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CCM professor Joel Hoffman has composed a new
opera, The Memory Game, based on the life of
Mordechai Gebertig, a Polish folk poet and composer.
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Act I
At rise, Joel Hoffman, age 6, is seated in his living room, watching the rain fall beyond a picture window. He yawns and sighs, having no idea that 43 years later, he will have two compositions played nearly simultaneously in Cincinnati during his tenure as a professor of composition at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. All he knows is that he wants to play something on his violin to reflect the rain outdoors. He calls to his mother, a concert violinist, and asks her to write down his ideas, and his first composition, Bored on Rainy Days, is born.
Act II
The time is 1998. Professor Hoffman is balancing a workload of teaching and composing. He receives a call from the dean of the music conservatory, who is working on creating a new complex and wants to commission Hoffman to write a piece that would "celebrate the new building's opening and involve as many students and faculty as possible."
Hoffman scratches his head and picks up the phone. He dials the number of a close friend, Henk Romijn Meijer, whom he met in 1985 at an artists' colony in Italy and asks him if he would write a libretto for a new opera Hoffman plans to compose. Meijer agrees and The Memory Game is born.
Hoffman considers the facts. Born in 1877, Mordechai Gebertig was a folk poet and composer. He achieved much acclaim in Poland, Europe and throughout the world both during and after his life. In recent times, Gebertig's work has evoked renewed interest, thanks to what Hoffman believes is "an attempt to reconcile the past with the present, as well as a serious and successful movement to revive Yiddish."
On a personal level, Hoffman knows he is somehow connected to Gebertig and his music. During a trip to Italy, Hoffman worked with a group of musicians and got involved in performing, arranging and composing Jewish folk music. Upon his return, as he composes, he finds snippets of folk stylings creeping into his concert music.
He decides that The Memory Game will combine operatic stylings with Gebertig's own music to tell the story of poet-composer's life, including his untimely death at the hands of the Nazis in 1942.
Act III
After four years of labor, The Memory Game is ready for its first audience in May 2003. Hoffman explains the story-line for the opera: "Mordechai, his wife and his three daughters are materialized in the present," he says. "They are compelled by an unseen force to tell the stories of their lives. They are charged with the responsibility of telling what it was like to be a part of the Jewish community in Krakow, Poland, from pre-World War I to mid-World War II."
The opera will have its world premiere on Friday in the Cohen Family Studio Theater at CCM. The event is the culmination of countless hours of work by students in the opera department at CCM and guest artists from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Opera and the cities of Cleveland, Berlin and Hanover, Germany.
At nearly the same time as the premiere of his first opera, Hoffman also debuts a work commissioned by Timothy Rub, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, to mark the opening of the Cincinnati Wing, the museum's tribute to artists who flourished in Cincinnati in the 19th and 20th centuries. For this event, Hoffman wrote Coast to Coast, which he describes as a "fun piece."
"It has a lot of train music (in it)," he relates. "Cincinnati was shaped to a large extent by trains. It's about going back and forth between different kinds of coasts -- geographical, musical sensibilities and worlds."
Hoffman has several more projects to complete before taking a break for the summer; his favorite is what he describes as "an intense New Music festival, called Music 03."
"In mid-June, we bring three very important composers to Cincinnati," he explains, "along with 22 young composers. They collaborate to perform 19 concerts and 14 masters classes." This year's professional lineup includes Louis Andriessen, Frederic Rzewski and Martin Bresnick. Hoffman anticipates something "very special."
Act IV
Following the festival, Hoffman will spend some time with his family, snorkeling on an island in Croatia. He is nowhere near ready for his final curtain call, but he's a long way from that rainy day that started it all.
THE MEMORY GAME, presented at UC's College-Conservatory of Music, will be performed on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
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