usOperaweb - Jake Heggie Interview Spring 2004

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Jake’s Journey

By Robert Wilder Blue

Few recent operas have connected with audiences as immediately and deeply as Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. Since its premiere in San Francisco in 2000, the opera has been performed to acclaim in Orange County (CA), Cincinnati, New York, Austin, Detroit and Adelaide (Australia); future productions are scheduled for Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Calgary and Dresden (Germany). In an art form that resides mostly in the past (and often in languages other than English), Dead Man Walking was an anomaly; it told a timely American story and gave audiences the sort of visceral emotional experience they usually expect only from theater or film.

Now Mr. Heggie has written a new work for Houston Grand Opera (HGO), The End of the Affair, based on the 1951 Graham Greene novel. While exploring different story matter from Dead Man Walking, it again takes up the theme of spiritual crisis that has been the focus of Mr. Heggie’s work for the past several years. USOPERAWEB visited with Mr. Heggie in his flat above San Francisco’s Castro district, where he spoke about the genesis of the new opera, among other things.

“After the workshop of Dead Man Walking, Patrick Summers and David Gockley approached me about doing a piece for HGO. We didn’t know what the subject would be at that point, but we knew it would be a chamber-sized opera, because they wanted to present it in the Cullen Theater, which is their smaller performing space. Dead Man had such a massive cast and ensemble and orchestra, I was eager to do something on a smaller scale that was still big dramatically.

“Originally, you know, Dead Man Walking was supposed to be a comedy—a lighthearted piece. But it didn’t turn out that way [he laughs]. I thought the second opera could be something more lighthearted and we had the idea of doing an operatic version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. But, it turned out that Sean Connery had the rights all tied up. I turned to Terrence McNally again to pick his brain for ideas, even though I knew he wasn’t available to write another libretto at that time. The new film version of The End of the Affair had just come out and Terrence knew the book and suggested I take a look at it. I read it and then watched the movie and read the book twice more and I fell in love with it. David read the book and thought it was a brilliant idea, as did Patrick. It was all pretty instantaneous. HGO contacted the Graham Greene estate to secure the rights. That all happened about a year after I had begun talks with HGO.

“The story is huge dramatically. It is a deeply human story about spiritual transformation, with extremely elevated emotions, which opera does very well. I was writing this post-9/11 and I liked the fact that The End of the Affair was all about a changed world. It is extraordinarily relevant for our time. It takes place in London during the Blitz ; in fact, the story is set in motion when a bomb falls and explodes. Before 9/11, we had an attitude that was very similar to Londoners before the Blitz, in that they were a major city and felt impenetrable and all of a sudden everything changed in a second.

Graham Greene was born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, England. As a child, he was shy and something of a misfit. After several suicide attempts, he left school at age fifteen. He was sent to a psychologist, who suggested writing as a means of self-expression.

Greene enrolled Balliol College, where he studied modern history. He passed his university years drinking and in debt, but continued to nurture his writing talents as editor of campus newspaper. He developed dual fascinations for religion and politics and the two themes would be important in most of future writings. After taking his B.A., he found a position as a subeditor for a newspaper in Nottingham, where he met his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning. During their courtship, she convinced Greene to convert to Catholicism; the couple married in 1927.

Greene’s first novel failed to find a publisher, but his second, The Man Within, was not only published but met with critical and popular success and led to his decision to live as a self-employed writer. Greene became an avid traveler, in part to satisfy his wanderlust, but also to search out new locales for his novels. He had several extramarital affairs during his lifetime and the story of The End of the Affair mirrors his affair with Lady Catherine Walston, his mistress and muse during 1940s and ‘50s. The book was quite popular when it was published, and was treated to its first film version in 1955, with Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson and Peter Cushing and directed by Edward Dmytryk.

As adapted for the opera, the story goes like this:

Despite the incessant bombing of the London Blitz, an unhappily married Sarah Miles meets her lover Maurice Bendrix for a clandestine rendezvous. A bomb explodes in the building, and Bendrix goes to investigate. A second explosion makes Sarah fear for her lover’s life, but in a moment he returns. He finds Sarah in the bedroom on her knees. To his bewilderment, she leaves abruptly, breaking off their affair. Later, in post-war London, Bendrix, driven by obsessive jealousy and grief, hires a detective to follow Sarah. The detective, Parkis, finds Sarah’s journal and gives it to Bendrix. He learns that following the explosion, Sarah feared he was dead and promised to give him up if God would allow him to live. Knowing the truth now, Bendrix wants her back; Henry wants her to stay; Parkis is drawn by her kindness; and the rationalist, Richard Smythe, tries to talk Sarah out of her belief in God. Each man pleads his case. Ailing, Sarah is torn and cries to God for mercy. Her death brings insight and faith to each man except Bendrix. Later, standing outside in the doorway of the church, Sarah appears to him, and tells him “Love never ends.” He takes one step into the church. (Courtesy of Houston Grand Opera.)

