Chamber Opera in Three Acts
circa 35 minutes.
Clara Immerwahr Haber – soprano; Franz Haber – Tenor; Richard Abegg – Baritone; Otto Sackur – Tenor; James Franck – Baritone
Herman Haber – (Child); Charlotte Nathan; various servers, scientists, officials – Supernum
Background
Clara Immerwahr Haber was born in 1870 near Breslau in Germany to a middle-class family of assimilated Jews. Her father was a Ph.D. in Chemistry who became an agronomist and store owner. Breslau at that time contained the third largest Jewish population in Germany, yet the Immerwahr family seldom, if ever, practiced Jewish religion or customs, but rather focused on education and intellectual achievement. During her youth Clara faced the reality that formal university education in Germany was closed to women, although they could attend schools for teachers. Even the ability to audit at a university was given only by special dispensation.
Clara’s persistence and hard study allowed her to pass the entrance exam to the University of Breslau, where she eventually became the first woman from that university to receive a Ph.D. in Chemistry, focusing on physical chemistry under the direction of her advisor, Richard Abegg, with whom she published her first research paper. All three of Clara’s published research papers appeared in 1900-1901. At a university garden reception in 1901, she renewed acquaintance with Fritz Haber, whom she had met at a dance class a few years earlier. Haber pursued her diligently and quickly proposed marriage. Perhaps imagining a partnership of two scientists, she accepted the proposal and the couple married in August of that same year.
A note on sources: Tracking reliable information surrounding the motives for and precise circumstances of Clara Haber’s suicide proves a highly uncertain task. Possibly the most comprehensive source of information to emerge is the long review article by Friedrich and Hoffmann that appears as a chapter in the volume One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences. (2017). That chapter, titled “Clara Immerwahr: A Life in the Shadow of Fritz Haber,” reviewed extant sources to try and clarify what was known or not known about the tragic end of Clara’s life. Their effort yields much information yet leaves the precise reasons for Clara’s suicide shrouded in uncertainty. Some mixture of the following factors seems most reasonable: revulsion against the perversion of science that resulted in chemical warfare; frustration with her role as housewife rather than scientific partner; and a marriage that proved a cold and cruel disappointment. The opera is from history, but it is not history. We hope rather to tell a compelling story that is true enough to elevate and enlighten.
David J. Adams
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