No one who knows anything about opera expects a masterpiece from a first effort by a relatively young composer. Yet listeners, who pay as much as $150 for a seat, have a right to expect an emotional evening of music and art.
That’s exactly what San Francisco Opera patrons got Saturday night when “Dead Man Walking,” a new opera by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally premiered at the War Memorial Opera House.
The two-act, 2 1/2-hour opera is based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean, the Louisiana nun who opposed the death penalty, became spiritual adviser to several murderers on Death Row, and was the subject of a 1995 film by Tim Robbins, which won Susan Sarandon an Academy Award.
The opera’s creators insist that their work is not similar to the movie and that it is not a polemic about the death penalty. Rather, it is an attempt to bring a grand opera sensibility — no cheap “music theater” effects here — to a story of redemption and love. This love, of Prejean (Susan Graham) for the convicted rapist and murderer Joseph de Rocher (a composite figure), is not carnal and is about as unoperatic as possible. And in a way, it makes the opera suffer. The real Prejean is an admirable woman. But in the opera, her chilly presence and inability to empathize with the families of the victims, while expending emotional energy on the murderer, render her an opaque heroine at best. De Rocher (John Packard) is equally hard-edged, and his redemption is not musically convincing.
That leaves De Rocher’s mother (Frederica von Stade) in a position to steal the show. This pathetically dysfunctional woman, with two sons in jail, has, as Von Stade puts it, “been out to lunch while her boys were growing up.” Yet her bewildered vulnerability, displayed in Von Stade’s superbly judged emotionalism, brings out the best communicative qualities in Heggie’s music. As a purveyor of small-scale domestic drama — forget this “redemption and love” stuff — Heggie may prove to be contemporary opera’s savior.
Heggie’s rhythmic profile is powerful and his orchestration strong (lots of percussion) without covering the singers. (Part of these ideal balances were because of the sensitive conducting of Patrick Summers.) The opera is particularly accomplished in its many ensemble pieces. If the jail house chorus (“Woman on the tier”) and the big, concerted finale (“Dead Man Walking”) sounded like the Benjamin Britten of “Billy Budd” and the “War Requiem,” those are sound models and Heggie’s part writing remains original.
Only the long monologues seemed underwritten. The entire cast, including Robert Orth, Nicolle Foland, Catherine Cook and Gary Rideout as the bereaved parents, John Ames as the sympathetic warden and Theresa Hamm-Smith as Sister Rose, looked their parts and sang flawlessly. Director Joe Mantello’s simple production was a model of how to squeeze realism out of opera singers; he’s a “human” rather than a “concept” director. Michael Yeargan’s moving gray boxes provided clever abstract background, and Sam Fleming’s costumes managed to be authentically tasteless.
