‘The orchestra is the best orchestra to play the score so far!’ composer Jake Heggie is enthusing to me over the phone from Adelaide, where he has been attending rehearsals of his opera Dead Man Walking. It’s the first time the opera will be performed outside the USA. Since its world premiere in October 2000 at San Francisco Opera, Heggie’s Dead Man Walking went on to be commissioned by seven other American opera companies: Opera Pacific, Cincinnati Opera, New York City Opera, Austin Lyric Opera, Michigan Opera Theatre, Pittsburgh Opera and Baltimore Opera.
And Heggie is pretty impressed with the way the State Opera of South Australia’s production is shaping up for the exclusive Australian season.
‘It’s incredible. I am so impressed with the way the company is doing the production,’ Heggie continues, whose excitement is commendable considering that: a) it’s just 9am in the morning and b) he’s been waking at 5.30am on the nose for the past few days, thanks to a bout of jet-lag.
‘This is an amazing orchestra…they really get the various gestures that I’ve put into the orchestra that are very much based on a psychological moment, or the way someone sings their line. They [the orchestra] move and they give, besides…they play gorgeously!’ Heggie is equally passionate about the Adelaide season’s orchestral conductor, John DeMain, who is now notching up his fourth gig conducting Dead Man Walking.
It may come as a surprise to some that such a major international contemporary opera is being staged in the small South Australian capital, rather than the elaborate Opera House in Sydney. A closer look, however, points to a number of internationally-renowned arts events which take place in the city, including the Adelaide Festival and the Australian Performing Arts Market.
Meanwhile, the UK’s own interactive theatre and game purveyors, Blast Theory, are set to descend on Adelaide in January 2004, for a three-month residency to develop their latest venture, Uncle Roy All Around You, a game played simultaneously on the streets of a city and online.
But the State Opera of South Australia has worked hard to place itself at the forefront of opera productions in the nation. Following a Federal inquiry into Australia’s major performing arts companies in 1999, the company lobbied the Government to support it as a producer of large-scale niche opera product. Since 2000, the State Opera of South Australia has been classified as the nation’s sole specialist opera producer, receiving split funding from both the State and Federal Governments.
The company’s General Manager, Stephen Phillips, tracked the success of Dead Man Walking in San Francisco in 2000 and contacted Heggie to find out how it might be staged for the State Opera.
The Adelaide premiere of Dead Man Walking reunites composer Heggie with baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes, who performed in three of the original nine San Francisco Opera productions in 2000. ‘He knows how to act and he’s incredibly charismatic and appealing on stage,’ says Heggie of Rhodes. ‘I’ve been so taken with him I’m writing one of the principal roles in my next opera specifically for him,’ he adds, referring to his second opera commission, The End of the Affair which is set to premiere in January 2004.
Heggie’s comments mark an interesting comparison to Rhodes’ own thoughts last week, who admitted to Arts Hub that he felt the need to draw on more than his voice in contemporary opera, especially in Dead Man Walking.
One of the problems with ‘traditional’ opera, Heggie observes, is that it has, over the years, garnered a ‘stand there and sing it’ perception from audiences. ‘It [opera] works so much better when it’s theatrical and the drama is being told through the voice, as well as the acting,’ he notes.
Heggie worked with the renowned American playwright Terrence McNally on Dead Man Walking. It was McNally who suggested the idea to base the opera on the novel, by Sister Helen Prejean, which was also made into a Hollywood film by Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon in 1996. The intense theatricality of the opera, Heggie believes, is something audiences really respond to.
‘That was my good fortune working with the great Terrence McNally. He’s so dramatically astute, he knows about stagecraft. [In] creating the architecture and structure of the piece,’ Heggie explains, ‘we designed things to be extremely theatrical. And I think it’s one of the things that audiences respond to – especially audiences that have never gone to the opera before.’
Sister Helen Prejean has attended nearly every performance of the opera in the States, and is also in Adelaide for the Australian premiere. The combination of music and drama tends to have a profound impact on audiences’ emotions, she observes, making it a ‘doubly powerful artform’, taking people on the journey that she has, and still does, experience when accompanying inmates on death row.
‘Jake Heggie has written some amazing music,’ says Sister Helen, who got to know Heggie well throughout the creative process. ‘Jake would call me and say, “Listen to this, I think I’ve written something really wonderful.” So he’d call me periodically, or he’d plink it [a composition] out on the piano and try to sing it just to give me a sense of it.’
Heggie’s foray into the world of composing operas reads like a fairytale, or the tale of the tortured artist finally achieving success. Heggie had been a pianist and composer up until his late 20s, when, in the latter half of the 1980s, muscular difficulties in one of his hands forced him to give it away. ‘My hand would clam into a ball when I played the piano, it just came from years of playing with way too much tension,’ he recalls. ‘I became very depressed and stopped writing music.’
Heggie decided if he couldn’t have a career in music, he would forge one adjacent to the artform, and became a staff writer for first the UCLA centre for the arts, and then San Francisco Opera. While his musical talents were at first hidden behind the guise of staff press release writer, his talents were unveiled again (his hand having healed over time with therapy) when he was inspired by mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, for whom he wrote three pieces and gave to her as a gift on one of her opening nights. Before long, word got out, international singers were seeking Heggie out in the press office, and he was called into the office of the San Francisco Opera’s general manager, Lofti Mansouri.
Far from wondering why singing talent was knocking on his press officer’s door, Mansouri’s question to Heggie was, had he ever considered writing an opera?
‘I thought he was talking to someone else!’ Heggie exclaims, in jest. ‘It was an enormous leap for him [Mansouri] to make.’
But the leap for Heggie, aged 36 at the time, was also a significant one – from staff writer to full-time composer.
‘I had gone from being a full-time staff writer thinking I would never have a life in music again, to writing a world premiere, with a great American playwright, on an amazing story for one of the greatest companies in the world with an incredible cast. It happened very quickly, it was a huge change in my life.’
‘It was like being set free,’ Heggie says, adding that the relief came not only from the opportunity that he could now write freely, but also, a feeling of affirmation that his artistic work was being supported.
‘I think that’s the hardest part for any emerging artist, “do people reallly want this, do people really need what I have to say?”. It was a tremendous feeling to know that was the case, that people were eager for the notes that I was putting on the page.’
