This is what I wrote in the program book …
SIX MILLION AND ONE
Helena Citrónová is an opera. That is to say, it is a performance in which we accept the crazy notion that people walk around on a stage singing while surrounded by the surging sounds of a symphony orchestra. It deals with a subject that is par excellence “operatic” — a doomed, impossible and tragic love. By and large, it follows the conventions of opera — it’s divided into acts, utilizes a variety of musical structures, and has arias, duets and ensembles. Of all art forms opera is the least true to life, yet there is truth in opera. In moments that are most contrary to naturalism, opera reveals our true nature. Helena Citrónová is a work that asks questions both about our true nature, and about the nature of truth.
But Helena Citrónová was also a person, one of the millions whose lives were upended, transmuted, and terminated by the relentless machinery of the Third Reich. This real person is the inspiration for this opera. Some of the unlikeliest-seeming events in this opera actually happened to that real person. Other events, even “likely” ones, were invented to accommodate the exigencies of opera. Helena had been in the camp for some time before her encounter with Franz Wunsch. Helena never had a moment of indecision standing near a doorway in Vienna — that scene is definitely a “what if” moment — we do not know even if it is merely a fantasy.
Six million is a number: a number that cannot be comprehended. One is a person.
In a sense, in my opera, one must speak for six million. Because we need to at least try to comprehend that six million if we are to learn anything from our dark past. And to comprehend that those millions are all individual stories, all of them real people.
We will never know what was going on in these real people’s minds. We will never know for sure whether this was a transcendent love story or a tale of people doing whatever they could to survive, to create some fragile illusion of normalcy in an unbearable world. I’ve written a libretto that, read on its own, could be interpreted along a whole spectrum of alternate meanings.
But opera is music, not a libretto, and it’s in the music that I have told the truth as I see it. I believe that when you take away someone’s personhood, you diminish your own. I believe that Helena was a person who refused to let her personhood be taken from her, no matter what the cost, and that her refusal to do so may also have saved Franz Wunsch from complete descent into the abyss. I believe that even in the darkest corners of the universe, light exists — light must exist — and it is our commandment — our mitzvah — to search for the light — otherwise nothing has meaning.