Seattle’s Music of Remembrance revives two acclaimed commissions

Mina Miller is convinced that music can make a difference in the world.

“I am the child of parents whose entire families were annihilated in the Holocaust, so I grew up with a visceral awareness of the power of memory — of the stories that need to be told,” she said during a recent interview.

Determined to “rediscover and keep alive voices that refuse to be silenced,” Miller left a tenured university position to found Music of Remembrance 25 years ago. The Seattle-based MOR soon began commissioning new works to present alongside music by figures whose voices had been cut off by the Holocaust. To date, the organization has commissioned a total of 45 works.

“Another Sunrise” and “For a Look or a Touch” are among this legacy of commissions. Through the medium of chamber opera, they address the trauma of an Auschwitz survivor and the Nazi persecution of gays, respectively. Jake Heggie, one of the most successful composers on the opera scene today, wrote the music for these one-act operas, which MOR will present in a new staging by Erich Parce on May 21 to conclude its anniversary season. The production will then tour to San Francisco and Chicago.

Partnering with librettist Gene Scheer, Heggie has received five major commissions from MOR to date. The most recent of these, “Before It All Goes Dark,” involves the story of a Vietnam War veteran who discovers he is the heir to a priceless art collection that had been looted by the Nazis. Originally scheduled to be unveiled at the May concert, it has been postponed to 2024.

In its place, Miller has designed a double bill comprising the first two commissions Heggie and Scheer completed for MOR. Her association with Heggie goes back to 2005, when Miller was seeking a composer to engage with the topic of gay people being persecuted in the Holocaust. In town for Seattle Opera’s production of his Graham Greene-inspired opera “The End of the Affair,” Heggie was introduced to Miller by Speight Jenkins, the company’s general director at the time.

“There were no musical responses to that subject that she knew of,” Heggie recalled in a Zoom conversation. He discovered that many survivors in the early postwar decades had gone underground and “never told their stories.”

At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Heggie and Scheer eventually discovered the journal of Manfred Lewin, a young Jew in Nazi Berlin who was murdered at Auschwitz. His lover, Gad Beck, was also gay and Jewish but evaded deportation and worked for the resistance. “For a Look or a Touch,” which MOR premiered in 2007, transforms their story into an emotionally gripping chamber opera that has since been staged in Canada and Europe.

“Another Sunrise” distills the memoirs of Krystyna Zywulska, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz. “Diving into her true story of survival has inspired me in ways I never could have predicted,” says soprano Caitlin Lynch. She will reprise the role, which she created for MOR’s premiere of “Another Sunrise” in 2012.

“It was a real touchstone for me creatively,” Heggie says of “For a Look or a Touch.” “It changed my perspective on what opera can be and how we can tell stories.” Miller, who is also a professional pianist, likewise points to their collaboration as a “transformative experience” that has significantly shaped MOR’s identity.

“It’s one thing to read headlines in the newspaper and quite another to realize there are real people behind these stories, with real emotions and real lives,” Miller says. Through its commissions, MOR has increasingly underscored the relevance of the past to present-day threats to human rights.

From the start, Miller wanted to represent a broad spectrum of voices targeted in the Holocaust. She has expanded that impulse over the past decade to include marginalized groups beyond the Holocaust, such as the incarceration of Japanese Americans in the Second World War and the separation of families at the Mexico-U.S. border.

In the years since Miller first got to know Heggie, the San Francisco-based composer and pianist, now 62, has become one of the most widely performed opera composers around the world. His breakthrough, “Dead Man Walking,” tackles the issue of capital punishment and has become the most frequently staged new opera of the 21st century since its premiere in 2000.

Bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, who has been cast in the lead male role in “Dead Man Walking,” which will open New York’s Metropolitan Opera’s season this September, will sing Manfred in MOR’s “For a Look or a Touch”; his lover Gad is a non-singing role and will be played by the actor Curt Branom (Heggie’s spouse). “What we do in music is to give voice and tell stories that otherwise would remain unheard and be forgotten,” Heggie says. “But we need to do so respectfully, in a way that doesn’t sensationalize but that inspires and enlightens.”