Gather Us Around

Returning to Dead Man Walking, an opera by Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally, a decade after its world premiere in 2000.

By Patrick Summers, Houston Grand Opera Music Director

There are two words rarely paired together in US opera companies. Separately they are innocuous, but together they can strike fear, dread, and even anger in some opera patrons: ‘modern’ and ‘opera’. Even amongst some the most open-minded, modern opera is an anachronism, or something akin to swallowing medicine, you know you must but you’re not going to like it. There is a crisis in the arts in 2010, or at least a general feeling that the role of culture in the twenty-first century internet age is still unknown. On the surface this manifests itself as a (worse-than-usual) cyclical financial crisis. But the crisis in classical music is really just an inability to find a new music over the last 100 years that has consistently drawn a public.

Were audiences of 2010 clamoring for contemporary works from a few dozen living composers, as their counterparts did in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries, there would be no shortage of audiences, money, nor any serious need to defend the existence of arts organizations. This is counterintuitive for American arts companies, under constant financial pressure to repeat the known, for serious art has become, for many, a sort of benign therapy, something to take the mind away from “real life”, instead of being what it should be: provocative, stimulating, relevant to now and endlessly new, even if its old. Too much of the great music written in the past seventy-five years has not found a consistent public. Outside the world of the 1.7% of the US population that attends the fine arts, and this figure includes people who attend one fine arts even per year, the idea that there are composers living among us writing classical music, let alone grand operas, would be as surprising as learning of a new blacksmith or cobbler next to the nearest Starbuck’s.

New operas, for many audiences, translate as tuneless, irrelevant, cerebral, “I won’t understand it”, simply too much work to contemplate. And a wide gulf persists even among professionals in the industry charged with maintaining our institutions, “we must do new operas because we must do new operas, but if we play it safe, the critics will maul us. If we put on a work that is representative of the most progressive musical minds of the day, the critics will praise it to the skies and the wider public will hate it,” both admittedly broad generalizations with exceptions, but both contain truths. There would seem to be no middle ground.

Along comes composer Jake Heggie, who is central to an emerging new style of opera in the United States, one that fuses elements that formerly never overlapped: the old form of “art song”, the most progressive of the post-Sondheim commercial music-theater composers, the experimental film score composers, smatterings of pop culture, and some important influences of the older generation of minimalist composers popular in the 1970s and 80s. Jake also, in interesting ways, inherits the legacy of a composer incredibly important to the history of Houston Grand Opera, 84-year-old Carlisle Floyd, in that both are highly driven by narrative and the fabric of spoken English forms the rhythmic basis of all of their work. Jake is among a large current group of American classical composers of wildly diverse musical styles, Daniel Catan, Mark Adamo, Ricky Ian Gordon, Jennifer Higdon, Kevin Puts, Christopher Theofanidis, John Musto, Stephen Schwartz, Jack Perla, Michael Daugherty and so many others. Their unifying quality is that there is no unifying style amongst them, each is utterly unique, so different from the other it is difficult to remember they are contemporaries. They are a musical amalgam, an artistic melting pot much like their nation, with disparate ideologies and energies, and what interesting and dynamic music they write, and how fascinatingly they talk about each other! The lines between musical genres are spectacularly blurred now, as a whole new artistic world shifts around an extremely unpredictable and still, mostly, artistically conservative operatic public. That none are “household names,” as the cliché goes, says nothing about their talents, but a great deal about how information does or doesn’t get disseminated in the world of info-glut.

Jake has had the deserved career advantage to have star singers clamoring for him to write for them. Giacomo Puccini, remember, the composer of La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, and Tosca, owed his initial opportunities not to music critics or fellow composers, most of whom deplored him, but to a few star singers who championed him. I remember Jake calling me to ask what I thought of Susan Graham and Frederica von Stade starring together in the 2000 world premiere of Dead Man Walking; I told him I thought he should remember that not everyone’s first opera has such celestial casting. Like several of his predecessors, Massenet, Puccini, Verdi, and Stephen Sondheim, Jake has written almost exclusively for the theater, though a first symphony is in its embryonic stages.

