“I’d like to think that it’s all my canvas” - an interview with Alex Weiser

But being really personally interested in this content, I just fell in love with the place. And I sit in on every single program that they do, so I’m getting my kind of unofficial graduate education in Jewish studies. At some point in my first year, the summer program of Yiddish instruction was coming around and I was welcome to sit in on classes and learn some Yiddish. So I did, and I loved it, and it opened up this amazing world to me.

And then I had a commission from Roulette, and they basically just tell you to do whatever you want. So I decided, well, I just learned Yiddish and found some really cool poetry. I’m going to set some of it to music. This ended up being and all the days were purple—it was this meditation on life and death and finding meaning in the world through Yiddish and English poetry and instrumental music—crafting a journey through contemplating some of these ideas with these texts at my disposal. It was a meaningful piece for me.

As my knowledge of Yiddish grew and my exposure to different things by working at YIVO and reading for fun on the side has expanded, I have returned to Yiddish a lot in my work.

JR: Your song cycle, Coney Island Days, is set to the words of your grandmother, Irene Weiser. How did that project come about?

AW: My grandmother was sick. I knew she’d be passing away, and I knew I wanted to do something with some of her stories. I was interested in this idea: what’s my connection to this past? How far can I trace back my personal lived experiential connection to this world that I was born into? That question naturally leads to my grandparents and the experiences that I have had vicariously through the stories that they’ve told.

So I recorded her telling some of these stories for an hour one day, and I transcribed them. She would kind of trail off and tell different stories and come back. I grouped the texts a little bit by story and then very loosely edited them. I really stuck pretty close to her exact words—I didn’t actually add any words, but in some cases I removed a word here or there. But in many cases, I left things that were hesitations or asides because it really felt a part of her way of speaking, and that felt like a really important part of it.

JR: The nuances of verbal expression are so key in your work in opera, as well. It’s always struck me as so invigorating to have a medium in which the norm is performances that happen in a wide variety of languages with text that is often subtitled. It seems to me that there’s so much potential in that factor.

AW: I totally agree—the same is true in art song. In a way, that was a big part of why I felt so emboldened to just dive into doing things in Yiddish, because I was so used to studying and listening to and enjoying music that wasn’t in a language that I was a native speaker of. And I learned in school: you can learn German, French, Italian, and you can enjoy art song and opera. So that definitely felt like an invitation — “OK, I kind of know I can do stuff with this.”

JR: You draw extensively from the breadth of musical history in your work, but you also engage extensively with social and political histories. How does the medium of opera fit into your vision for exploring the past and the future? Your opera State of the Jews is the most explicitly historical, and it’s also the opera you wrote first.

AW: I think of music in general as being a medium through which we can think about our relationship with the world. A big part of that is thinking about the world that we’ve received and how we fit into it. That’s the thing that really drew me and my friend librettist Ben Kaplan to Theodor Herzl. His story is about grappling with what it means to be a Jew in the modern world. We brought this out through the lens of his disagreements with Julie, his wife, really teasing out what their different perspectives are. Their interactions are set against the backdrop of history and political machinations. This feels like it’s the perfect story for opera because it’s both about these very personal emotional questions, but then also how they live in this larger meta-historical way. It allows us to explore the bigger ideas that are at stake within those personal interactions.

JIt’s always operating on those two levels: how do I feel and how do I relate to the world? What does it mean to me and how do I live? But then also, well, what does that mean for how people are going to organize themselves and for how history is going to change and how we’re going to tell stories about this? How are we going to understand what happened and make sense of it and fit it into the way that we have understood things for generations?

I’m also fascinated with the way Herzl’s story becomes, in the collective Jewish imagination, a story about Exodus. Herzl is thought of as a kind of modern day Moses leading the people to the promised land. Whatever you think about that politically, that is the image. It’s so compelling that we can at once see this as a story about a real person who had questions about his identity that many people still have to this day, and yet we also understand it collectively in this larger-than-life way. That juxtaposition is so interesting, and I think opera is a really good medium for exploring that.

JR: In The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, you take up historical questions, as well—the intersection of the legacies of both the self and community.

AW: The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language is a story that is a kind of myth within the Yiddish-enthusiast community. I heard about the story initially as a kind of joke—that there is no comprehensive Yiddish dictionary because they once tried to make one and they couldn’t agree on the spelling, and so they never got past the letter alef.

But actually, when you go deeper, it is a really interesting story that speaks to both the richness and the incredible depth of the Yiddish language and of the intellectual world of it, and also of the tragic, incomplete nature of it, that we never got a chance to tell all those stories. We never got a chance to finish that dictionary.

