'In my teens, I wrote a lot of songs for Barbra Streisand,’ says composer Jake Heggie with a smile. ‘This was the 1970s and she was a superstar. She never saw any of them but she was the voice that blew me away – voices have always been my inspiration.’ If Heggie wrote a song for Streisand today, it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t leap at the chance to sing it. Heggie is now a superstar in his own right. The Wall Street Journal has declared him ‘arguably the most popular 21st-century opera and art song composer’ and he has achieved breathtaking success with his richly scored, emotionally charged vocal works for stage and concert hall.
This year has brought some especially glittering engagements: a new production of Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (2000) starring Joyce DiDonato and Ryan McKinny opened the Met’s new season; a double-bill of one-act operas commissioned by the groundbreaking Music of Remembrance toured the US this summer to mark the organisation’s 25th anniversary; and Heggie’s newest opera, Intelligence, received its world premiere at Houston Grand Opera this autumn, starring Jamie Barton and Janai Brugger
as Civil War spies.
Where was Jake Heggie born?
For all his accolades, Jake Heggie is still astonished at the shape his career has taken. Talking from his home in San Francisco, he remarks how ‘it still feels very miraculous, all of it’. Born in West Palm Beach, he grew up with ‘music all around when I was a kid. My father, who was a medical doctor, was an amateur jazz saxophonist who played for fun, and the record player always had a big stack of records by it.’ The family listened to big band vocalists – Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra – alongside musical theatre like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. When Heggie started learning the piano ‘at age six or seven, you couldn’t get me away from it. Music meant storytelling, it meant adventure – it
meant possibility.’
Heggie started composing more seriously at 11 ‘and from then it was central to my life. I just never put down the pencil.’ His early works were ‘music-theatre type songs, before I was introduced to classical music in a more profound way’. He spent time studying in Paris, then UCLA and ‘around this time saw Sweeney Todd and Peter Grimes back-to-back. Wow. I mean, the top of my head blew up because I didn’t know this was possible in the current day for the lyric stage.’
But just as Heggie was hitting his stride as a pianist and composer in his twenties, ‘I developed what’s called a focal dystonia, where my hand would curl up into a fist when I played. And so I had to stop playing and start retraining my hand. I was told it’d be a five-year journey and I kind of lost my courage to compose too.’
What did Jake Heggie do before composing?
Keen to continue working in the music industry, Heggie took a job in the marketing department of San Francisco Opera. While in this post, he began writing songs informally for the company’s artists who included then-rising-stars Renée Fleming and Frederica von Stade. In due course, the company’s general director Lotfi Mansouri called Heggie into his office with a life-changing offer: ‘He asked me if I’d ever thought of writing an opera.
He said, “I think you’re a theatre composer. I want to send you to New York to meet Terrence McNally; I think you guys might be a good team. We have a slot in the 2000-01 season for a new opera and we’d like to see what you come up with.” I remember looking around, thinking: “Who is he talking to?” But he saw something in me that I never saw in myself. He opened the door and I leapt through it.’
The result was an adaptation of Dead Man Walking, the 1993 memoir by Sister Helen Prejean, recounting her work as a spiritual adviser to convicted murderers on death row. The opera was an extraordinary success ‘and I realised I was at home writing for the stage. I’d written song cycles before but never anything like this. It was emotionally wrenching, because the story is so powerful – but I was on fire with it.’ The opera has since had some 80 productions, but to open the Met with a brand-new production is, for Heggie, ‘astounding, something literally I could never have imagined.’
What is Jake Heggie's Intelligence about?
Next up was Intelligence, which premiered at Houston Grand Opera this October. The spark for the work came from an unlikely source. A volunteer at the Smithsonian ‘pulled me aside and said, “I have a great idea for your next opera.”
And I’m thinking: “Oh, if you only knew how many times I’ve heard that.”’ But their suggestion was sound – to look into the lives of two women spies in the South during the American Civil War.
Elizabeth Van Lew was a privileged white woman. Mary Jane Bowser, a Black woman born into slavery who became a hidden spy in Jefferson Davis’s Confederate White House. ‘I’ve always been about trying to get the stories of bold, heroic women onto the stage. I grew up around very strong, powerful women who inspired me,’ says Heggie.
'The hardest part of creating an opera is working out what sound world it lives in. I try
to terrify myself!'
