Sophia’s Forest

LIBRETTIST’S NOTE – Hannah Moscovitch

In 1908, my Romanian great-grandparents, Chaya Yankovitch and Chaim Moscovitch, left Bucharest and travelled across the ocean to Halifax, Canada. They left because Eastern European Jews were being massacred in a vicious wave of pogroms. In Canada, my great-grandparents thrived. They had children who had children who live today. The branch of my family that remained in Romania, however, all died. For my family, one journey marks the border between life and death. That journey is imprinted on my psyche and over the years it has taken on a mystical quality in my mind. Sophia’s Forest is an expression of that mysticism.

Eastern Europe and in particular the Balkans continue to be roiled by genocide and war right up and into the present day. I’ve used details and circumstances lifted from contemporary conflicts in the Ukraine, Chechnya, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Serbia to create the world of Sophia’s Forest.

COMPOSER’S NOTE – Lembit Beecher

I grew up with stories about Estonia: my grandmother was born there in 1922 and her stories described how she survived both the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Estonia and immigrated to the United States as a single mother of two. These stories were intense and dramatic, and in repeated retellings acquired the sheen of legend. More recently I found a picture of my mother in a displaced persons camp in Germany after WWII. She was 7, with a group of children all looking intensely at the camera, clutching teddy bears. The family story suddenly seemed more real. I began to think about the experience of immigration for children, and the role of imagination and play in dealing with traumatic circumstances, thoughts which were compounded by the recent images of Syrian and African refugees so prominent in the news. This piece is not my mother or grandmother’s story in any way, but as was the case with Hannah, I think family history drew me towards this topic.

The sound sculptures in the piece grew out of my desire to find a way to represent sonically the inner world of the protagonist, nine-year-old Sophia. The sounds the sculptures make, with wine glasses and bike wheels, have clear literal associations deriving from specific memories of Sophia, but these sounds can be re-interpreted: it is amazing how easily a wine glass can sound like a young girl’s singing voice or the windshield wipers of a car. And I can imagine how the sounds of a whirring bike wheel could call to the mind of a young child the fluttering wings of a goblin. Developing this piece has been a true collaborative process, between singers, instrumentalists, engineers, architects, librettist and director; I’m so thankful for the countless hours that have been spent by others working on this project with me.