Composer Jake Heggie had a huge year in 2010. Last May he saw Moby-Dick, his grand new opera starring the legendary Ben Heppner, mounted to international critical acclaim at the Dallas Opera. Last fall Passing By, a beautiful new CD of songs and duets—performed by Isabel Bayrakdarian, Joyce DiDonato, Frederica von Stade, Susan Graham, Zheng Cao, Keith Phares, and Paul Groves—was released. Intermingled between these two milestones were a myriad of concerts, recitals, and performances of his many other works, including opera, art song, and concert pieces.
Unlike so many of his predecessors, it appears that Heggie won’t have to wait until after he is dead to be appreciated. With so many singers and opera companies backing him and a growing fan base supporting him, Heggie is sure to be eagerly engaged for many years to come. The new year is already off to a busy start. This month DiDonato and von Stade appear in Heggie’s Dead Man Walking in a special farewell tribute to von Stade at Houston Grand Opera. His opera Moby-Dick moves on to the companies that co-commissioned the work, first to the State Opera of South Australia in August 2011 and then to Calgary Opera, San Diego Opera, and San Francisco Opera. And Heggie continues as the 2010-2011 guest artist in residence at the University of North Texas in Denton, where he is hard at work on his first symphony based on several Ahab monologues from Moby-Dick to premiere in 2012 featuring tenor Richard Croft.
CS sat down with Heggie to discuss just what it is about his works that keeps singers clamoring to perform them and opera companies hungering to produce them.
Give us some insight into your childhood, musical background, academic training, and any other facts that we should know about you!
My siblings and I began to study piano when we were very young. I was about six years old, and my parents bought a 64-key piano, which was called an “apartment-sized” piano. We lived in Bexley, Ohio, and I had always wanted to start music lessons. I fell in love with the piano right away. It was not hard to practice all the time, and I wanted to learn more and more. My father committed suicide when I was 10 and everything changed. It was a week before my 11th birthday. I found solace in my music. That’s when I started wanting to write. I wrote piano pieces, but I also started writing songs.
After I saw Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, I was forever drawn to and in love with the voice. That was also the time when the great rock musicals—Godspell, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar—were coming out. Movie musicals were still being made, and I was enthralled with the relationship of text and music telling a story so cleanly that it seemed natural. At that point, I knew nothing about opera. I was writing my own texts.
We moved to California when I was 16, and I began to work with Ernst Bacon. He introduced me to existing Keith Phares as Maurice Bendrix and Emily Pulley as Sarah Miles in Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s 2007 production of The End of the Affair 2007 production of Dead Man Walking at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna texts and poetry. I was friends with a young, high lyric baritone, and began to write songs for him. I saw how I could write more for his type of voice than for a pop singer. I still wanted to write for Barbra Streisand and Julie Andrews, but I was becoming a little more realistic. I studied in Paris for two years and then returned home and went to UCLA. I thought I would be a solo pianist who wrote songs, but I was getting to know some really fine singers who introduced me to the world of the art song and opera arias.
At UCLA, I went through all the song cycles of Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, and Wolf. I learned the 19th century repertoire from Jim Lowe, fell in love with it, began to write chamber music that featured the voice, and then I stopped writing music for about five years due to a hand injury. I was in my late 20s and certain that I would have a life adjacent to music somehow, just not really in it. It was then that I moved to San Francisco.
You have led what might be called “a charmed life” since coming to the San Francisco Opera in the 1990s. In the process, you have become a highly acclaimed pianist and composer. Is this a true assessment?
Professionally, I have led a charmed life. Personally, there have been many hardships. People very important to me have died too young.
In San Francisco, everything in my life changed. I got a job at the San Francisco Opera writing press releases and began playing piano again. We were doing the world premiere of Conrad Susa’s The Dangerous Liaisons with Renée Fleming, Flicka [Frederica von Stade], Tom [Thomas] Hampson, Mary Mills, and Johanna Meier. Listening to those wonderful singers in that 1994 production was an amazing experience. I watched opera taking shape from the ground up, every step of the way. I sat in on rehearsals, heard the best singers in the world up close, got to talk with them, and got to know them. It was so inspiring that I wanted to write again.
Looking back, that five-year period when I lost the ability to play the piano was very dark and sad; however, if I hadn’t gone through it, I might not have moved to San Francisco, wouldn’t have gotten that job at the opera, and would certainly have never been introduced to that new world.
