‘Before It All Goes Dark’: A Tribune story about Nazi-looted artwork gets the operatic treatment

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The one-act opera adaptation by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer tells the story of a man who was the heir to an art fortune worth millions.

Former Chicago Tribune critic Howard Reich at his suburban Chicago home on May 2, 2024. A new opera “Before It All Goes Dark” is based on the 2001-2002 Tribune series by Reich about a Vietnam War vet named Gerald McDonald who learned he was heir to an art fortune looted by the Nazis. By 2001, Howard Reich found himself in plenty of strange situations in his line of work. As an arts reporter for the Tribune, it came with the territory.

Gerald McDonald arrives by train in the early evening at Lodz, Poland on July 1, 2002. McDonald retraced the steps of his great-great uncle Emil Freund, who was the owner of a vast art collection taken by the Nazis. . “I grew up with a visceral awareness of the power of memory, and the vastness of stories that need to be told,” Miller says.

“I got this rush — I felt music,” Heggie says. “It was a different perspective on the Holocaust from anything we’d considered.” “I think Howard understood that what I’m doing is very, very different than what he did. He was really writing a newspaper piece, telling the story. But we’re trying to write an opera, which is anchored in emotion,” Scheer says.

That’s gradually changing as attitudes around looted artwork have evolved. The Art Institute of Chicago is the most prominent local institution to face restitution claims, including for antiquities from Nepal. Just last month, the Art Institute filed a lengthy rebuttal in New York courts to defend its ownership of a watercolor by Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele.

 

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