commissioned by American Lyric Theater

Tevye’s daughters marry for love. But what happens after they immigrate to America? Who do they become as grown women, straddling the old world and the new? And what of the sisters you didn’t meet in Fiddler?            

Inspired by Sholem Aleichem’s “Shprintse,” one of the darker stories in the beloved writer’s Tevye the Milkman collection, the opera centers on a tale not included in the musical, in which Tevye’s younger daughter Shprintse falls in love with a young man above her station, troubling the status quo. Like so many women of her generation, Shprintse, in Sholem Aleichem’s telling, has no choice but to navigate her crisis with silence.

Tevye’s Daughters rewrites that silence, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories have been suppressed. Moving between a shtetl in 1907 Ukraine and a Catskills summer cabin in 1964, the opera conjures a highly theatrical reimagining of a cultural archetype we think we know, from the perspective of the daughters themselves. When their grandniece Rose arrives the day after her grandmother’s 80th birthday bringing with her a secret of her own, Tevye’s surviving daughters, haunted by a vestigial memory submerged for more than half a century, can no longer look away from the past.