Jake Heggie
Billed as a ‘new American epic’, the opera was co-conceived with Heggie’s longstanding collaborator, the librettist Gene Scheer, and director/choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder of radical dance company Urban Bush Women. ‘Every opera demands a new language. The hardest part of creating something as big as an opera is working out what sound world it lives in. I try to challenge myself – to terrify myself! – in all of these works to do something new, and Intelligence is very different from anything I’ve done. There’s this amazing energy around it. We’ve created this magic palette, where words, music and dance are all equally important in the telling of the story.’
'I think survivor stories are interesting'
As with many of Jake Heggie’s works, Intelligence explores social injustice and the power of the human spirit. Heggie remarks that the stories he’s drawn to ‘tend to be a quest for identity in some way – wondering how you fit in your own skin, how you fit in the world. And sometimes it’s against the backdrop of harrowing circumstances. I think survivor stories are interesting, because it is a question of what are you choosing to remember? And what are you choosing to forget? Or trying to forget. And can you ever be free till you embrace all of it?’
Heggie’s preoccupation with these questions have made him the ideal collaborator to work with Music of Remembrance, a Seattle-based organisation that commissions works that grapple with social justice and persecution. To mark Music of Remembrance’s 25th anniversary this year, the organisation staged a tour of two of Heggie’s previously commissioned works. For a Look or a Touch (2007) explores the Nazi persecution of gay people and is based on the true story of Gad Beck and Manfred Lewin, two idealistic young men whose lives were torn apart by the Third Reich. The work was paired with Another Sunrise (2012), an intimate emotional portrait of the writer, lyricist and Auschwitz survivor Krystyna Żywulska as she struggles decades later to come to terms with the agonising decisions she was forced to make to stay alive during the Second World War.
'I need an idea that really sets me on fire'
For Mina Miller, Music of Remembrance’s founder and artistic director, Heggie was the obvious composer to help mark this anniversary. ‘Jake writes from his heart, and this comes through with every measure of every work. He’s not afraid of tackling painful or difficult topics. Both these works dare us to look at survival in all its moral and psychological complexity. They challenge us to consider the meaning of memory as we wrestle with the ghosts of our past.’
For all the complexity of the material Heggie gravitates towards, there is a simplicity to his methods. He composes in a studio a short walk from his home and completes his scores by hand. ‘I need privacy and time. Also, I need an idea that really sets me on fire. I need a piano, some paper and a pencil. And I need coffee. That’s it.’ Indeed, the prompt for a new work is rarely conscious, but rather a ‘shiver – and this shiver is music. I don’t know what the music is; I just know it’s there.’
Staying true to one’s instincts remains key to his creative approach. ‘I tell young composers: “Please, when you’re a student, try everything. Challenge yourself. Be prolific! But you’re going to find an authentic voice within you. It will evolve over time, but the core of you as an artist is who you are already.” And for me it was always voices – those great singers who moved me from an early age. It’s what I go back to again and again. And I just don’t know any other way to write, except from my heart.’
Never Forgotten
Lessons from the Holocaust
Musician and educator Mina Miller founded Music of Remembrance in 1998. ‘The entire families of both of my parents were annihilated in the Holocaust,' she says. 'I grew up with a visceral awareness of the power of memory and the vastness of stories that needed telling'. ‘Music of Remembrance was a way for me to make sense of all this. To give voice to silenced people, and to use art to confront compelling issues in today’s world.’
At the outset, ‘we were one of very few groups to focus on music by Holocaust-era composers who’d been silenced’. The organisation’s mission has now broadened into commissioning works ‘that address the Holocaust’s lessons in new ways’. Such works have explored everything from the persecution of Roma and gay people to the Armenian genocide and the struggle for women’s rights in Iran.
Music of Remembrance has to date commissioned four pieces from composer-librettist pairing Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer (‘Their creative partnership is a true marvel,’ says Miller). Next year, their new work Before It All Goes Dark premieres in Chicago. It tells the story of an unknowing heir to Nazi-looted art as reported by music critic Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune.
‘Our relevance depends on our ability to respond to a changing world,’ says Miller. ‘We may commission a work at some point about the climate crisis, or the war in Ukraine, or threats to democracy. I think today’s audiences appreciate how little we can afford to take for granted.’
Photo: James Niebuhr
