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Children Possessed: Adam Maor and Yonatan Levy’s Opera The Sleeping Thousand (2019)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2024
Abstract
Adam Maor and Yonatan Levy’s chamber opera The Sleeping Thousand refashions the Palestinian–Israeli conflict as a futuristic science-fiction political fantasy. Adopting a critical and satirical perspective, the opera develops ad absurdum an imaginative state of affairs out of which a utopian and dystopian situation unfolds. My argument is that in The Sleeping Thousand, children are central and, furthermore, that the image construed for them is new to the medium of opera. The image is disconcerting. The child is positioned in a troubled, brutal world and catalyses the portrayal of a violent, cursed, unethical, and estranged world inhabited by adults. Children are not assigned a voice but rather are reported on; in the report, they are said to be possessed by a dybbuk. In The Sleeping Thousand, a dybbuk phenomenon forms operatic children and, through them, infiltrates the opera as a whole.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
Footnotes
This article was written before the 7 October 2023 war. It is part of a larger project entitled ‘Childhood in Opera’, supported by a grant (no. 1568/20) from the Israel Science Foundation. I am grateful to Adam Maor and Yonatan Levy for generously sharing materials related to their work and for fascinating conversations about the collaborative process and their ideas about the opera. Jelena Novak kindly shared an interview with the artists conducted at the Centro de Estudos de Sociologica e Estética Musical (CESEM). I would like to thank Sapir Miedzinski for his valuable assistance with the musical examples and for insightful conversations about the opera. I am also indebted to the other members of the graduate student working group ‘Childhood in Opera’ – Noga Chelouche, Inbal Shilor Shemesh, and Oded Shnei-Dor – for stimulating exchanges of ideas.
References
1 The Sleeping Thousand. Composition: Adam Maor. Libretto and direction: Yonatan Levy. Musical direction: Elena Schwartz. Scenery: Julien Brun. Costumes: Anouk Schiltz. Lighting: Omer Shizaf. Dramaturgy and assistant direction: Amir Farjoun. English translation: Evan Fallenberg. With Tomasz Kumiega, Gan-ya Ben-gur Akselrod, David Salsbery Fry, and Benjamin Alunni, Ensemble United Instruments of Lucillin, and Augustin Muller and Serge Lacourt of the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).
2 The soloists: Nurit, Prime Minister’s secretary (soprano); A Voice from the World (tenor) who sings three roles – Minister of Agriculture, Protester, Cantor; Prime Minister (baritone); Sh., Head of Israeli Secret Services (bass). The orchestra comprises clarinet in B♭, bass clarinet in B♭, arghul; accordion; large percussion section – bendir, tom-toms, cymbals, vibraslap, tam-tam, vibraphone, bass drum, tambourine, cowbells, crotales, singing bowl, opera gong, styrofoam, portable styrofoam, kutu wapa, Tibetan bowls (cymbal on floor tom), styropore; strings – violin, viola, violoncello, double bass; keyboard computerized to produce various synthesized and non-synthesized sounds, prominent among them the oud.
