By James Manheim

The idea of a love story set in the Nazi concentration camps during World War I seems unexpected in the extreme… Yet the story here is true, and before this opera by Gerald Cohen, it was covered in a 2007 documentary, also titled Steal a Pencil for Me. Jaap Polak and Ina Soep Polak were well-off Dutch Jews shipped first to the Westerbork camp and then to the notorious Bergen-Belsen, where their incipient romance continued to flower. Amazingly, they both survived, although Jaap almost died of typhoid fever after the camp was liberated by the British. He was even still alive, at 97, when Cohen began his opera and said that the composer should write the music quickly so he could hear it (he died before the production could be mounted). The opera tells the whole story, from a relatively carefree party in Amsterdam at the beginning to the couple’s reunion in Amsterdam at the end. The problem facing Cohen and librettist Deborah Brevoort was to forge a language flexible enough to encompass both the romance and the horrors of the camps, and here, Cohen has largely succeeded… Cohen forges a natural, semi-popular language for the lovers (Leonard Bernstein may come to mind); it begins with the Amsterdam party and continues in flickers through the entire remainder of the opera. The Germans are painted in harsh strokes that owe something to television depictions of the era, but that fit together well with the lovers’ music. The singing in this Denver production, well recorded by the Sono Luminus label not live at the Denver Opera but in a local auditorium, is quite strong; the cast inhabit their roles and avoid the overwrought quality that would be a real risk here. A unique and notable entry in the annals of music about the Holocaust.