It was during this time that you met Lotfi Mansouri?
Oh, yes, Lotfi. I owe everything in my career to him. He is a great impresario. During his time as general director of the San Francisco Opera, he kept an eye out for talent wherever it might appear and would create opportunities for it. That’s how artists like Valery Gergiev and Anna Netrebko made their American debuts.
I had been working for the opera about a year and a half in 1995 when Lotfi asked me if I had ever thought about writing an opera. We were at a party, and I didn’t think he was serious. The very next day he called me into his office and asked me if I would like to write an opera for the company. He said that he wanted to send me to New York to meet with Terrence McNally. To pull me out of the Public Relations department and give me a commission to write a major opera—that was quite a leap of faith on his part. It took someone like him to do it.
I met Terrence the first time in May 1996. I remember it well because it was the same day that Renée [Fleming] was performing one of my songs, “I shall not live in vain,” in a recital at Alice Tully Hall. I knew that Terrence was a little nervous because he knew nothing of my work, and people had been asking him for quite some time to write an opera. It took eight months, but in January 1997, he called me, said he really wanted to do it, and asked me to begin thinking about ideas. In the summer of 1997, he came to San Francisco and suggested Dead Man Walking.
In the meantime, I had been writing for a lot of different singers while keeping my day job and working hard at that. I am glad I was young, because it was exhausting. I think I could have been very happy with that life, but Lotfi made it possible for me to go a step further, which was miraculous.
Dead Man Walking has been performed more than 150 times since its San Francisco world premiere in 2000, and more than 50 times internationally in 2007 alone. This makes it one of the most performed new American operas. That is quite an honor for such a young man.
It’s an honor for anyone. We all look for the magic formula in terms of an opera or theater piece. What is it that will stimulate the imagination and not just the singers, the accompaniment, the audience—and not just one time, but many times? It’s an elusive combination because it has to be the right story and the right team. Beyond that, the score and the stagecraft must work as well. To find something that actually fulfills those needs and continues to resonate is a rare occurrence. For me to have found one of those right off the bat was really good fortune, but hard work as well.
Is opera the vehicle for your creative energies today?
What I do is tell stories, whether they be songs or song cycles, a one-act, a theatrical song cycle, or an opera. It’s all about telling interesting stories and using voices, music, and great words todo that. I’m very interested in exploring all aspects of storytelling. It heavily influences the things that I do today. But I write best for classically trained voices because their range of expression is so extraordinary that I feel I can delve even more deeply into the telling of the story.
Elaborate for us about the accessibility of your songs and vocal works, as to vocal difficulty and proficiency required, for voice students at different levels of development.
When I write, I take for granted that the technique is there. I have learned many lessons from my dear singer friends about passaggio and other things I didn’t know when I first started writing. I know that the E-natural at the top of the staff is the least favorite note for just about any singer to sit on.
When I wrote Dead Man Walking, both Suzy [Susan] Graham and Kris [Kristine] Jepson told me that I was writing in their vocal crack. They would laughingly say, “Heggie, get your pen out of my crack.” Young singers need to learn to negotiate that, because even Mozart was not always kind to singers. I like it because it’s very vulnerable; however, if one writes a sustained pianissimo sitting up there, strange things begin to happen to the voice. When I write, I don’t think about whether it’s a young or a mature voice. I write for the best singer I can think of.
When I do masterclasses, my goal is to remind students of the joy they have in singing and why they’re singing in the first place. They must know what the personal connection to the song is so they can become a storyteller. I am not a singer or a voice teacher, so I tell them that I am not there to talk about their technique. They need to let their teachers fix those things. What they need to do for me is to get back to the text, the truth of the story. When they get out of their own way, suddenly they begin to sing very naturally. I see their teachers’ faces light up because they hear a personality coming through. They don’t have to become someone different while they’re singing.
Did you have any influence in the casting of Moby-Dick and of Captain Ahab in particular?
Yes, absolutely. From the minute they agreed to do Moby-Dick, I said that we had to have Ben Heppner as Ahab. They asked him if he would do it, and he said, “Yes.”
Who isn’t a Ben Heppner fan? When the man stands there with integrity and heart and sings, it is just not to be believed. Ben is a big lyric, a full lyric tenor. He has a huge sound throughout his entire range. But he brings special heart to every single part of his voice.