3 In this article I refer to the numbering of scenes in the score (unpublished) rather than in the libretto. In the score, the opera is divided into nine scenes, while in the libretto there are seven. The discrepancy begins in scene 4:
libretto score
4 ‘Torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (“ill-treatment”) continue to be practiced widely worldwide, and the use of torture methods that leave no visible marks is on the increase in various contexts and countries’ (Elna Søndergaard, Rupert Skilbeck, and Efrat Shir, ‘Development of Interdisciplinary Protocols on Medico-Legal Documentation of Torture: Sleep Deprivation’, Torture, 29.2 (2019), pp. 23–27 (p. 24). I will not be able to analyse the opera’s relationship to real situations in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. For studies and documentations on the use of torture methods of sleep deprivation in interrogations of Palestinian detainees in Israel, its inhumanity as well as its ineffectiveness, see, for example, Mahmud Sehwail, Pau Pérez-Sales, Khader Rasras, Wisam Sehwail, Alba Guasch, and Andrea Galan, ‘Sleep Deprivation Does Not Work: Epidemiology, Impacts and Outcomes of Incidental and Systematic Sleep Deprivation in a Sample of Palestinian Detainees’, Torture, 29.2 (2019), pp. 56–69 Google Scholar; Søndergaard, Skilbeck and Shir, ‘Development of Interdisciplinary Protocols’Google Scholar; Cakal, Ergün, ‘Befogging Reason, Undermining Will: Understanding Sleep Deprivation as Torture and Other Ill-Treatment in International Law’, Torture, 29.2 (2019), pp. 11–22 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Rubel, Jordana S., ‘A Missed Opportunity: The Ramifications of the Committee against Torture’s Failure to Adequately Address Israel’s Ill-Treatment of Palestinian Detainees’, Emory International Law Review, 20.2 (2006), pp. 699–740 Google Scholar; Grosso, C. M., ‘International Law in the Domestic Arena: The Case of Torture in Israel’, Iowa Law Review, 86.1 (2000), pp. 305–38Google Scholar; and Ron, James, ‘Varying Methods of State Violence’, International Organization, 51.2 (1997), pp. 275–300 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Studies on the topic have also been scarce. For a recent overview, see Sutherland, Andrew, Children in Opera (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020)Google Scholar. On themes of childhood in opera and what the child comes to mean in opera, see Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900, ed. by Joy H. Calico and Justin Vickers (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.
6 The version with mute children is most often performed today.
7 For the child’s voice understood in relation to opera’s original attraction to the high treble voice and its association with the figure of the angel, see Poizat, Michel, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera (Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
8 See, for example, studies by Meckea, Ann-Christine and Sundberg, Johan, ‘Gender Differences in Children’s Singing Voices: Acoustic Analyses and Results of a Listening Test’, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127.5 (2010), pp. 3223–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sergeant, Desmond C., Sjölander, Peta J., and Welch, Graham F., ‘Listeners’ Identification of Gender Differences in Children’s Singing’, Research Studies in Music Education, 24.1 (2005), pp. 28–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 For a detailed interpretation of the opera, see Grover-Friedlander, Michal, ‘Transformations of a Killing of a Boy: Weill and Brecht’s Der Jasager ’, in Music’s Obedient Daughter, ed. by Lichtenstein, Sabine (Rodopi, 2014), pp. 381–404 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 See Kaminsky, Peter M., ‘The Child on the Couch; Or, Toward a (Psycho) Analysis of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges ’, in Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music, ed. by Kaminsky, Peter M. (University of Rochester Press, 2011), pp. 306–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among the few important essays devoted to the place of the child in particular operas, I would like to especially single out the inspiring work by Carolyn Abbate on Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, in which she analyses the child’s disturbing vocal closing utterance that brings the opera to an end; Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Outside the Tomb’, in In Search of Opera (Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 185–246 Google Scholar.
11 Maor studied in Geneva with Michael Jarrell, Luis Naon, and Eric Daubresse and at IRCAM in Paris.
12 Adam Maor, ‘About’, n.d. <https://adammaor.com/about/> [accessed 15 January 2022].
13 Adam Maor, ‘The Sleeping Thousand’, 2019 <https://adammaor.com/portfolio/the-sleeping-thousand/> [accessed 15 January 2022].
14 Yonatan Levy, URU AAEEM: The Sleeping Thousand (Dehak Publishing House, 2019) (in Hebrew). English translation by Evan Fallenberg. URU AAEEM means, in Hebrew, ‘Wake up, brothers’. The title is transliterated in an unconventional way – AAEEM rather than ‘AHIM’ – and play with vowels and their sounds is central to the novel (and libretto) on the whole.
15 The novel (as well as the libretto) is clearly referring to One Thousand and One Nights, not only through the act of storytelling but also in the embedding of stories within stories, and in the thousand detainees that become a thousand and one at the end of the opera. There are even a thousand stories in the Jewish population’s dreams.
