The Child Dreams (opera)

The Child Dreams (Hebrew: הילד חולם‎‎) is a 2010 opera by Gil Shohat, based on the play of the same name by Hanoch Levin.

The Child Dreams was commissioned by the Israeli Opera for its 25th anniversary season, one of a number of new operas commissioned by the company from Israeli composers. Levin's play, inspired by the MS St. Louis incident and the film Voyage of the Damned based on it, is considered one of the most important Israeli plays. When it premiered in 1993 under the direction of the playwright, Hanna Munitz, the director general of the Israeli Opera, wanted to make it an opera. Director Omri Nitzan, who had directed operas for the Israeli Opera and Levin's plays in Israel and abroad, approached Levin about having Shohat compose the opera; Levin gave Shohat his permission shortly before his death, and Shohat, who also knew upon seeing the play that he wanted to adapt it into an opera, began working on the music. Shohat's opera is the first operatic adaptation of a Levin work. Shohat and Nitzan adapted the Hebrew-language libretto from Levin's text, making only slight cuts. Munitz hired designer Gottfried Helnwein for the production after seeing his work, which features images of hurt children, in Los Angeles.

The opera had its world premiere in Tel Aviv on January 18, 2010 in a production directed by Nitzan, conducted by Israeli Opera music director David Stern and with sets and costumes by Helnwein. Besides being the Israeli Opera's 25th anniversary season, it was also Tel Aviv's centennial and the tenth anniversary of Levin's death. Unlike most previous Israeli Opera productions, which for many years had no Israeli principals, the entire cast was Israeli. The role of the child was sung by soprano Hila Baggio, but played by acrobats May Poleg and Yuval Lifsitz; the use of a child singer was considered, and strongly supported by the designer Helnwein, but ultimately an adult singer was chosen for logistical reasons including legal aspects of hiring child performers.

Helnwein's designs included the large face of a sleeping child as the backdrop for the first act, through which soldiers broke, and the bodies of dead children—some dummies, some acrobats—suspended above the stage in the fourth act. The opera's premiere coincided with an art exhibition by Helnwein originally created to commemorate Kristallnacht and titled Selektion, which depicted children lined up as though in a concentration camp. In 2012, a documentary about Helnwein's designs for the opera, titled Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child, was released to poor reviews, which criticized it for containing little material about the opera itself and instead promoting Helnwein.

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