NEW YORK – Sister Helen Prejean remembered when she first spoke with Jake Heggie about adapting her e book “Dead Man Walking.”
“I don’t know boo-scat about opera,” she advised him. “I just got two requests. One, you’re not going to do that atonal thing, are you? Are we going to be able to hum a tune when we come out? And the other thing, I just want to hear from you is it got the theme of journey of redemption.”
The most-performed twenty first century opera reaches the Metropolitan Opera for the season’s opening night time Tuesday in a manufacturing by way of Tony and Olivier Award winner Ivo van Hove starring mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as Sister Helen.
“All of a sudden the piece has more resonance than ever,” Heggie mentioned. “And that’s here as well as internationally, because it’s still a debate among a lot of people. It’s established in a lot of these abolitionist countries that there is no death penalty — the government, we don’t kill people for their crimes. And yet there are a lot of people who still wish that they would.”
Prejean was once a nun at New Orleans’ Sisters of Saint Joseph of Medaille when she changed into non secular adviser to a couple of fellows on dying row in 1984.
“The book was just a blooming miracle,” the 84-year-old Prejean recalled, crediting her editor Jason Epstein for forcing her so as to add center of attention at the sufferers and their households.
Published in 1993, “Dead Man Walking” has bought just about 800,000 copies, in line with Knopf Doubleday. Tim Robbins tailored it right into a 1995 film that earned Susan Sarandon the Academy Award for best possible actress for her portrayal of Prejean.
Now 62, Heggie studied piano and composition at UCLA, receiving a bachelor’s level in 1984. He gave up enjoying after he was once recognized with focal dystonia, a muscular situation that affected his proper hand. He took public family members jobs with the UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, Cal Performances and the San Francisco Opera, and spent 5 years retraining his hand to play piano. He was once writing artwork songs on his personal time and confirmed his paintings to mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade.
San Francisco Opera basic director Lotfi Mansouri requested Heggie whether or not he had thought to be writing an opera and despatched him to New York to fulfill with playwright Terrence McNally. While Mansouri advised an adaptation of the French movie “Les Belles de Nuit (Ladies of the Night),” McNally a couple of yr later proposed “Dead Man Walking.”
“Sondheim actually said to me: 50% of the success of any project is the idea of a story. It’s finding the story that’s going to set you on fire,” Heggie mentioned, recounting composer Stephen Sondheim’s recommendation.
Robbins mixed the 2 inmates into one and adjusted the execution from the electrical chair to deadly injection, and Heggie and McNally adopted that manner. Their paintings premiered at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House on Oct. 7, 2000, with Joe Mantello directing Susan Graham as Sister Helen and von Stade because the convict’s mom. After the prologue depicting the murders, the opera opens with a habitual hymn: “He will gather us around.”
Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote the rating was once “marked by gorgeous flights of lyrical breadth, punchy rhythmic byplay and orchestration” however added “it is certain to dismay the apostles of novelty and progress, those for whom art must be either wholly new or worthless.”
DiDonato first sang as Sister Helen in a 2002 New York City Opera manufacturing, then reprised the function at Houston in 2011 and Madrid in 2018. Heggie knew DiDonato from her time at San Francisco’s Merola program for younger artists and really useful her to City Opera. Since then, she has long gone directly to Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, and the Illinois Youth Center in Chicago for track categories, deepening her appreciation of Prejean’s message.
“I’ve had so much life experience since then and in particular going into prisons and doing work in prisons and meeting men who all have been convicted of murder, who are guilty of murder, and interacting with them and learning more about the justice system.” she mentioned. “And having lived the last two decades of this world that has gotten a little bit further and further away from the idea of love, universal love.”
Von Hove heightens the drama with video closeups and a minimalist Jan Versweyveld set gets rid of cellblock bars. Heggie estimates that is kind of the seventy fifth world manufacturing of “Dead Man,” a pandemic-delayed staging first set to open in April 2021.
Graham sings de Rocher’s mom, connecting this forged to the unique. A Times Square simulcast was once deliberate for Tuesday and the Oct. 21 matinee shall be televised to film theaters world wide. The Met and Carnegie Hall plan to provide excerpts at Sing Sing on Sept. 28 with DiDonato, Sister Helen because the narrator and inmates because the refrain.
There were 1,575 executions in the U.S. for the reason that Supreme Court allowed the dying penalty to be reinstated in 1976, in line with the Death Penalty Information Center. Twenty-four states have dying penalty rules, 23 don’t and 3 have governor-imposed moratoriums, the middle mentioned.
“I have accompanied six human beings to execution, I’ve been with them and they’re suffering in the last hours, counting last hours,” Prejean said. “I have seen the suffering and it’s hidden from the public. It’s almost a secret ritual. Every time I see it portrayed, that I know the movie is being shown or the opera, I feel joy at that, that I know that people are being brought close to one of the deepest human rights issues of our day, the inalienable right to life of human beings.”