Jake, born in Florida, raised in Ohio and California, started his artistic life as a pianist, studying in Paris then at UCLA with Johana Harris. I met Jake in 1994 when he was at a personal crossroads in this life, contemplating his next step while working in the press office of San Francisco Opera, writing press releases and speeches for SFO’s then General Director, Lotfi Mansouri. Jake and I struck up a friendship, and he showed me some of his songs, which impressed me immediately with their lyrical immediacy and operatic scope. Along with several important singers, I suggested Lotfi take a chance on Jake writing the “millennium” opera he was seeking to follow Andre Previn’s operatic version of A Streetcar named Desire in 1999. Lotfi commissioned Jake for a year-2000 world premiere. As Jake was a newcomer, Lotfi signed on Broadway veteran playwright and quadruple Tony-winner Terrence McNally to write his first opera libretto. Terrence provided Jake with a list of ten potential operatic properties, telling him he had a favorite on the list but without identifying it; Jake quickly chose it, Dead Man Walking, saying he got chills upon seeing the title on the paper and could immediately hear parts of the score he would eventually compose. The rest of Terrence’s list, by the way, is fascinating, but the theater is a superstitious world, so it would be bad luck to divulge. Terrence’s lean and musical libretto brilliantly never takes a side in the intractable death penalty debate. It simply asks a big question but never answers it: what does murdering a murderer say about murder?

Audience reactions to the world premiere in 2000 were powerful, diverse, and never benign; it is a drama that lands on a person at whatever precise point they are on their “journey”, as Sister Helen would put it. What was absent from the reactions to Dead Man Walking were the aforementioned typical reactions to “modern opera;” there was only a powerful connection, for unlike older operas of the repertoire which can benefit from some context and prior knowledge, Dead Man Walking needs no introduction. It dives into an enormous subject, for if the role of the state in terminating the life of a citizen is not important, well, nothing is, but it does so at an intimate level that can be understood. At its essence it is not a political opera, nor is it ultimately an opera “about” the death penalty; that is merely its setting. There is no reason to read between the lines of Dead Man Walking, for the lines themselves are so provocative.

Though Dead Man Walking is a uniquely American work, it is also definitely a “grand opera” with arias, duets, and big ensemble scenes, scored for large chorus and orchestra, for unamplified soloists singing in natural sound. There are passages in the opera where amplification is used to surprising effect, though never while someone is singing: Jake wrote all of the music you hear emanating from the car radio in the opening scene, which is pre-recorded and obviously amplified.

The spiritual tune of the cryptic “He will gather us around,” which we hear Helen teaching to a group of children, musically unifies the work, as do several other recurring musical themes. “This Journey,” a falling three-note theme that is itself a fragment of the uneasily quiet opening measures of the opera, is heard through the piece, undergoing a number of transformations until it is at its most rapturous, late in the work, at the moment of reconciliation. The ensemble of Helen and all of the drama’s parents, “you don’t know,” grows from a more complicated a musical development of Helen’s journey music, taken in an unexpectedly baroque direction, and balanced with the shock of emotion that each character feels in the scene. Jake subtly changes orchestral textures as themes repeat.

For Joe’s uncomprehending and heartbroken Mother, the character has no other name, Jake wrote two diverse arias, simple and ardent, exact musical pictures of a character who will soon be presiding over a new set of victims. Jake’s simple but unerring gift for prosody can be heard in her first aria, for the character is full of questioning self-doubt. She initially sings “Haven’t we all suffered enough?” before correcting her emphasis, as though embarrassed by her honesty, “Haven’t we all suffered enough?” Jake sets snatches of Elvis Presley as an important moment of emotional intimacy between Joe and Helen. His choral “Lord’s Prayer” is Joe’s march to his own execution, the “dead man walking” of the title, written with long choral phrases and a roiling orchestra underneath building in tension, so typical of Jake’s style. He uses silence in the opera’s finale to great effect, a rare risk for a young composer. And if you think you heard no “tunes” in Dead Man Walking, then you simply weren’t listening: Jake is classical music’s most unashamed melodist.

A few have complained that Jake breaks no new ground, as though the only music worthy of an audience is that which revolutionizes. This is an interesting and short-sighted look at the long history of music, as many great composers have looked to their influences and made them their own. Jake’s genius is the skill with which he takes an audience on a musical journey that is indeed new, but also has a level of familiarity and comfort. His music has, at its heart, beauty, which inevitably brings up the ancient discussions about the nature of beauty itself, discussions which are ubiquitous in modern opera houses, for what is beauty and its role, not just in works of art but in life? Clearly, surface prettiness isn’t beautiful, for the surface of anything can belie profundity underneath. Conversely, a desert landscape or high mountaintop can clearly be beautiful, yet it is a harsh and stark beauty, inhospitable to human habitation; so, is beauty only that which we can use? Few would find the city of Houston as beautiful as, say, Paris or Rome, yet young people in love in Houston are just as in love as a young French or Italian couple. And in regards to music, is only “old” music beautiful? So, what is beauty?