16 The Israeli authorities are secretly adding detainees’ semen to the food dispensed to the Jewish population, as it is known to transform consciousness. Their semen is also used to prepare fertility medication and to treat sensations of numbness in the genitals. These and other sexual components of the novel (including the feeling of being circumcised and the disappearance of the body), as well as animal themes (a speaking dog appears regularly in the Jewish sector’s night terrors), are not included in the opera.
17 In the novel, the sleepless Israelis endure nightmares about practically any harm that has ever been visited upon Jews over the course of history: wars, pogroms, the Holocaust, terror attacks, and so on, and they also suffer from imaginary nightmares. The entire Jewish population has a recurring nightmare in which the Palestinian population eats them up.
18 Hasamba in Hebrew is an acronym for ‘The Absolutely Absolute Secret Group’. This is the title of a series of children’s adventure books written by Yigal Mossinson from 1950 to 1994. The stories concern the heroic adventures of a group of children while assisting the underground movement in its struggle for Israeli statehood; once the state is formed, they continue their work by assisting the security forces in the fight against their enemies. The children repeatedly save the day. Books in the Hasamba series were very popular among children and formed an important part of Israeli culture. In the novel, the Hasamba adventure forms a story within a story and acts out one of the main variants on the novel’s main narrative. Hasamba is read aloud by Kapach, Nurit’s ex-husband, to their child, who constantly has trouble sleeping.
19 ‘Child’ in Israeli society is a designation loaded with paradoxes. To bear children, to procreate, is the highest Jewish calling. This imperative goes hand in hand with delivering the child over to serve in the army at the age of 18. It is as if a child were a temporary deposit, and there was a willingness to offer it as a sacrifice. The ‘child’ embodies Israeli society’s irrationalities, traumas, and paranoias. For nineteenth-century formulations of images of the child and childhood in Hebrew and Yiddish literature (Bialik and Abramovitch), see Rotem Preger Wagner, ‘“The Live Son and the Dead One”: Constructing Children and Childhood in Hebrew Literature in its Formative Period’, Dappim: Research in Literature, 20 (2017), pp. 169–87 (in Hebrew). For the image of the Israeli child, the tsabar, in the 1920s as a living shield, as the nation’s hope and its victim, see Salina Mashiach, ‘Yonatan Ha-Katan (“Young Yonatan”): Main Characteristics of the “Young Tsabar”, or Culture as a Lizard’s Tail’, Moznaim, 4 (January 1996), pp. 15–18. For analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Israeli society’s collective fear and its collective sense of victimhood and aggression, see Daniel Bar-Tal, ‘Why Does Fear Override Hope in Societies Engulfed by Intractable Conflict, as It Does in the Israeli Society?’, Political Psychology, 22.3 (2001), pp. 601–27, and Schori-Eyal, Noa, Halperin, Eran, and Bar-Tal, Daniel, ‘Three Layers of Collective Victimhood: Effects of Multileveled Victimhood on Intergroup Conflicts in the Israeli–Arab Context’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 44.12 (2014), pp. 778–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Gulbenkian, ‘Yonatan Levy’, 14 January 2020 <https://gulbenkian.pt/musica/biography/yonatan-levy/> [accessed 15 January 2022].
21 Ibid.
22 In the score, scene 4 ends here; scene 5 begins with ‘O, the keening of babes’.
23 Translated from the Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg.
24 See Meizel, Katherine, Multivocality: Singing on the Borders of Identity (Oxford University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Steven Connor, ‘Choralities’, Twentieth-Century Music, 13.1 (2016), pp. 3–23 (p. 3).
26 Ibid., p. 4.
27 For a detailed interpretation of the opera, see Michal Grover-Friedlander, Operatic Afterlives (Zone, 2011), pp. 115–47.
28 Rocca had been struck by the performance of An-Ski’s Dybbuk by the Habima Hebrew theatre troupe at Teatro di Torino in October 1929. S. An-Ski (Shloymeh-Zanṿil Rapaporṭ), The Dybbuk: A Play in Four Acts (Boni & Liveright, 1926). An-Ski’s Dybbuk was also translated into Italian in 1927. See Samuele Avisar, Teatro Ebraico (Nuova Accademica Editrice, 1957), p. 71.