And then we tell that story through the personal commitments and passions of these two individuals who worked at YIVO, which is where I work, and where Ben Kaplan, the librettist works. It is a story that exists on these different levels, and we tried to bring that out in how we told it by adding an element of the supernatural.

In the historical record, Yudel Mark is pursuing this project with a kind of quasi-religious fervor. When he talks about the project, he talks about words as being like Kabbalistic sparks—part of the religious act of repairing the world is saving these sparks. This is a metaphor that he uses, and he’s not a Kabbalist, but that really speaks to the deeper meaning of the project. So we tried to bring that to life by imagining the letters speaking to him as divine messengers.

Again, it brings it to this meta plane where it is a kind of religious story. These moments in the opera of the alefs speaking to Yudel Mark are modeled on selections from the book of Ezekiel: the valley of the dry bones at the very opening of the opera, and in the middle of the opera, when Yudel Mark decides to go to Jerusalem, that moment is modeled on inverting the beginning of the book of Ezekiel. At the beginning of the book of Ezekiel, the presence of God leaves the Temple, and that represents the diaspora and the destruction of the Temple.

JR: The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language explores ideas of speech and silence in a plurality of ways—silences that are momentary, silences that last for generations, and those that are perhaps eternal. Opera seems to offer interesting potential for engaging with both speech and its absence.

AW: Yeah, with The Great Dictionary, obviously there’s the fear of the silence of Yiddish, Yiddish disappearing, but there’s also the fact that one of the letters of the Yiddish alphabet that comes to life in that piece is the silent alef. That was one of the specific points of disagreement between Yudel Mark, the person creating the dictionary, and Max Weinreich, the person overseeing the institutional support. They disagreed about the role that the silent alef should play in the spelling of the language itself. So it’s this kind of wonderful little detail, the idea that you have the silent alef as a character who really sings. At the end of the opera, we get a whole aria from the silent alef in which she reflects on her experience of history and what it might mean to be a letter that has been used for generations and generations to record the experiences of Jewish people and history, bearing witness to it.

I think there’s something interesting about the role that music can play to fill that silence or to bring to life what is otherwise unspoken—what we feel, but don’t have the ability to articulate—and to allow us to access something that we can’t access otherwise. The Great Dictionary is an opera about the Yiddish language that’s partly in Yiddish, but it’s mostly in English, and it’s really meant for an English-speaking audience. So it’s really about how we connect with this thing that we fundamentally are not connected with—the music can help us do that.

JR: It’s interesting, too, that the music both speaks and illuminates where the text has gone silent. Your opera Tevye’s Daughters, which is based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, also takes up this dynamic. Where the narrative of The Great Dictionary is oriented around the letters of the alphabet, Tevye’s Daughters is anchored by letters that are being sent as correspondence.

AW: There’s a great tradition in Yiddish literature of epistolary stories. So that was something that librettist Stephanie Fleischmann and I were thinking about with Tevye’s Daughters, this idea of letters as a form of storytelling.

The other literary conceit that is so key in the original stories is the act of storytelling itself. In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye is narrating what’s happening—the original stories are really just Tevye telling the stories to Sholem Aleichem (who is both the author and a silent character). That’s something we also play with in the piece—who’s telling the story, with the different characters taking moments to break the fourth wall and speak to the audience and say, “this is what’s happening”, or “this is where the story begins”, framing it for us. It’s a fun, playful thing theatrically, but also a way of creating this connection with the original.

JR: Sholem Aleichem’s story Shprintse is the most prominent source for Tevye’s Daughters, but could you talk a bit about the other sources that you and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann worked with as you created the opera?

AW: We wanted to draw out some of the aspects of the story that would bring the women’s world to life. The original story is told from Tevye’s perspective, so what would it mean to tell the story from Shprintse and the other sisters’ perspectives? In order to do that, we did a lot of reading of Yiddish short stories and poetry by women, people like Kadia Molodowsky and Salomea Perl, and Bella Chagall has wonderful memoirs of her childhood and the ritual world of it—really gorgeous writing.

And then also, the other big thing was tkhines, Yiddish prayers that are meant for women; again, to bring to life the beautiful world of wonder and ritual and sanctity that Tevye is not telling us about because he’s not part of it. But it’s a really important part of understanding this world and of appreciating it, and it’s a part of the story that’s been left out because it wasn’t Sholem Aleichem’s experience. So we read a lot of tkhines, we read books about tkhines, and we created our own tkhines that thread through this opera. And they, in particular, touch on the moments of the rituals that women perform that men don’t perform, which are, in particular, lighting candles for the Sabbath, baking challah, and also ritual purification after menstruation or in connection with a wedding. So we wanted to thread that through the piece to recapture what has been lost and what we’ve collectively forgotten, and to offer a richer alternative way of engaging with this history.

