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.
