After the Premiere: From Fairy Tale to Terezín — Lori Laitman, Children’s Operas, and the Work of Musical Memory
By Justin Vickers
When Lori Laitman was composing Vedem, she initially thought she knew how to pronounce the title. She had already written an entire movement with the stress falling on the second syllable. Then, after a conversation with survivors and their families, she learned that the emphasis belonged on the first. Thus, she rewrote the vocal line to restore the accurate syllabic emphasis.
While it is a small story, it reveals something essential about Laitman’s artistry. For her — indeed, for any composer working in text-driven vocal forms — words do not merely sit atop the musical line. They determine its weight, its contour, its motion through time. The originally-conceived accompaniment, she told me, could retain some of its original shape, since it carried no text. However, the sung line simply could not. The setting of the language had to be precise. Once the language changed, the music, too, had to adjust accordingly.
That granular instinct is one reason Laitman is so widely respected: it governs the entire range of her work, from family operas to Holocaust memorial pieces.
Language, Voice, and Musical Memory
Laitman has often said that song and opera are deeply related forms for her, and in conversation she returned to the idea with characteristic clarity. “The essence of both opera and song for me,” she said, “is telling a story through music.” The difference is not that one is dramatic and the other is not. It is that opera more fully externalizes character, conflict, and theatrical relation. In either genre, though, the central task is the same: honor the voice, make the line singable, and let the music carry the words with maximum clarity and expressive force.
That commitment to text does not make her a literalist. Quite the opposite. Laitman is acutely interested in what happens after words have passed. Once a melody has been attached to text, she said, it retains “the imprint of the words.” She can then reintroduce that melody elsewhere—fragmented, transformed, submerged in the accompaniment—and with it the emotional residue of what has already been sung. In an opera such as The Scarlet Letter, she can use that process to suggest a mind in disarray, the psyche itself becoming contrapuntal. For Laitman, musical memory is dramatic memory.
Writing for Children Without Condescension
What is striking is how naturally that same compositional ethic extends into her work for children. We often speak about children’s opera as though it were a separate, lesser province of the art form: simpler, smaller, more forgiving. Laitman does not talk about it that way, and neither does she compose that way. Children, she said, are “naturally musical,” “naturally inquisitive,” and instinctively drawn to stories. Opera, in that sense, is a natural medium for them: it unites story, image, movement, and sound into an experience that can feel genuinely magical.
Her family operas The Three Feathers and Maya and the Magic Ring, both written with librettist Dana Gioia, proceed from exactly that assumption. The challenge is not to simplify, but to avoid condescension. “You don’t want to talk down to either level,” she said of writing for children and adults at once. The adults may hear one layer, the children another, but both audiences deserve real craft, real dramatic stakes, and real pleasure. A family opera needs adventure. It needs conflict. It may even need a certain degree of scariness. Above all, it needs momentum.
Laitman is especially sharp on the distinction between writing for children as performers and writing for children as listeners. And she is clear that those are not the same. In The Three Feathers, which includes children’s choruses of rats, bats, and frogs, she wrote music that was difficult enough to be interesting, but memorable and singable enough to be learned and embodied. She wants the lines to be catchy and attractive, yes, but on the musical level never something that can be dismissed. She also wants the score to resist being obvious. “I try never to write anything that’s predictable,” she told me. The dramatic structure, on the other hand, should be lucid. Children respond to recurrence, to pattern, to the pleasure of knowing that something is coming back and will matter again, which also enhances the educational aspect of a work composed for the child.
That principle shaped The Three Feathers in concrete ways. Gioia chose a lesser-known fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm, one untouched by Disney, she jests, but one that was nonetheless rich in fairy-tale architecture. Dora descends into the underworld three times, and that repeated structure gives young audiences an intelligible dramatic map. Laitman recalled that at the premiere even the smallest children, recognizing such a pattern, would call out as Dora approached the hatch between worlds, almost as if to say: “Don’t do it!” In this recognizable structure, Gioia and Laitman allowed empathy and engagement to take hold.
