Special to WJW

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," German social philosopher Theodor Adorno once declared. What, then, about a Holocaust opera?

While two operas written during the Holocaust ‹ Victor Ullman's Emperor of Atlantis and Hans Krasa's children's opera Brundibar ‹ both created in the model concentration camp Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, deal obliquely with the Holocaust, few composers have attempted to face the vastness of the Holocaust tragedy. Little wonder why. Operas frequently mine flawed familial relationships and tragic consequences, yet the Holocaust remains a human-rendered catastrophe of epic proportions.

Renowned British-born composer Nicholas Maw, a Maryland resident, saw the inherent operatic drama in novelist William Styron's work Sophie's Choice. Maw's 2002 opera, based on the 1976 novel and the 1982 film, continues its Washington National Opera American premiere Saturday evening and Oct. 5 and 9 at the Kennedy Center Opera House. The work's world premiere at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London in 2002 received mixed reviews, yet was a popular sellout.

Maw's libretto to Sophie's Choice replicates closely the film and novel, unfolding through the eyes of Stingo, a loosely disguised Styron as a young, would-be novelist, up from southern Virginia trying to make a go of it in New York. Befriended by a flamboyant, yet volatile, couple, Sophie and Nathan, Stingo is drawn into a dysfunctional and tension-filled threesome.

But uprooting the causes for Nathan's and Sophie's roiling and argumentative relationship takes time and understanding. By the time Sophie reveals her secrets, it's too late, and Stingo is impotent to rescue her, even if she wanted rescue, which she apparently doesn't.

A Catholic, Sophie survived Auschwitz; she has the tattooed number on her arm to prove it. But her survival is just the beginning of the heartbreaking events that have brought her to Brooklyn, and to Nathan, her resentful American Jewish lover, and to Stingo.

Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirchschlager imbues Sophie not with fragility, but with steely determination, which makes her wrenching choice all the more horrific: Upon arrival at the notorious concentration camp, she must select one of her two children to die or both will be shot before her eyes.

As Nathan, Rod Gilfry is stolid, his manic and depressive episodes a confusion of pent-up anger, but little else of depth, while Gordon Gietz as young Stingo carries his naivety with aplomb and a wisp of a Southern drawl.

Sophie's Choice is on its way to becoming an iconic American tale in both novel and movie form, for the film gave actress Meryl Streep an Oscar, Golden Globe and critical praise for her relentless study in order to speak authentically in German and Polish for the flashback scenes.

As a relatively early work of fiction concerning the Holocaust, we see events unfurl doubly, through Stingo's growing realization of the seriousness of Sophie's past and through true-to-life passages following this one woman's experience. As with other popular artworks dealing in tragedy, it seemingly supplants the dry facts and figures of history, emotionalizing and personalizing the tragedy for a popular audience.

As a theatrical experience, the opera contains some absolutely stunning elements, namely Robert Schweer's evocative set: a floating platform amid a blackened hollow of stage space, which is filled with thousands of black-and-white passport-like photographs, the nameless, but not faceless who were lost in the camps, killing fields and gas chambers. The allusion is obvious, recalling the tower of photographs of every resident of a Jewish town that is one of the affecting exhibits in the District's own U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

For German director Markus Bothe, this floating set with its sunny yellow platform representing present reality and its inscribed season and date ‹ Summer 1947 ‹ becomes essential to drawing forth the story and delineating between past and present, real and remembered.

The young Stingo resides wholly on this platform, while his counterpart, an older and mature narrator (Dale Duesing), floats in the darkened netherworld, looking back at times with bemusement at his younger self, at times with grief at the desolate life Sophie unravels, piece by piece. Sophie navigates both worlds, and Kirchschlager physically mounts and dismounts the platform when she shifts in and out of memory and reality.

Maw's libretto, sung in English and conducted by Marin Alsop, remains faithful to Styron's dialogue, and it's probably the only opera in which words like "anthrax," "protoplasm" and "schizophrenia" are embedded in the score. Early on, there's even a touch of Yiddish.

Musically, the approach Maw takes is contemporary; there are a very few moments of subtle romanticism, a few light and jazzy elements, but much of his operatic score is plodding and heavy-handed, and for all but true opera and contemporary music afficionados, the experience of sitting through the four acts of Sophie's Choice, which clocks in at nearly 3 1/2 hours, is challenging, to say the least.

While Maw may be trying to replicate the anguish of the tragic life choices thrust upon Sophie in his musical pastiche of 20th-century modern composition, it is a laborious evening at the theater. And though the pitiful trajectory of Sophie's life is exactly the point of Styron's original fictionalization of the Holocaust experience, the question remains, in the wake of Maw's imperfect effort, can art after the Holocaust provide meaning, tangible effect, healing or escape? Is it necessary?

Sophie's Choice reminds us that description and replication of the excruciating tragedy of the Holocaust is understandably beyond reach. Perhaps that is why another writer on the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, has never allowed his own nonfiction memoir, Night, to be adapted.

Sophie's Choice is onstage at the Kennedy Center Opera House Sept. 30, Oct. 5, 9. Tickets, $25-$48, are available by calling 202-295-2400.

Lisa Traiger writes frequently on the performing arts.