Mamzer Bastard review: Dense and disorientating drama sheds light on Jewish past

The Hebrew word “Mamzer” describes someone born from a relationship — incestuous or adulterous — forbidden within Jewish religious law; “bastard” is an approximate synonym. By using both words as the title of her new opera, Israeli composer Na’ama Zisser focuses attention on the stain the past leaves on innocent lives.

The plot revolves around a Hasidic family in New York in 1977, when the famous blackout throws lives into disarray but also allows the possibility of coming to terms with history — the Holocaust partly, but also the family’s.

The protagonist is Yoel, a young man about to marry. Struggling to see how his past fits his present, he gets lost in the blackout, which forces his parents to examine secrets they’ve hidden from him, and from each other.

It’s a dense story, and Zisser’s music sometimes struggles to make it dramatic. Yet she writes for voices sympathetically, which she amplifies, while her small orchestra (Aurora Orchestra conducted by Jessica Cottis) is at its most persuasive when at its quietest. Zisser’s musical coup is to integrate the microtonal ululations of a Jewish cantor, Netanel Hershtik, providing an archaic penumbra that is both comforting and chilling.

In Jay Scheib’s production much of the action is filmed and projected onto the set, the images slightly out of sync with the live action. The disorientating effect becomes a visual analogue of the rupture between past and present, between what’s said and what’s not said — precisely what’s at the opera’s heart.