Working with the texts of an exciting, exacting poet and a singer-muse who has inspired almost all of his operatic work, composer Michael Hersch probes the infinite distance at the heart of relationships. Two people embrace, their hands and bodies covered in white clay slip. They smear each other with streaks of the material, temporarily freezing their forms before motion causes the clay to crackle. It’s a striking image—a couple who try to fix one another into objects, only to find that they cannot. This is Michael Hersch’s opera and we, each, a narrative constructed from the poetry of Shane McRae that follows the slow, agonizing process of a relationship breaking down and the occasionally beautiful patterns that can form in the cracks.
I spoke to Hersch and McRae in the lead-up to the opera’s New York premiere at National Sawdust. McRae found Hersch’s work through a review over a decade ago and was attracted to the characterization of Hersch’s symphonies as “doomy and gloomy.” McRae “wanted music to sound, generally speaking, unhappy and angry,” and Hersch’s pieces fit the bill. McRae wrote Hersch a fan letter, and they started a correspondence, but it wasn’t until years later that Hersch asked to collaborate on an opera.
The libretto itself has something of a unique story. Unlike many operas, which involve considerable direct collaboration between librettist and composer, here Hersch was working with existing material while also commissioning more. Almost two-thirds of the libretto comes from already published work by McRae, with the remaining material written for the opera at Hersch’s request. This ceding of creative control means that and we, each is almost a chimera of Hersch and McRae; not necessarily a homogenous collaboration, but McRae’s words refracted through Hersch’s sensibility, then reframed yet again by McRae.
What results is a piece that is both fragmentary and deeply lyrical, full of McRae’s rich language. The imagery is often startlingly visceral, even violent, but as McRae tells Observer, it is not the violence itself that is of interest. “Violence in art can function as a preliminary move; it kind of breaks the reader or viewer or listener complacency in such a way that you can then seed other, more interesting thoughts.” In and we, each, these moments function to get at the fraught process of knowing another person, the pain and distance that can seep into relationships almost without the lovers knowing they’re there.
Hersch has written five operas, all but one explicitly for soprano Ah Young Hong, who has been his muse and collaborator for over a decade. Casting Hong for his first opera, a lengthy, virtuosic monodrama entitled On the Threshold of Winter, was something of a risk. The soprano had no experience with contemporary music, and Hersch’s work is demanding, both physically and dramatically. But Hersch says that Hong’s artistry blew him away; he was so impressed with her performance that all of his subsequent operas were written for her. Through Hersch’s work, she’s embodied both Medea and Poppea, women of mythic reputation who are defined and damned, in one way or another, by their relationships. Here Hong and baritone Jesse Blumberg are characters without names; they exist only in the context of one another.
Early in the opera, one member of the couple sings, “I write you to make a wound write back.” It’s a line that easily applies to a breakup, but it wasn’t written with this scenario in mind. McRae wrote it in a poem about the death of his grandmother. There, he considers the whole process of addressing the dead, which he describes as “writing to get an understanding of yourself”—a way to address the “particular woundedness” that comes with our feelings about people who are absent. In and we, each, this line changes context, now speaking to the difficulty of relationships more generally, the infinite distance and complex projections that separate us even from the people with whom we are the most deeply intertwined. Closing that gap is the work of any relationship, a process McRae describes as moving from a model of acquisitiveness, a “peace according to which what one wants is acceptable to another person,” to one where each person can be seen in their “fullness.” “The work,” as he puts it, “is recognizing the other without putting yourself between your vision of the other and the other themselves.” and we, each is about the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of succeeding in this endeavor, of truly seeing one another with clarity and without looking away.
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Opera is particularly able to speak to that difficulty, McRae and Hersch tell me in very different ways. One of the beautiful opportunities that opera presents, Hersch says, “is that it allows composers—it allows me—to escape myself; it allows a different kind of projection of the self outwards. That illusion allows for a kind of escape from one’s demons.” Hersch tells me that he “lives in a world of hearing,” but opera is the space where the visual, the bodily, the relational becomes as central as sound. McRae and I get to this question circuitously. I asked him about epics and relationships, not only because of scattered references to The Aeneid that haunt and we, each, but because McRae’s upcoming book is a riff on Dante’s Inferno. What did he think of this connection, particularly with regard to opera? For McRae, epic poetry and performance are inherently relational. They aren’t just about human relationships; they arise “out of a communal performance”; they “imply a listening” that also implies someone there to listen. Opera, a genre that in its early history frequently depicted epics, works in a similar way. “I think opera can’t help but be better tuned to what an epic does,” McRae says, because opera also is written with communal performance in mind.
The narrative of and, we each recalls for me another epic scene—the meeting of Odysseus and Penelope at the end of Homer’s Odyssey, where the long-separated lovers tentatively, apprehensively try to make sense of one another, to slice through the haze of absence and fear and see what still lies between them. The encounter, full of desire and terror, ends happily enough for those mythic lovers. But the modern ones in and we, each are somehow too close together and too far apart to reach one another. They aren’t heroes; moments of clarity are fleeting or arrive incomplete. The Odyssey isn’t just an archetypical journey. It also asks an epic relational question: can we ever really know anyone, even those we love the most? The couple in and, we each asks that, too, but adds to it another, perhaps more frightening question: what happens when we know someone too well, as well as not knowing them at all? Can we keep loving them?
Hersch is a composer who is comfortable with possible impossibility. He recognizes that sometimes he writes music that might not be performed, either soon or ever, because of its difficulty. One of his pieces, sew me into a shroud of leaves, took him fifteen years to write, and would take a musician almost ten hours to perform its 153 movements (though it was performed in 2019). Hersch’s work has often been cited for its darkness and intensity, and both artists are no strangers to these qualities. In 2023, McRae, by then a respected poet, published a memoir about his childhood. Born of a white mother and Black father, McRae was kidnapped at the age of three by his white supremacist grandparents, who robbed him of his history and distorted his reality, all while purporting to love him. In Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, the poet describes how he clawed his sense of himself back. Hersch has written, as he did in an article for Nautilus, about the death of his father and a close friend from cancer, along with his own experiences with that disease and a cardiac event that nearly killed him. The composer prizes the ability to look into the abyss of pain and loss with an unflinching gaze.
But for Hersch, a flat darkness isn’t the only thing to see when staring into the void; there’s almost infinite shading there, perceptible once the eyes adjust. As Hersch put it, “Human beings are unbearably complicated; I’ve spent my life trying to get at that, and I think I mostly fail. That’s why I keep being so excited about composing.” Here, Hersch and I return to Dante and the ending of Inferno. Having been through hell, Dante and Vergil travel so far down that they find themselves right-side-up, looking at the stars. We may not all get there, Hersch says. “But even if you don’t, most people want to be there.” That failure is not depressing but affirming of art’s power: “One could argue that that is the nature of optimism—that effortfulness.”
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