I am very collaborative when I am writing roles for singers like Flicka, Ben, or Suzy Graham. I believe in making them part of this process. They tell me things that they can bring to the table that I might not be aware of otherwise.
A musical score is simply a guide; it’s the composer’s thoughts about a musical journey and the world, and the best way to transcribe it is through all those notes. Then it becomes the singer’s responsibility as a re-creator to bring additional thoughts and ideas to it. If they have something to offer, the creative process takes another step further, and they make the role come to life in a very special way.
Dead Man Walking and Moby-Dick are large-scale works. In between these, you have written The End of the Affair, At the Statue of Venus, and Three Decembers—all more intimate compositions for smaller casts. How do you adjust your thought process for these different-sized works with regard to the vocal line and orchestrations?
It all comes down to what’s right for the story. I look for stories that are suitable for the ensemble. Dead Man Walking had to be big. It didn’t make sense to me as achamber opera. The same is true for Moby-Dick. It’s huge. What works well in those stories is that there are intimate stories within that vast landscape.
I also look for that sense of intimacy and vastness even within the scale of a chamber opera. The End of the Affair deals with issues of life and death, faith, disbelief, love, and redemption. It made sense to me as an ensemble piece. I was commissioned to write something for six characters and no more. I had to find a story that would work well for that where we didn’t get the feeling “Where’s the rest of it?” That ensemble had to have the feeling of completeness.
It was the same with Three Decembers. There was a time during its evolution when it suddenly became a cast of thousands, and it started to fall apart. Flicka said, “I think we’ve gotten away from what originally moved us,” which was three people. Then it all began to come together and happened very quickly because it was the right scale.
All of these pieces were written on commissions, so it’s making sure that within the limitations of the commission, you open up new possibilities in terms of the exploration of storytelling, finding the right size story, and the right size cast. With To Hell and Back, I knew I only had two soloists and an orchestra. It started off being a 20-minute piece and wound up being 40 minutes long because it felt right in terms of the story we were telling.
Are there arias and vocal solos from your larger works that can be excerpted and performed out of context or used as audition pieces? What about your song cycles?
Yes, to all of your questions. I believe there are things that can be excerpted in every piece. There certainly are in Dead Man Walking. There are arias for Joseph De Rocher and his mother. Even Sister Rose has an aria that can be excerpted. Flicka does one of the arias from Dead Man regularly, “Don’t say a word,” when the mother is saying goodbye to her son. In The End of the Affair, there are a couple of arias—one for Mrs. Bertram and one for the tenor.
Moby-Dick has standalone arias as well. There is a pants role in Moby-Dick, so there is a lyric soprano in that piece. A wonderful young soprano, Talise Trevigne, played Pip, the 14-year-old cabin boy. I had never written a pants role before, and it was all men except for lucky Talise.
Are these arias published? Can they be obtained by teachers and students alike?
Yes, all of my music is self published at this time. My publishing company is Bent Pen Music, but all of my scores are available through a website run by my publishing representative who is also my copyist. You can find them at www.BillHolabmusic.com.All of the songs from The Faces of Love are available in three volumes from Associated Music Publishers distributed by Hal Leonard. They are also available on CD by the same title. There are at least 200 more songs by now. Bill has all of those. My new CD, Passing By, was released last fall on the Avie label.
When you have finished a new work, what is it that you look and listen for in the singers that will eventually perform it? How do you cast the roles in your operas?
I have a say only in the original productions of my works. In subsequent productions, it’s up to the general director, and sometimes they ask me for ideas.
When I do it, I look for a great singing actor who has the voice and personality that suits that character. It has to be someone who will inhabit that role well. Also, there must be enough difference between voices so that each character will sound distinct. That varies depending on who’s singing the leading role, and who will make a good foil to that character, and who—when
they’re singing together—will sound good, yet different.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of open auditions, but we did that for the role of Pip in Moby-Dick. We also did that for the role of Joseph De Rocher in the original production of Dead Man Walking because we were looking for a very specific type of lyric baritone.
I find the audition process rather cruel and awful. I am so glad that I’m not a singer. I love singers more than anything, but I’m so grateful that I’m not one, because I think that the life of a singer is very, very hard. When you find people who are willing to stick with it, possess a fire in their belly, and have a passion for it, they will find a way to perform.