“Another reason this project was perfect was because I wanted to write a big lyric-soprano role. Up to now, I’ve focused so much on mezzo-sopranos in my work. Sarah is a great operatic character. There’s an intense vulnerability to her, but there’s a great mystery as well. She has moved off on a totally different trajectory. The rest of the characters are all men who have such a need of her and I was fascinated by the dynamics between them. It is Sarah who makes the choices and decisions that influence everyone about her.”

Yet, work on the opera did not proceed smoothly. “The project has been fraught from the beginning and has gone through many shifts and changes. My first librettist, a wonderful playwright named Gary Bonasorte, died. I was originally going to work with the director Michael Mayer, and he introduced me to Heather McDonald, another playwright. I did not know her at that time, even though her work has been performed all over the country at the major playhouses. I read some of her plays and I found her work incredibly poetic. Heather has the ability to distill character in so few words or gestures, which is exactly right for opera, and to find the essential scenes and organize them in a logical sequence theatrically.

“Then, Michael had to drop out because he got a Hollywood film based on Michael Cunningham’s book Home at the End of the World, which will be released this summer, I believe. This was with Sissy Spacek and Colin Farrell and it was a very big deal and he knew he would have not time to focus on an operatic project. Luckily, Leonard Foglia was available; he had done the second production of Dead Man Walking that has appeared all over the country.

“But when we were ready to start writing, Heather had a huge crisis in her family, which delayed completion of the libretto. I finally got Act I in February, 2003, and Act II in May. I had to write the entire opera, orchestrate it, do the workshop and then do rewrites in about ten months. It was very turbulent. But the story was about such huge struggle, it almost seemed as though the opera had to have a struggle behind it as well. Everyone was a little nervous and I admit I didn’t know for sure I could get it done on schedule. You usually get only one chance with an opera and I didn’t just want to throw notes on a page. It has to be honest and true and right. You can't afford to fail. You have to be willing to take that chance, but any composer or artist is judged by their most recent work.

“The more I got into writing End of the Affair, the more excited I was by telling this story—this huge, incredibly dramatic story—on such an intimate scale. The way I work is that I get to know the architecture and flow of the story and the characters and they start telling me how they want it to go. I listen to them, making sure that the music is telling the story and propelling it forward. From the start, the characters spoke to me very clearly.

“What did someone say about Handel taking only 30 days to write the Messiah? Well, it took him forty-plus years to write the Messiah. It’s amazing that it came out of him so quickly, but it took all of his experience up to that point. That’s true with any composer. But I felt that because this was done in a hurry, I had to be resourceful and creative in a different way and on a different time schedule. I’m very proud of the piece. It’s quite different from Dead Man Walking.”

What, specifically, did you learn from 'Dead Man Walking'?

“God, I learned everything about what I do. It was such a huge first project and everything was new—I had never written an opera. I learned that you can say a lot with very little. I learned the value of melodic and rhythmic gestures that repeat in different dynamics—leitmotifs, you could say, but beyond that gestures that might be just a drop in the pond, but the ripple effect is strong. I learned that it is important for the characters to each have a musical language that defines them so they are recognizable immediately. Also, I have become bolder with pushing vocal ranges on both ends—lower and higher.

“I felt with the new opera I could actually be more intense with smaller forces. I told a friend who is an orchestral musician that The End of the Affair was scored for 24 players and she responded, ‘Oh, that’s scary. There’s no place to hide.’ That’s very true. It’s like writing chamber music—everything counts, everything is exposed. When you have a large orchestra, there’s a lot of room for padding. My inspiration for knowing it could work was listening to the Britten operas, which are amazing. Listen to The Turn of the Screw. It has 17 players in the orchestra and it sounds massive. Also, Ariadne auf Naxos—it’s amazing what Strauss was able to do with that orchestra. It says a lot for the flexibility of opera that it’s really about great singing and great drama and being smart with the use of accompanying instruments. It’s exciting to have a large orchestr.