Singing Only Softly (2019)

Creators' Notes:

We have no recording of Anne Frank’s voice; instead, it comes to us from the pages of her diary. But passages in Anne’s diary about her sexuality and her frustrations with her family were redacted by her editors. The story that director and dramaturg Alaina Viau wanted to tell was not that of Anne the martyr, as she has at times been represented, but of Anne the young woman, as she represents herself. Inspired by Anne’s own words and by the rediscovered pages of the diary, librettist Monica Pearce has created original texts which show Anne maturing during her time in the ‘secret annex’. Anne’s self-awareness and self-representation are complex: neither an innocent, nor a martyr, neither ingenue, nor symbol, she reveals herself in her writing to be a young woman of courage and substance confronting her circumstances with as much humour and grace as those circumstances could allow. Imagining Anne's emotional world in the 'secret annex' was a daunting responsibility for all of us. Her perspective is our focus; the nightmare of her situation surrounds this song-opera but the opera itself – like Anne – resists it. This was not so much our decision as it was Anne’s: to focus on the humour and hope of her situation even in the face of horror, and to recognize that there were things she didn’t know. We have called this a ‘song-opera’: the episodic and single-voiced nature of Anne’s diary drew us to explore the tensions between conventional opera and the art song cycle. Song cycles and operas aren’t as far apart as they might seem. The episodic monodrama ‘As One’ (2014) has been hugely successful, and companies of all sizes stage song cycles, and commission composers to augment existing cycles into staged works. Anne’s diary invited us to build an episodic structure, echoing the entries (or letters) which she addressed to ‘Dear Kitty’. Each episode in our song-opera reveals a different side of Anne, while drawing us along the journey of her 'growing up' – including her changing relationships with her boyfriend Peter van Daan (van Pels) and with her parents – to her final days in the 'secret annex'. We chose not to reference the music of Anne’s time but instead to find a musical language that can – we hope – take on these shifting facets of Anne’s character, while driven by the intense, lyrical understanding of humanity that comes through all we know about her.

Loose Tea Music Theatre, 2019

Artists:

• Music Director - Cheryl Duvall
• Director - Alaina Viau
• Anne 1 - Sara Schabas, soprano
• Anne 2 - Gillian Grossman, soprano