How do you turn humanity’s darkest moment, the most appalling of atrocities, into music? This is the question that has occupied the 24-year-old composer Noah Max for many years. “It gets to the point when you’re completely consumed with the topic. You dread the moment someone asks, ‘So what have you been up to?’ and you have to say, ‘Well, for the past five years I’ve been writing an opera about the Holocaust…’ ”
Max’s first opera started to take shape in 2020, but the real beginning was more than a decade earlier when, growing up in north London, he found a copy of John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in his school library. “It made an immediate big impression on me, and I never forgot about it. In the Jewish community you get around a table once a week and talk about things that matter, but I didn’t speak to my family about it immediately. I felt instinctively that something horrific happens in the book and that one had to tread a bit carefully.”
Despite selling 11 million copies and becoming a $44 million-grossing film, Boyne’s 2006 book about a friendship between a Nazi official’s son, Bruno, and a Jewish boy, Shmuel, in Auschwitz has been dogged by controversy. Critics have questioned Bruno’s naivety — no German child would have been so oblivious of antisemitism — and pointed out that there could never have been such an encounter between the boys; a child like Shmuel would have been sent straight to the gas chamber on arrival at the camp. In 2020 the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum stated that the book “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust”. One rabbi called it “a profanation”.
Max, whose great-grandparents were friends of the Freuds and escaped Vienna at around the same time (June 1938), is robust in Boyne’s defence.
“It says on the very first page that it’s a fable. I think that kids instinctively get what that means. Contrary to popular belief, John Boyne really had done his research before putting pen to paper, then he took creative licence. The book treats children with respect and they get it; it’s the adults that don’t.
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“There’s a real fixation in our cultural climate with who is allowed to tell which stories. When I was making this opera I felt I had to approach the Holocaust Educational Trust and ask for their support. When they said they weren’t happy with the book it became the start of a real dialogue and they are now in the process of revisiting their position.”
The ethical battle was just the start. A legal battle stood between Max and his opera. Miramax, the film company founded by Harvey Weinstein, controls the rights to the story, and if he was to have any hope of staging it Max would have to obtain them. Months of stonewalling finally yielded a price: $1 million. It was, Max says, “a turning point”. With the help of The Jewish Chronicle — “I explained the situation to them and asked for their help” — he was able to negotiate them down to a nominal fee of £5,000.
Talking to Max, the startling David-and-Goliath victory becomes clearer. Just turned 24, all focused intensity and chaotic curls, long pauses and fast talking, the composer, conductor, cellist, artist and poet is a fizzing creative fuse. A child of a cellist and a pianist who made his Wigmore Hall debut while still in the womb (“My parents gave a recital together — Mum was pregnant, and when she sat down at the piano I ‘played’ a spectacular atonal cluster…”), Max has the confidence of someone who walked away from a coveted place at the Royal Academy of Music while still a teenager to follow his own path. “It just wasn’t me. I wanted to be making things from scratch, and it felt like a step backwards.”
Swapping further formal education for a series of mentors and self-directed study (Max’s conversation roams from Jonathan Sacks to Nietzsche and Primo Levi, Soutine, Modigliani, Haydn and George Benjamin), Max put himself well ahead of the career curve. “Suddenly no one is telling you what to do any more, so you have to ask yourself, ‘What do I want to do? How should I live?’ I started on those big questions quite early…”
The answer, for now, is composing. Later this month Max finally sees A Child in Striped Pyjamas (his decision to change the opera’s name reflects both the story’s universality and the fact that women sing the roles of the two children) staged at the Cockpit in Marylebone, and becomes the first Jewish creative to adapt Boyne’s book. “There’s no sense of reclaiming the story; it’s a human story, it doesn’t need ‘reclaiming’.” But with the novel already reworked as both a film and ballet (Northern Ballet, 2017), what can his music add to so well trodden a tale?
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“I just looked at this tragedy and I felt that the only way to convey its magnitude — and in such a way that people understood it was symbolic and not real — was through opera… I remember saying to someone, ‘I want to write hell in music — actual hell on Earth.’ And they told me, ‘OK, but only do it for 30 seconds.’ So I went off and wrote about eight minutes of it…”
Musically, Max hopes the opera is “accessible enough for anyone to appreciate — everything has a tonal centre”. But expect no consolation or softening. “The opera confronts people with the very thing they don’t want to see, which is themselves. To recognise part of yourself in a character wearing a Nazi armband is a big wake-up call. The moral imperative is clear: we must never go there again.”
A Child in Striped Pyjamas is at the Cockpit, London NW8, Jan 11-12
