the attempted neo-Nazi march on Skokie. At the time, 1 in 10 Skokie residents was a Holocaust survivor.
Reich’s parents were among them. He remembers his father, “ashen,” placing frantic calls to relatives as news of the march spread.
“For most of my growing up, I couldn’t even touch or get near it — it was just too volatile, too explosive,” Reich says of the Holocaust. “It took degrees of getting more comfortable doing this, with finding a vocabulary for doing this, which is now, I see, a lifelong process.”
Music of Remembrance founder and artistic director Mina Miller says Reich’s story echoes her own. She is also the child of Holocaust survivors, growing up in New York City. Miller has early memories of her parents submitting classified ads to The Forward, then still a Yiddish paper, to seek out family members from whom they’d been separated.
But at home, the Shoah was strictly off-limits.
“When everyone else went to their extended family for Thanksgiving and birthday parties, I would always ask, ‘How come we don’t have relatives?’ My parents said, ‘They all died in the war.’ That’s all you heard — ‘they all died in the war,’” Miller says.
She founded Music of Remembrance in 1998, at first with a focus on telling stories related to the Holocaust. Since then, the organization’s purview has expanded, presenting stories addressing everything from the Armenian genocide to migrant detention camps run by the U.S. government.
As “Dialogue of Memories” began to take shape, Miller matchmade Reich with Tom Cipullo, a New York-based composer who already has two Music of Remembrance operas under his belt: “After Life,” imagining a postmortem meeting between Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso, and “The Parting,” about the Jewish-Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti. Reich watched three of Cipullo’s operas ahead of time “to get familiar with his way of thinking” and agreed that he was the right composer for the job.
“As we know, music says things that words can’t,” Reich says. “His music is sort of a combination of this soaring lyricism, but also a lot of harmonic grist and tension, too.”
According to Cipullo, sections of the score reference Gershwinesque symphonic jazz — a nod to Reich’s long career as both a jazz and classical critic — as well as Robert Schumann’s “Kinderszenen” to lend Reich’s childhood memories a nostalgic twinge.
Cipullo says he flavored his musical writing accordingly to fit all these real-life figures. “After Life’s” score “was very rhythmic, very vital” — an outgrowth of Picasso and Stein’s larger-than-life personalities. And while “The Parting” evoked the passion of Radnóti’s verse, Cipullo strove to capture the “tenderness” he associated with Wiesel’s, having admired the author from afar when he taught at Boston University.
“I’m sort of like a Hollywood movie biographer,” says Cipullo, who attended Boston University for graduate school. “It’s all about how I perceive a person musically.”
As for Reich, pictures with Wiesel still take pride of place in his office. As he spoke to the Tribune, a photo of him and Wiesel, engrossed in conversation on the stage of Orchestra Hall, peered over his shoulder.
“I’m never speaking to Elie Wiesel in this opera, or in real life, without my mother and my father being there,” Reich reflects. “That’s part of who I am. … Without that, I’m just another interviewer.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
If you go
“The Dialogue of Memories” is presented at 7:30 p.m. May 23 and 3 p.m. May 24 at the Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan Ave., tickets $50-$85 and more information at musicofremembrance.org
