The world premiere of the concert version of Darkling in New York in the spring of 2006 was met with acclaim from the critics. For his production, director Michael Comlish adapted Anna Rabinowitz’s book of the same title for the stage. The award-winning author had compiled narratives from the time of the Third Reich. The stories are based on old letters and unidentified photographs that had been lying around in a shoe box for decades until they were discovered by Anna Rabinowitz in a closet in her parents’ house. She wrote a narrative collage about the Holocaust that speaks for all those who did not survive to tell their stories or write down their memories.

Darkling is a contemporary opera: poetry is overlaid with live music and the drama is interwoven with projected film sequences and photographs as well as with collages of spoken text and recordings. The music was composed by Stefan Weisman and Lee Hoiby.