The 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and the subsequent film adaptation have both created controversy over their putative fictionalising of the Holocaust. It’s a brave composer, therefore, who takes the subject as the basis of an opera, as the 23-year-old Noah Max has done for his A Child in Striped Pyjamas.
As with Boyne, Max makes no apologies for the fictional elements in the story: it is of course a poetic imagining of a horrific Holocaust scenario not a documentary.
Briefly, the story involves the friendship developed by two nine-year-olds on either side of a barbed-wire fence bordering a concentration camp (identified in the novel as Auschwitz). One is the eponymous child in the dehumanising apparel given to the Jewish prisoners; the other the child of the camp commandant. Digging under the fence to join his Jewish friend, the German boy is swept up with him into a gas chamber.
Max has been familiar with the story for many years, but only during the Covid lockdown found the time and the inspiration for his operatic treatment, which he conducts himself in a simple but effective staging by Guido Martin-Brandis.
It’s necessarily an intense, harrowing drama with no opportunity for light relief (unless one counts the parodically boastful repetition of the first vowel in “Fatherland” by the commandant). But Max offers variety in the form of instrumental texture and vocal register.
The ensemble (four strings, clarinet and trumpet provided by the skilled Echo Ensemble) creates sonorities with much spiky interlacing, resembling, perhaps, barbed wire, but coalescing intermittently into more humane consonances. Sometimes the latter reference synagogue service music, but alert listeners may have caught the heroic theme of Wagner’s Siegfried on the trumpet.
The parts of the children are written not for boys but for a soprano and mezzo-soprano. The stratospheric notation of the former part (admirably executed by Susanna MacRae) enhances tension, at the same time suggesting unreality: the story, after all, is a fable or parable. The sober ending (contrasting with the pandemonium of the film version) invokes the mourning ritual of the Hebrew Kaddish chant.
Both acts move to a powerful climax. The first ends with the German child, under duress, betraying their Jewish friend. The second act peaks with frenetic dissonances at the point of the children’s deaths, but wisely, perhaps, it is not only the Father who grieves: the entwined bodies, along with the incantation and music of calm reflection, invites universal grief.
The Jewish child is sung ably by Rachel Roper and the bestial Lieutenant Kotler by Xavier Hetherington. Jeremy Huw Williams deploys his sonorous voice to advantage as the Father, initially presented as a decent man, but soon descending to vicious anti-Semitism. While the latter may avoid the accusation (brought against the book) of humanising a murderous monster, incidentally, it is less convincing in dramaturgical terms.