Perhaps the most revealing answer she gave me about childhood came when I asked how she “hears” it. She did not speak first about innocence or wonder. She said, instead, “I guess I think of cartoons.” That answer is more sophisticated than it sounds. Laitman grew up with the classical-music universe of American animation in her ears, and she understands that children’s theatrical music often depends on clarity of gesture, precision of timing, and the right kind of exaggeration. If there is a fight, the music must both amplify and clarify the nature of the fight. If there is comic tugging or hopping or tumbling, the score can reveal and embody that motion. Word painting is not decorative in such moments; it becomes structural. As she put it more than once in our conversation: “The words tell me what I need to do.”
Collaboration and the Shape of Family Opera
Her collaboration with librettists begins there as well. What emerges from her description of working with Gioia is not an abstract theory of collaboration but a lived, practical process: conversation, rejection, discovery, and gradual recognition. When she was commissioned to write Maya and the Magic Ring, she knew she wanted Gioia because the two had already found a shared language in The Three Feathers. They threw around ideas. She dismissed some of them. He accused her, jokingly, of being too negative. Yet then he landed on a story that suddenly clicked.
The resulting opera is a perfect example of the way Laitman and Gioia balance theatrical delight with emotional depth. A bored little girl, left at her grandmother’s house to do homework, rummages instead through a chest, finds a ruby ring, rubs it, and releases a genie trapped inside it for fifty years. Wishes follow. A cat is granted speech! A unicorn comes to life. The house descends into chaos. Yet beneath the comic surface lies something deeper: a story about unintended consequences, about the power of love, and about the hidden history carried by our elders. The opera’s final revelation—that the grandmother’s long-ago wish was for Maya herself—gives the piece its emotional center.
Family opera, in Laitman’s hands, is never only about spectacle; to describe it that way would be too reductive. It is about palpable emotional recognition.
Process, Revision, and the Life of a Work
If her artistic principles are consistent, her creative process is anything but tidy, and her social media posts often reveal just how sprawling that process can be in practice. Having admired her for years, one of the pleasures of talking with Laitman is hearing how frankly she describes the messiness of composition. While writing Maya, she recorded video logs nearly every day, documenting decisions that could take weeks to resolve. A single interval might occupy her for days. Should a phrase begin one way or another? Should the genie’s self-announcing line open with one pitch or its sharper, stranger intervallic alternative? These are not trivial questions in her world. They are the questions.
Then life intervenes. In the middle of working on Maya, Laitman was on a trip to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia when she slipped on a wet ramp to a helicopter and broke her right wrist. Unable to write normally, she sang ideas into her phone instead. The motif that ultimately unlocked the cat’s aria arrived, as so many good ideas do, in an apparently ridiculous circumstance: sung half-formed into a voice memo while in a bathroom, only then to be rediscovered later and recognized as precisely the right melodic line. Composition, in her telling, is full of these bizarre, wonderful detours. A piece begins in doubt, rises and falls, resists, yields, and eventually arrives at coherence. “It’s like childbirth,” she said, laughing. You don’t want to do it—until you do—and then the reward is immense.
That sense of process continuing beyond the desk is crucial to how Laitman thinks about operatic life after the initial premiere. She is not precious about the fixity of her works; they are not immovable granite. She recently prepared a new version of The Three Feathers in which the Upper World King becomes an Upper World Queen, a practical change that gives the opera greater casting flexibility. Likewise, when Vedem was staged alongside Brundibár, she wrote transition music using motives from both pieces to help bridge them theatrically. An opera that hopes to live must adapt to the realities of performance.