Beauty is simply a true response about a fundamental truth; if a drama or phrase of music has a truth within its own structure, it’s beautiful, whether the language be coarse or fine, the music tonal or dissonant. In classical music, there has been too much analysis of music that is on a fixed continuum, which by its nature implies there is only one way to do something. Surely it is just as important to judge a composer or work of art by how precisely it reaches the goals and ambitions of its creation. Many composers, Beethoven, Mahler, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Britten, to name just five, fought with life through their art; each seemed, at the cellular level, at odds with the travails of living on this earth. For happier men, joy has rarely had better expression than by Bach, Dvorak, Handel, or in the final years of Verdi, for who has written more joyously of life than in the closing moments of his Falstaff? Jake Heggie’s goal is to only to connect with you at whatever your level of understanding may be; “accessible” is a desirable trait for him; he does not admire or seek obscurity. He writes to be understood, which in 2011 could probably be considered a radical act.

Having conducted many new operas in my career, it is singularly rewarding to come back to Dead Man Walking a decade after conducting its world premiere, and after conducting the premieres of all of Jake’s large-scale operas, including his recent Moby Dick for the Dallas Opera last season. My artistic collaborations with Jake on his subsequent three operas have taught me a great deal about the unwritten and unspoken intricacies of his aesthetic, and I’m looking forward to applying those discoveries to HGO’s production of Dead Man Walking. I’m ten years older and thus am not the same musician as a decade ago, and I hope to bring something deeper to it. What strikes me in 2010 about the opera Dead Man Walking is how successfully it honors its legacy as a “grand opera,” even as it whispers with intimacy.

While I have a very wide range of tastes in modern music, as I most ardently seek composers who write from an honest and personal voice, whatever their language, I admire how Jake achieves, fully within his own language, his own balance of intellect and emotion. He can certainly speak to the heart, as in what I believe is the musical center of Dead Man Walking, the short confessional aria of Owen Hart in Act Two. Jake instinctively understates lines that lesser composers would have overdone: “nothing’s gonna bring back my little girl,” Owen haltingly sings, as a little tune quietly rises from quietly hollow chords. There are surprises: Sister Helen offers to take a photograph of Joe with his mother and brothers, which Jake musically freezes, the last precious moment of a family, which allows us just enough time to contemplate a complicated set of feelings, for though Joe denied such a moment of goodbye to two helpless teenagers, we are unexpectedly confronted with a new and just-as-heartbroken set of victims.

These lyrical moments are all the more poignant set against some of the brutal and jagged music of the prison sequences, music which clearly points to the thorniest and most orchestrally thrilling music Jake has yet written, the storm sequence in the second act of his Moby-Dick.

In his work, Jake is ultimately motivated to emphasize that which humanizes, and on our similarities more than our differences. All of Jake’s operas are identity quests: Dead Man Walking is about one nun’s surprising and unsought test of her own vocation, for we feel Helen struggling not to believe, but to hold on to the central tenets of her faith, and to emulate the example of Jesus Christ, himself a victim of capital punishment. The condemned Joe has a journey to tell the truth about himself for the first time in his life, for after all of his masculine bluster and constant denial, Sister Helen’s love, the first compassion he has ever felt, transforms him into a child, “don’t you hate me now, too?” he sings, following his confession, tellingly to the first complete melody we hear in the opera. Jake’s second opera, The End of the Affair is a mirror image of Dead Man Walking, involving a journey through one devout woman’s bargain with her faith in the face of adultery and regret. Three Decembers, or Last Acts as it was known in its Houston premiere, is about one family’s journey to the truth about itself, and is perhaps closest to Jake’s own personal story. Moby-Dick, with its clear libretto by Gene Sheer, became in Jake’s hands not only an opera about Ahab’s famous obsession with the title character, but an unexpected journey into the motivations of the character who narrates the novel, a man whose real name we never know but who asks to be called Ishmael. Even in the face of the brutality of much of Dead Man Walking’s stage action, the opera manages, miraculously, to be an uplifting and cathartic work that demands reflection.

This is an opera that views its subject matter from all sides, both victims and perpetrators. No character in this opera is “wrong;” they all simply have their justifiable feelings. It is a deeply moral work, to be sure, but it does not come down on either side of the death penalty issue, leaving that decision to you. At the center of this opera is the figure of Sister Helen Prejean herself, a voice of true apolitical morality in our world, capable of bringing intellectual clarity and focus to an issue that is emotional and endlessly complex. This opera captures her empathy and humor. She is a jolly and gregarious southern Catholic nun capable of talking to anyone, open and engaging, easy to laugh, a model of compassion and light-heartedness, yet she can address a joint session of the American Congress or the European Union and leave hardened politicians quaking. Whatever one’s religious beliefs or political leanings or lack of either, one is humbled by her.