JR: Because Tevye’s Daughters shares its source material with Fiddler on the Roof, which is so familiar to many, you’re able to explore the idea of tradition in multiple dimensions at once. Both works navigate the intimacy of family traditions of mourning, of celebration, of prayer and blessing, but Tevye’s Daughters also engages with elements of the stories that may be new to audiences.

AW: I think part of what drew me to telling that story of Shprintse is this idea that we have this collective understanding of this particular aspect of the Jewish past, but what did we leave out? What did we forget? And Yiddish is part of that, but there are so many other things. The story of Shprintse is part of what we left out and what we forgot — her tragic suicide. We think of certain narratives about antisemitism and Jewish dispossession as the story of the shtetl. It’s like, okay, we were poor and there were pogroms and we left, and then life was better in America. Something along those lines. But actually, some of the tragedy of what happened had nothing to do with any of those things. And some of the joy and richness had nothing to do with any of those things. There’s so much more to the story that we can recapture.

And so yeah, Tevye’s Daughters is very much about trying to go back and find those things, both the tragedy that we’ve forgotten, that’s been submerged in our collective unconscious, but also so much of the beauty and the joy — of ritual, of prayer, of food, and of the domestic life.

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately, looking back on what we’ve done with this piece, is the great theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel and his book, The Sabbath. He talks about the idea of the Sabbath as a “palace in time,” and this idea that ritual separates sacred time out as this whole separate thing. I think that that’s kind of what Tevye’s Daughters is really about—prayer and memory and ritual and food, all of these help us access this holy time, this separate plane of experience and of existence. And that’s really special to think about in terms of continuity—the idea that we’re accessing this separate plane of existence that, in a way, is actually the same exact plane of existence that our ancestors accessed. Maybe they did it in a different place and they did it in a different language, and maybe they did it with rituals that are a little bit different than ours. But in a way, they were accessing this same special place. And I think that’s what that piece is about, bridging that gap and finding that special place.

JR: In the chamber instrumentation of Tevye’s Daughters, you use one violin, one viola, and three cellos, which is quite unusual. Could you talk a bit about that choice?

AW: A big part of what is distinctive about how we’re telling the story is the idea that the pond that Shprintse drowns herself in, and that the pond that our character Rose is swimming in the backyard of the home in the Catskills, where this story is retold, are this point of connection between the two worlds. And it’s a place of horror and death, but it’s also a place of freedom and choice and escape in both worlds. And so that is a really big part of the storytelling, the theatricality of our opera. The music I wrote to evoke the pond is this really deep murky music. It opens the opera, shows up in many different forms throughout the opera, and also—in this really transformed form—ends the opera. I wanted to lean into that with orchestration and have it feel a little idiosyncratic, more low and murky throughout, to honor this storytelling conceit.

JR: I found the balance in the orchestration so effective. It really mirrored my experience with the characters—familiar and unfamiliar at the same time

As an extension of this idea, thinking about manifestations of awe, or even the sacred, it seems to me that one of the things that opera as a genre does especially well is to inspire wonder. And it happens in your work both on this grand scale—ideas that are huge in terms of their impact on people, communities, and political entities—and also in evoking the wonder of the everyday.

AW: I think that musically, I’m really drawn to, and connect with, prayer and ritual and these moments of wonder. So those are the parts of writing this opera that come most naturally to me. I am really happy that they frame the opera in an important way because I think it does really create this sense of throughline, that we’re constantly returning to these really special musical places.

JR: I always wonder, in any kind of artistic process, is the ease where the magic is happening, or is it the challenge? I guess it’s always a combination of both, right—it’s absurd to think of it in this kind of binary way, but it is interesting to think of just in the sense of how flow states operate.

AW: As a listener, what I’m most in awe of are things that are so simple that I’m not sure how they came about. It’s so simple, it’s so elegant, but who would’ve thunk it?

Whereas there’s so much craft and time and labor that has to go into these things that are intricate and complicated. And sometimes things need to be that way. It’s not a bad thing, but I’m more personally drawn to and excited by the kind of things that sound effortless. I think that the truth is that it’s very hard to write things that sound effortless.

When you’re trying to write something that sounds complicated, and it is complicated, you have all your years of experience and all the tricks in your toolbox to get you there. But when you’re trying to write something that sounds effortless and magical and beautiful, it’s more that you have to keep chipping away until you discover it. It’s more an act of discovery than crafting, and it’s more an act of almost receiving in the prophetic sense.