a new opera
music by Alex Weiser
libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann
commissioned by American Lyric Theater

piano/vocal workshop

In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye’s daughters marry for love. But what happens to these beautiful, intelligent, passionate young women after they have emigrated to America? Who do they become as grown women, straddling the old world and the new, carrying with them the baggage endemic to the upheavals of the 20th century? And what of the sister you didn’t meet in Fiddler?

Tevye’s Daughters, a new opera by Alex Weiser and Stephanie Fleischmann, investigates Sholem Aleichem’s darker, grittier companion stories to create a highly theatrical reimagining of a cultural archetype we think we know, from the perspective of the daughters themselves—as opposed to filtered through Tevye’s famously discursive narrative lens. The opera centers on the tale of the beloved milkman’s younger daughter Shprintse, who falls in love with a young man above her station, only to meet a tragic death. Like so many women of her generation, Shprintse has no choice but to navigate her crisis with silence. Galvanized by the literature of little-known female Yiddish writers, as well as tkhines, Yiddish prayers designated expressly for women, Tevye’s Daughters rewrites that silence, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories have frequently been suppressed, omitted, even erased.

 The opera moves between a shtetl in Ukraine (1907) and a summer cabin in the Catskills (1964) as Tseytl, Khava, and Beylke, now old women, haunted by a vestigial memory submerged for more than half a century, can no longer look away from the past. The arrival of Irene, a granddaughter grappling with her own sexual identity, incites the sisters not only to re-member Shprintze’s traumatic story, but to come to terms with their shared tumultuous present.