The premiere of Dead Man Walking in San Francisco was a star-studded event attended by Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, and Sean Pean, there to support Sister Helen, as they had all three made the Oscar-winning film based on her novel, though the opera and the film are very different experiences telling quite different stories. In the audience that night was even the ultimate singing nun herself, Julie Andrews, who was in San Francisco filming Disney’s The Princess Diaries. But the star quotient was not the main reason that it remains one of the most exciting nights of all of our lives. There was a sense of important accomplishment infused with the raw power of the work Jake and Terrence created, something you never really feel until an audience is present, and a prescient sense that we were all involved in something important. We were, at the time, an underdog project. Jake was untried; Terrence was highly experienced but new to opera. No one knew what to expect, and thus the impact of the piece for those first audiences was shattering.

I recall other flashes of that night: all of us eagerly looking for the real Sister Helen before the performance, hoping she wasn’t lost, only to find that she was out on the street in front of the theater praying with a group of pro-death penalty protesters who were picketing the opera. I also recall being introduced for the first time to actor Robin Williams moments after the curtain came down. He meekly said, “nice to meet you, Patrick,” and he fell into my arms, sobbing.

Now, ten years later in Houston, an extraordinary group of artisans are gathered, devoted to Jake and to new music, with artistic ties that span generations. Leading it all will be Leonard Foglia, the director most steeped in Jake’s aesthetic, having directed the premieres of all of his operas following Dead Man Walking (Joe Mantello directed the original production in San Francisco). Lennie’s production, originally created for a consortium of US opera companies, is the obvious choice for Houston’s presentation.

Philip Cutlip, a baritone of rare vulnerability, sings the role of Joe de Rocher for the first time in his career. The role’s surface physical demands, for it surely is the only role ever written that demands push-ups (in the opening of Act Two), is the easiest aspect of the part; this is a role that ranges from nearly-unwatchable violence to blustering denial to complete resigned submission and admission. Philip is no stranger to Jake’s music, having performed the west coast premiere of The End of the Affair in Seattle. Measha Bruggergrossman, who sings Sister Rose, is a ravishing and riveting spinto soprano, the leading singer of a new generation hailing from her native Canada. Cheryl Parrish, a spirited soprano whom I’ve known and loved since my earliest days in San Francisco, returns to the opera stage after years away (she’s a professor of voice in San Marcos, Texas), so that she could take part in what she called “this rare moment.” John Packard, who a decade ago created the leading role of Joe de Rocher in the opera’s world premiere, impressing us all with his heartbreaking transformation, returns to the piece in a very different role, as Owen Hart, the father of the murdered girl. It will be fascinating for John and for us all to watch him discover the work from a different perspective.

Finally, there are three incredible generations of America’s leading mezzo sopranos, led by the inimitable Frederica von Stade, who sings the role Jake and Terrance created for her, Joe’s Mother. Flicka, as she is known to everyone, has been Jake’s constant muse and ardently unwavering supporter. As difficult as it is to imagine opera in America without Flicka, she has chosen to retire from the operatic stage with these performances, capping a career that spans more than four decades; she confided in me several years ago that she wanted to “hang in there long enough to sing Jake into Houston.” Susanne Mentzer, a veteran Rossini and Mozart mezzo soprano, now a Professor of Voice at the Shepherd School at Rice University, thankfully agreed to take on a role considerably smaller than she normally would, simply because she wanted to be part of this experience.

Most importantly, returning to her artistic home of Houston Grand Opera, is the peerless Joyce DiDonato, singing the role of Sister Helen. Joyce sang the role in the work’s debut at the New York City Opera, and her advocacy of it and of Jake is a resounding reason for the opera to appear in Texas this season. Joyce is easily the leading mezzo of her generation, a star of a caliber one erroneously hears they don’t make anymore, except in her case, they do! Sought by every opera house in the world, Joyce does what a true star should do: just as her colleagues did in the nineteenth Century, she uses her fame to advance those two words which began this article, two words you’ve no cause to fear, for they are two words which represent the most privileged, exciting, moving, and important artistic work of a serious opera company.  

Patrick Summers
November 26, 2010
Trieste, Italy