The Making of ‘Morning Star’

Until I got sober, I could never have written an opera. It’s too big a commitment, a lengthy process with twists and turns demanding entirely too much concentration. Also, opera is collaboration, and there are so many personalities that have to be navigated, you have to be at your optimum or the weight of the endeavor will pull you down.

In the late 1990s, I was invited to be the composer in residence at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Having written only one opera, I was too scared to start a new piece, so I mentioned what I was writing about my family.

In Chicago, I played a bunch of the music for the Lyric staff. Everybody was pleased and “The Family Piece” it was.

Then I came to my senses. I realized how spotty my work for “The Family Piece” was, unstrung, without even an implied narrative; writing an opera on my own without a librettist was too ambitious. I called William Hoffman and asked him to work with me. Bill had written the libretto for The Ghosts of Versailles with John Corigliano at the Met.

One day, I got a call from Richard Pearlman, the overseer of the project. He had seen a revival of Sylvia Regan’s play Morning Star at Steppenwolf and thought it might be perfect for Bill and me.

I was astonished at what an apt project it was for me. It concerns an immigrant family, the Feldermans, on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1910. Becky, after her husband’s murder, escapes the rising antisemitism in Europe with her three daughters, a son, and her husband’s best friend, Aaron Greenspan, and they come to America. They live together in an extremely cramped tenement. The constellation, a young son, Hymie, and his three older sisters, was just like my family, so it felt as if I could write about my family through the Feldermans.

Esther, the youngest daughter, a starry-eyed romantic, works at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Fanny, the middle daughter, a “showbiz”-style singer, works as a ticket taker in a theater where she falls in love with the usher, Irving Tashman, a talented songwriter trying to break into vaudeville. Sadie, the oldest, is a shrewd businesswoman and sells hats. Once Irving marries Fanny, he won’t let her sing in public. Sad and frustrated, a caged bird, she feels unjustly pressured to hide herself in housewifery. Harry, the handsome history teacher, comes to tutor the women once a week, including Becky. Sadie is in love with him, unaware that he and Esther are already in love, and all hell breaks loose.

The central tragedy of the opera is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. The bosses had locked the seamstresses in for increased productivity, and they all perished. My mother’s mother, Rebecca Lieberman, worked at the Triangle but was home sick on the day of the fire. Her mother rushed her over to see her friends and co-workers flying out the window, their shirtwaists flapping like wings on fire. At the pier where the bodies were laid out, she helped identify their charred remains. She was suicidally depressed for the rest of her life. Bill, personalizing the story, made the city they escaped from Riga, Latvia, where his people were from. That is a big step in collaboration, when the “mine” of a piece becomes the “ours.” We were now pregnant with the same child.

Bill was great; funny, naughty, and personable, but he was not always easy to work with. He could go so far off in a direction I felt was wrong and I would have to rein him back in. He went off to write Sadie’s big aria, “Three Loving Sisters,” in Act 1, but the first draft was about five pages long and included kings, queens, ogres, princesses, dark clouds, spells, thunder, poisoned apples, and mirrors. “Bill,” I said. “What the hell is this?!” feeling it would be longer than the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. But that was his process; he had to go way far afield to get to the center.

I felt stretched by what Bill gave me to set to music. The first thing was the world coming to life outside and inside the tenement. Becky Felderman studies for her history lessons. Fanny tries to learn “Morning Star,” a song Irving wrote for her. Esther stares into the mirror, trying on her beloved Harry Engel’s last name. Hymie studies for his bar mitzvah, and Aaron sleeps on the couch dreaming in Yiddish. Pearl and Prince, African American fishmongers, peddle their wares out on the street, and Kathleen O’Fallin, an Irish neighbor, warns her daughter Mary about the evils of men, and it all builds into a solo for Becky and the cast called “The Promised Land.” I had never written anything with so much simultaneity before, but I loved what we came up with, and it helped me to understand Bill’s style. Bill was a vertical thinker rather than a horizontal one, and he saw everything in layers. He was building clear and specific characters and inviting me to paint in broad brushstrokes to define them.

We did two workshops at the Lyric. Everyone loved it. Then something happened.

The opera was supposed to be a co-production with the Goodman Theatre. However, Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman and our would-be director, was supposed to direct a production of Massenet’s Thaïs, starring Renée Fleming, at the Lyric. His concept and design were delivered late, and when they finally arrived, the Lyric didn’t like them, so like a 12-year-old, Bob pulled out of his contract with the Lyric, which meant our opera was canceled, too.

In writing Morning Star, I leaned into my childhood, where my mother spoke Yiddish and everything she cooked—brisket, blintzes, black radish with schmaltz, lokshen kugel, and latkes—was Old World. Like my mother, Fanny is trapped and bemoaning the loss of her singing career. When she and Irving sing their duet “Morning Star,” it taps into my past life in vaudeville, and the opera ends with the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, for the victims of the Triangle. One day, sitting on a stoop outside, I asked Tony Kushner to recite the Kaddish into my tape recorder, and I set it exactly as he spoke it. It is that recording I played at the star magnolia tree the day Jeffrey’s ashes were buried.

Eric Einhorn, the artistic director of On Site Opera, a company out of New York City with no theater of its own that imaginatively comes up with locations that glorify the opera and the place, elected to do Morning Star in the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side for the centenary of the Triangle fire. Built in 1887, it is where many of the victims worshipped. Bill was gardening in his yard in Beacon, New York, one day, and he collapsed before the production and died. A week before, I got to tell him, “Bill, when you enter the synagogue, you are greeted by a magnificent circular stained-glass window with an image of a morning star emblazoned on it!” He wept. I think he knew he’d never see it.

The production was surreal, as if everyone were a ghost. We had entered a world that had never ended, and this was its continuance. The last matinee was on the day of the centenary. All around the neighborhood, in front of every house where one of the victims of the Triangle lived, were chalk markings on the sidewalks. Before the performance, in the snow, a parade of people walked past every marking, intoning their names.