What is it about your music that draws people in and makes them want to revisit it time and again? Can you describe the “Jake Heggie style”?
Oh gosh, I can’t tell you why people respond the way they do and come back time and again. I can tell you this—the only way I know to write isin a truthful, connected way. I don’t hold things close to my chest. I put the emotion and the journey out there for singers to express and listeners to experience. I write lyrically. My music is tonally based, and yet I do explore different harmonies.
I try to serve the drama with my music. It’s all about telling a story in a heightened way through music and exploring emotional journeys. In performance, singers are on stage with their hearts thumping and bleeding. The audience is vitally important. I like to bring them into the fold, not exclude them. I want to involve them from the beginning.
Friendly Persuasions: Songs in Homage to Poulenc, a song cycle for tenor and piano, is one of your most recent compositions. Will you tell us about it?
Malcolm Martineau, a wonderful pianist and friend, asked me to write an original song cycle for John Mark Ainsley for a series at Wigmore Hall in London. It was to be an exploration of the music of Poulenc. Poulenc is one of my gods. I thought about setting poetry that already existed, but decided to make it really theatrical and fun, something that had to do with the man and the composer’s life.
I went to Gene [Scheer] for advice. He had read abiography of Poulenc, and what struck him were the seminal relationships and friendships in Poulenc’s life that changed his way of thinking. These were the people that persuaded him to look at the world in a different way. Wanda Landowska was an early influence. He wrote his Concerto champêtre for her. Poulenc was not yet an openly gay man and was obsessed with a young man by the name of Richard Chanlaire. He was distracted, and Landowska helped him move on by telling him to “be who you are. Tell Richard you love him and finish the
damned concerto.”
The second song is about Pierre Bernac. One story tells of Poulenc having made a setting of Cocteau, and when he played it for Bernac, he [Bernac] hated it. Poulenc literally threw the piece into the fire. Bernac was horrified and asked him why he had destroyed it. Poulenc replied that it was meant to be that way and proceeded to write “Tel jour, telle nuit.” “Out of the ashes comes the phoenix,” you might say.
The third piece involves Raymonde Linossier, a woman with whom Poulenc was deeply associated. He loved her very much. They were what we would call soul mates. He asked her to marry him a number of times, but knowing his circumstances, she refused. When she died of cancer at the age of 31, he was devastated. It was a loss that haunted him the rest of his life and changed him deeply.
The last song is about the great poet Paul Éluard. Poulenc set many of his poems to music. During the French Resistance, Éluard was very vocal against the Nazis, whereas Poulenc—though not complacent and definitely a part of the Resistance—was very quiet about it. He didn’t write his revolutionary pieces and settings until after the war was over. It is about Poulenc’s meetings with Éluard and his agonizing over his own fear, while seeing Éluard as brave, outspoken, and inspiring.
What advice would you give to aspiring young singers who want to pursue a career in music and, in particular, opera?
First, I would tell young singers that you have to know that this is what you really want to do—and that you have the passion and stamina for it. There’s no one who gets beaten up by different opinions more than a singer. Singers have to be made of very strong stuff because you’re going to get opinions and negative criticism from every side. You may get praise from every side as well, but you have to be very strong to be able to take not only that, but to find out what of it is the truth for you.
The only way you learn what kind of singer you are, and what kind of music is really right for you, is to explore a lot of different things. Audition everywhere and enter as many competitions as you can. There was an article in a recent Opera News that asked a number of singers what was the worst advice they ever received. Jennifer Larmore said, “When people would tell me to protect my voice. Don’t sing all the time.” Her response to that was “I sang everywhere, and I sang all the time. People got to know me, it helped to build my stamina, and I learned how to sing when I wasn’t necessarily feeling 100 percent.”
One of the reasons singers become famous is because they don’t cancel, but show up and deliver over and over again. Singers who cancel all the time aren’t going to get hired. There is a sense of sturdiness that every singer must have and be willing to “put it out there.”
I’d also tell singers to work closely with directors so that they have that connection, that perspective on what roles mean and who the singer-actors are. I’d highly recommend taking acting and movement lessons. Become a really good singing actor.
The most important thing is that you have unrelenting passion. You have to find enormous joy in doing this and you must stay grounded. You must find people who love and adore you even if you never sang or wrote another note. Nothing would ever change in your relationship with them. I truly believe these things are the foundation for all of it.
