InsightALT: “Tevye’s Daughters”

Concert Presented by the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in partnership with American Lyric Theater; co-sponsored by YIVO Admission: $40 Registration is required. Get tickets

American Lyric Theater partners with the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust to present a concert of Tevye’s Daughters – a new opera by Alex Weiser and Stephanie Fleischmann.

Inspired by the darker, grittier stories by Sholem Aleichem not included in Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye’s Daughters centers on the tale of the beloved milkman’s younger daughter Shprintse, who falls in love with a young man above her station. Like so many women of her generation, Shprintse has no choice but to navigate her crisis in silence. Galvanized by the literature of little-known female Yiddish writers, as well as tkhines – Yiddish prayers designated expressly for women – Tevye’s Daughters rewrites that silence, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories have frequently been suppressed, omitted, and even erased. The opera moves between a shtetl in Ukraine in 1907 and a summer cabin in the Catskills in 1964 as Tseytl, Khave, and Beykle, now old women, haunted by a vestigial memory submerged for more than half a century, can no longer look away from the past. The arrival of Rose, a granddaughter grappling with her own sexual identity, incites the sisters not only to remember Shprintse’s traumatic story, but to come to terms with their shared tumultuous present.

Composer – Alex Weiser
Librettist – Stephanie Fleischmann

CAST

Tevye – Gideon Dabi
Golde – Mary-Hollis Hundley
Rose / Shprintse – Elizabeth​ Sutphen
Tseytl – Jennifer Zetlan
Beylke – Gina Perregrino
Khave – Heather Johnson
Arontshik – Hayden Smith

Conductor – Emily Senturia

American Lyric Theater Chamber Orchestra

Stephanie Fleishmann is a librettist and playwright whose texts serve as blueprints for intricate three-dimensional sonic and visual worlds. Her “lyrical monologues” (New York Times), “finely tuned” (Opera News) and “prescient” (The Wholenote) libretti, plays, and music-theater works have been performed internationally and across the United States. She is a recipient of the Opera America Campbell Librettist Prize.

Libretti include: In a Grove (Cerrone, LA Opera/Pittsburgh Opera/Prototype, NY Times “Best Classical Music Performances of 2025”; In a Circle Records); The Silver Cypress (Nourbakhsh, BMP/Prototype/LA Opera); Medea (Hersch; MusikFabrik, New Focus Recordings); Poppaea (Hersch; Wien Modern, Zeiträume Basel; Austrian Music-theater Prize nomination); No Trouble (Wagner; Brentano Quartet/Dawn Upshaw; 92nd St Y, Dartmouth Hopkins Center, and more); The Pigeon Keeper (Hanlon; Santa Fe Opera, Opera Parallèle); Remedios Varios (Carrillo; Chicago Opera Theater); Another City (Beck; Houston Grand Opera); The Long Walk (Beck; Opera Saratoga, Utah Opera); Claude & Marcel (Weinberg; West Edge Opera). Selected music-theater/plays: Red Fly/Blue Bottle (HERE, EMPAC, Noorderzon); The Visitation (urhere.art); The Sweetest Life (New Victory); Sound House (the Flea). Selected grants/fellowships/residencies: Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Howard Foundation, NEA, NYFA, NYSCA, MapFund, Macdowell, New Dramatists, Tennesee Williams Fellowship, HARP. Former resident artist: American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program. www.stephaniefleischmann.com

Alex Weiser’s debut album and all the days were purple, was named a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. The album features songs in Yiddish and English sung by Eliza Bagg. A second album, in a dark blue night, features two song cycles which explore Jewish New York history sung by Annie Rosen. February 2024 saw the premiere of a clarinet concerto, Tfiles, commissioned by POLIN for clarinetist Andrzej Ciepliński and the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra. An active opera composer and past resident artist in the Composer Librettist Development Program at American Lyric Theater, Weiser is currently developing Tevye’s Daughters with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann (American Lyric Theater), and recently premiered The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language with librettist Ben Kaplan (American Opera Projects). Weiser is Director of Public Programs at the YIVO Institute where he curates programs that explore history with an eye to contemporary Jewish culture. At YIVO Weiser has commissioned over fifteen works from leading composers for feature in concerts he has curated.

InsightALT events were created to give the public an intimate, insiders look behind the scenes of American Lyric Theater’s process of creating new operas. Each event features a concert reading of a new opera in development at ALT, featuring guest singers from the world’s leading opera houses, followed an interactive discussion between the audience and the writers behind each work. These conversations, moderated by ALT’s founder, Lawrence Edelson, use Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process to engage with those experiencing the opera for the first time to help the writers on their journeys.

American Lyric Theater’s programs are made possible by generous support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Howard Gilman Foundation, The Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, the Amphion Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, the BMI Foundation; and the support of many individual donors.