by Kelley Nassief

At the 2024 NOA Convention in Tempe Arizona, A Braided Light by librettist Wendy Steiner and composer Paul Richards was presented as a finalist of the Dominic Argento Chamber Opera Competition. This beautiful 20-minute Chamber Opera was originally a winning entry in the 2022 White Snakes Projects’ competition entitled “Let’s Celebrate,”  and was presented alongside four other chamber operas with a focus of shining a light on unique holiday traditions. I was very fortunate to sit down with both Steiner and Richards to speak in depth on their collaboration. 

A Braided Light is set for a mezzo-soprano, soprano, and baritone, with a small ensemble of violin, cello, and piano. This rich and poignant opera portrays a compelling and heart-wrenching story of 65-year-old Leila who has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s the day before, her 33-year-old daughter who has been too busy at her State Department job to notice her mother’s decline, and Leila’s 28-year-old son who lives nearby. The opera takes place in Leila’s living room in real time and portrays an intimacy that draws the audience into the family in crises.  

Alzheimer’s Disease is typically told by the family members who struggle with the slow decline and loss of their loved one. However, this story focuses instead on the victim’s grief of losing themselves, paralleling with the loss of holiness at the end of Shabbat in the ceremony of Havdalah. 

Havdalah, a bittersweet celebration performed every Saturday at the moment the third star is seen in the sky, signaling the end of the Sabbath. As a compensation, four blessings are offered in hopes that remembrance of the holy Sabbath will remain throughout the work week. The blessings are received through the senses, a cup of wine for taste and touch, a spice box for smell, the braided Havdalah candle for sight, and the hiss of the candle extinguished in the wine for hearing, all while celebrants recite the blessings. It was this image of the braided candle that inspired Steiner to write the libretto. A visit to an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York brought her to a photograph of a braided candle. This image of “the physical embodiment of holiness reflected off the physical fingernails of a person, not exalted in any way” became an unshakable seed of inspiration. She brought this idea to her longtime collaborator Paul Richards who thought the White Snake Project Competition would be the perfect place to create something with this image.  

Both Steiner and Richards are Jewish by heritage and had recently suffered the loss of someone close to them from Alzheimer’s disease. Steiner remarked that her experiences talking to her friend with Alzheimer’s, “seemed musical in a way of here and there, from intense emotion to humor, to abstraction.” The “hinge” as Steiner put it, is represented with dense symbolism between the Havdalah ceremony, separation between a state of holiness and the everyday, and the hinge between Alzheimer’s effects of being present and lost.

Richards said he was “struck by from the libretto’s entanglement of ideas.” He created a leitmotif he called the “tangled motive, a chromatic and sinewy thing that cycles back on itself and runs throughout.” Richards and Steinerboth commented on watching their loved ones bounce around in time, past, to present to confusion. Richards said he wanted the opera to feel like “floating nebulas space rather than something that progressed to a strong trajectory.” The idea of floating musically and dramatically seamlessly represents both of these “hinge” ideas in an incredibly moving way. The opera perfectly and effortlessly intertwines prayers in Hebrew and English with memories, games, some lighthearted and comical.  

The musical writing is the perfect embodiment of the story with its balance of solemnity, drama, and tenderness. As a singer, I truly appreciated the lyrical and beautiful writing, showcasing the entire voice and utilizing a wide spectrum of color. It is obvious Richards is intimately familiar with the singing voice, his father, Stephen Richards was a cantor and a fairly well-known composer of Jewish sacred music. He would hear him singing scales every Friday to prepare. The prayers were all new composition which proved challenging with the strong melody of the traditional prayers in his memory. He used word emphasis and rhythm of speech similar to tradition but did not want to reference a specific tradition or branch of Judaism. The music was innovative and yet felt ancient, an ideal blend that was intensely moving.

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The storytelling dramatically and musically is so engaging, the hiss of the candle that ends the opera is jarring and awakens the audience from an almost trancelike state. The final hiss of the candle was the first sonic idea Richards had in conceptualizing the music for the opera. He felt “it would have been musically inappropriate for this piece to resolve harmonically.” The result is hauntingly beautiful and memorable.  

What I found incredible was to be so invested in these characters in twenty minutes and how haunting the opera was long after it was over, a testament to the skillful economy and craft of these two creatives who have been collaborating for twenty years. I asked what made their professional partnership so magical. Steiner said “Paul is so smart; he just gets it. We haven’t argued over anything.” Richards said, “I find Wendy’s libretti so rich. The tangled, self-referential weaving happens in all four of our projects.” (Mondo Novo, Biennale, and The Loathly Lady are their additional three collaborative works).

Steiner and Richards are not shy about these challenging topics, as their other works deal with some thorny subjects. Richards stated, “Our job is to ask questions, not to answer them. Art should challenge.” It takes courage to bring out complicated questions to make others think. Steiner said, “this is the history of opera.” Richards said his general approach is that, “The world doesn’t need more beautiful things as much as an expanded definition of what’s beautiful. The reason opera works really well for me is that you get these unusual, tense, bizarre situations that encourage a kind of music outside what my instincts might gravitate towards or what others might expect and still find something relatable inside of something unusual.”

On behalf of the Sacred in Opera Committee, I congratulate Wendy Steiner and Paul Richards for the success of their chamber opera in The White Snake Project and as a finalist for the Dominic Argento Chamber Opera Competition. This opera is should definitely be added to your watchlist and I cannot wait to see more from these talented artists.