A scene from "Visitations"NOAH STERN WEBERToward the end of her life, Jonathan Berger’s mother suffered from dementia. In the throes of musical and auditory hallucinations, she repeatedly hummed a song that Berger, a composer and music professor at Stanford University, did not recognize. He transcribed the tune.
“Thank heavens for the Internet. I was able to actually track it down,” Berger said. “It turned out to be the number-one hit single in January 1948, in the week that my brother was born. That was a very poignant moment for me. So I got very interested in this issue of imaged, or imagined, sound.”
Both Berger’s personal fascination with the phenomenon and his immersion in the most up-to-date research are on view in “Visitations,” a pair of one-act chamber operas he composed, which explore the theme of auditory hallucinations from the perspectives of those who suffer from them. “Theotokia” transports the audience into the consciousness of a man in thrall to his hallucinations of the Mother of God; “The War Reporter” portrays the ...