Vedem, Terezín, and the Work of Witness
And then there is Vedem, with its rich texts by librettist David Mason (with whom Laitman is again collaborating on her forthcoming opera Ludlow, and who previously penned the libretto for The Scarlet Letter). In Vedem, everything in Laitman’s practice—textual fidelity, vocal care, dramatic instinct, moral seriousness—converges. When our conversation turned to that work, the atmosphere shifted. Laitman had recently visited Terezín for the first time. (Coincidentally, we both visited Terezín within a few weeks of each other, and I was taken aback by standing in the very spaces where the young boys of Home L417 lived, and where they produced their magazine, titled Vedem.) My friend and colleague Teryl L. Dobbs takes up this world powerfully in her arresting chapter “Tracing Brundibár, Dismantling Its Hopescape: Inception, Lehrstück, and Difficult Knowledge” in the forthcoming Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900, edited by Joy H. Calico and Justin Vickers. Terezín was a fabrication by the Nazis intended to deceive the international community: paved pathways, flowerbeds, an orchestra, choirs, the performance of key works of classical music, and works that became central to its cultural life under coercion, including Hans Krása’s Brundibár.
The former boys’ dormitory in the Terezín Ghetto outside of the Terezín concentration camp now houses an exhibition of the pain-drenched history of the prisoners, the town, and its buildings. That exhibition also preserves and allows visitors to see pages from the boys’ publication, the many pictures that the children drew there, and program covers for the many musical performances that were presented inside its walls. For Laitman, seeing the original Vedem pages, seeing names carved into the walls, encountering the physical remains of a world she had long inhabited through research and composition: all of this left a visible mark on her.
I asked her if a comparable publication had been produced by the young girls in their respective dormitory in the Terezín Ghetto. Laitman exclaimed: “Yes!” She excitedly told me about a new project growing from that visit, a song cycle drawn from Bonaco, the girls’ magazine from Terezín. The world of Vedem, in other words, continues to open outward. It will continue to usher new generations into its memorial space, facilitating renewed acts of listening, recovery, and witness.
What she said about writing heavy material was unexpected. The darker the subject, she told me, the easier it can be to write: not because the work is emotionally easy, but because there is simply so much there. So much pressure, so much grief, so much human significance. The task becomes one of setting it truthfully. (And one suspects with a dose of necessary detachment.) And here again music performs a paradoxical function. It magnifies language, certainly. But it also, she said, provides “some kind of cushioning.” That is a subtle and important insight. Music does not soften atrocity into acceptability; rather, it creates an additional field of attention, a space in which unbearable words may be encountered, held, and heard.
For the young performers who have taken part in Vedem, that encounter has often been transformative. Laitman spoke movingly about the surviving boys of Terezín who attended the work’s premiere and about the effect their presence had on the children performing it. What the young singers encountered was not the reality of the Holocaust’s horrors alone, but the innate promise of endurance and perseverance: evidence that resourcefulness, friendship, and shared artistic expression had made survival imaginable.
Laitman returned more than once to the role of creativity in these histories. It was no mere ornament. It was a shelter in the midst of the unthinkable.
Imagination as Shelter
That may be the thread that most powerfully binds her children’s operas to her memorial works. In one arena, imagination gives us talking cats, vain unicorns, and princesses descending into magical underworlds. In another, it gives imprisoned children a way to remain human, and indeed to preserve their humanity for generations to learn from thereafter. Laitman does not separate those worlds as sharply as one might expect. They occupy equally earnest positions: the imaginative life of the child, and the imagination that can sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Laitman understands that the same faculties that delight can also, by some miraculous turn of events, sustain.
The child in the theater shouting: “Don’t do it, Dora!” and the survivor correcting the stress of Vedem belong, in the end, to the same artistic universe. Both are listening closely. Both are insisting that something be said correctly. Lori Laitman’s music begins there, in that act of attention. The words tell her what to do. She listens.
And from that listening she has built an operatic world capacious enough for wonder, grief, memory, and play.
One leaves her work with the sense that much more is still to come.
© Justin Vickers, 2026
I often think of the children digging the swimming pool at Terezin with spoons. Yes, the pool they would never be allowed to swim in. Your article prompted me to go a step beyond the back-breaking work to the friendships that must have been made between these children in terrifying times.
This is a terrific piece, Justin.