- novawcp
- Jul 8
- 3 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
What We Learned from Meeting the Composer of Our
Season's Most Powerful Piece
There are rehearsals you remember for the music, and then there are the ones you remember for everything else. Last month's gathering was the second kind.
Our singers spent an hour on Zoom with Linda Tutas Haugen, composer of Anne Frank: A Living Voice, the piece anchoring our fall programs. During this conversation, we shared a reckoning with history and with our current time, and we discussed why a group of singers in Athens, Georgia would spend a summer wrapped in the words of a teenage girl who died eighty years ago.
How it began
Linda was originally asked for a short, three-to-five-minute piece for Susan McMane and the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Thinking about the teenage singers who'd perform it, she remembered what had shaped her own life at that age: reading Anne Frank's diary at twelve, an experience that cracked open her understanding of the world. One movement couldn't hold what she needed to say, so with permission from the conductor and commissioners, the piece grew into a full, multi-movement work for treble choir and string quartet, an instrumental ensemble that existed in the concentration camps. Anne Frank: A Living Voice premiered in 2004 and has been sung worldwide ever since.
Yet, before she could write a note, Linda needed permission to set Anne's actual words. She reached out to Buddy Elias, Anne Frank's last living relative, then in his eighties in Basel, Switzerland, and spent an afternoon with him before he passed away. "That was also a really affirming thing for me," she told us, "to be able to meet him and speak with him."
Linda chose her texts chronologically, tracing Anne's real psychological arc: the disorientation of the first months in hiding, the small ways Anne adapted and kept herself going, and finally the reality that begins to set in as the diary nears its end. Even in the final movement, Anne holds onto hope, writing that she believes peace will come one day. Haugen deliberately built the whole piece toward that line, even though she calls it one of the hardest passages she's ever had to set. The choice to end with Anne's hope, knowing her family would be discovered less than a month later, is what makes the work so powerful. More than two decades after composing that movement, Haugen still can't get through it. "I cannot listen to that without crying," she told us.
Setting a Voice, Not Just a Text
One of the most striking aspects of Anne Frank: A Living Voice is the speech-like quality that Haugen gives to Anne’s texts through frequent shifts in meter. It's as if Anne is speaking straight to us across eighty years, unfiltered and unmistakably present, rather than being sung about from a distance. Haugen credits her graduate studies with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Dominick Argento, whose work is known for natural text-setting. Haugen carried these lessons directly into this piece. While the mixed meter might make initial rehearsals slightly daunting, it exists because ordinary speech doesn't fit neatly within tidy 4/4 bars. The music bends to fit the words and not the other way around.
Why now?
Presenting Anne Frank: A Living Voice feels very timely, and its opening line, "It is the silence that frightens me so," became the hinge point of our conversation. For some singers, it called up their own hard chapters, old and new, long before the connection back to Anne set in. For others, it landed as something close to the news itself, no longer a historical artifact but a description of the week they were living through. Linda, who lives in Minneapolis, spoke quietly about neighbors too afraid to leave their homes this past year. "It's one heart opened at a time," she said. "And with more performances, there are more hearts opened."
Join us
NOVA will perform Anne Frank: A Living Voice, with string quartet, as part of our concert Fire Flowers. We'll sing it twice this fall: September 27th at 3:00 pm at St. Gregory the Great in Athens, and again October 10th at 7:00 pm at Congregation Children of Israel. Both performances are free and open to the public.
To learn more about the music of Linda Tutas Haugen, please visit her website: lindatutashaugen.com