29 ‘The Sleeping Thousand: A Conversation in English with Yonatan Levy and Adam Maor, Creators of the Opera Sleeping Thousand (2019)’. Portuguese premiere at the Gulbenkian Foundation in January 2020, moderated by Nicholas McNair, at CESEM, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zA1ToHFyFg&t=1s> [accessed 14 August 2021].
30 Ibid.
31 The arghul is an ancient Egyptian reed instrument from the time of the Pharaohs still played today in Egypt, Palestine, and Sardinia. It has two tubes, one of which serves as a drone with a changeable pitch; its mouthpiece is similar to that of a clarinet. The bendir, also an ancient Egyptian instrument, is a drum still played today in North Africa and in Sufi ceremonies. It is played with the hand and is held vertically. In scene 9, the non-western instruments are played using extended techniques, for example employing brush, bow, and superball on the bendir.
32 Maor’s description, Zoom interview with author, 2 October 2021.
33 See bar 1159.
34 See bars 1175–77.
35 See bar 1202.
36 See bars 1298–99.
37 Interview, 2 October 2021.
39 Author’s Zoom interview with Maor, 23 November 2021.
40 Nigaal, Gedalia, ‘The Dibbuk in Jewish Mysticism’, Daat: A Journal of Jewish Philosophy & Kabbalah, 4 (1980), pp. 75–101 Google Scholar (p. 79).
41 See Alexander, Tamar, ‘Love and Death in a Contemporary Dybbuk Story: Personal Narrative and the Female Voice’, in Spirit Possession in Judaism: Cases and Contexts from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. by Goldish, Matt (Wayne State University Press, 2003), pp. 307–45Google Scholar (p. 308).
42 Nigaal, ‘The Dibbuk in Jewish Mysticism’, p. 81.
43 The play was created by the first Hebrew theatre company (Habima, founded in Moscow) and based on stories and legends the author gathered from Jewish communities around Eastern Europe. See, for instance, Goldish, Spirit Possession in Judaism.
44 Dorit Yerushalmi, ‘Introduction: Histories of The Dybbuk’, in Do Not Chase Me Away: New Studies on The Dybbuk, ed. by Shimon Levy and Dorit Yerushalmi, trans. by Inbal Shilor Shemesh (Assaph/Theatre Studies and Safra, 2009), pp. 9–24 (p. 9).
45 Yoram Bilu, ‘Dybbuk, Aslai, Zar: The Cultural Distinctiveness and Historical Situatedness of Possession Illnesses in Three Jewish Milieus’, in Spirit Possession in Judaism, p. 358.
46 Yerushalmi, ‘Introduction: Histories of The Dybbuk’, p. 9.
47 Ibid., p. 10.
48 Ibid., p. 20.
49 Rokem, ‘The Motif of the Dead Son: “The Dybbuk”’ (1922), Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies, 9 (1985), pp. 75–80 (p. 78) (in Hebrew).
50 Shimon Levy, ‘Epilogue: “Do Not Chase Me Away”: A Note on The Dybbuk as Chaos’, in Do Not Chase Me Away, pp. 267–73 (p. 268).
51 Rokem, ‘The Motif of the Dead Son’, p. 77.
52 ‘The Sleeping Thousand: A Conversation’.
53 Sutherland, Children in Opera, p. 330.
54 For the state of sleep as a form of resistance, see Rost, Katharina, ‘Drowsing in Theatre Performances’, Performance Research, 21.1 (2016), pp. 110–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Han, Byung-Chul, The Burnout Society (Stanford, 2015)Google Scholar; Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013); Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Fall of Sleep, trans. by Mandell, Charlotte (Fordham University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
55 Hochberg’s article focuses on the sci-fi film trilogy of Larissa Sansour. Hochberg, Gil, ‘“Jerusalem, We Have a Problem”: Larissa Sansour’s Sci-Fi Trilogy and the Impetus of Dystopic Imagination’, Arab Studies Journal, 26.1 (2018), pp. 34–57 Google Scholar (p. 36).
56 Ibid., p. 40.