Jake Heggie - Dead Man Walking
The Metropolitan Opera, 2023
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Joyce DiDonato, Ryan McKinny, Susan Graham, Latonia Moore, Rod Gilfry, Krysty Swann, Wendy Bryn Harmer, Chauncey Packer, Helena Brown, Briana Hunter, Magdalena Kuźma, Matteo Omoso Castro, Alexa Jarvis, Justin Austin, Chad Shelton, Raymond Aceto, Regan Sims, Mark Joseph Mitrano, Jonah Mussolino, Christopher Job, John Hancock, Patrick Miller, Jonathan Scott, Earle Patriarco, Ross Benoliel, Tyler Simpson
The Met: Live in HD - 21st October 2023
It's the start of a new Met Live in HD Season, and no longer enjoying the star power of Anna Netrebko since their falling out over the war in Ukraine as a draw for the opening broadcast, the Metropolitan Opera in New York have instead chosen to go down an unexpected route of promoting contemporary American composers, as they did with Terence Blanchard's incendiary Fire Shut Up In My Bones in 2021. It's a risky strategy, but as Peter Gelb acknowledged in the introduction before the cinema relay, perhaps a necessary one for the Met to change and recognise opera as a relevant contemporary creative artform, not just a revival of music composed centuries ago. And presumably, such an approach might be necessary to attract new younger and more diverse audiences.
To that end not only does the 2023/24 season open with the Met premiere of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, but the next two broadcasts are also new or modern works, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X by Anthony Davis and Florencia en el Amazonas by Daniel Catán. That is certainly an appealing line-up for me, at least in as far as having the opportunity to experience unfamiliar works in the next best way to seeing them live (which would be highly unlikely outside of the United States in any case). The Met have their Live in HD broadcasts down to a fine art, and that was certainly the experience with their completely stunning production of Dead Man Walking.
Composed in 2000, and having the distinction of being the most successful or at least most widely performed (in America) new opera of the 21th century (so far), the Met are late catching on to Jake Heggie's first opera, but they certainly make up for it with a production that does the work full justice and which may even consolidate its reputation and popularity. I'm late to the work myself, as American contemporary composers are not particularly fashionable in Europe and rarely get performed here. As if seeking to make that cross-over, the Met chose the Belgian experimental opera and theatre director Ivo van Hove to direct their first production of the work, and that was enough to entice me out to see it in the cinema, when I otherwise might not have. I'm very glad I did, and it will certainly bring me back to see their other new productions this season.
Some of my initial hesitation and doubts about having any interest in Dead Man Walking would have been down to it being made into a film (that admittedly I haven't seen) and the subject matter. Although based n a real life story of a nun, Sister Helen Prejean and her memoir of the friendship she struck up with a man on Death Row in the days leading up to his execution, it not only seemed to me designed to stir emotions and gain Oscar nominations, but I imagined that the opera would have similar intentions and be a little ...well, over-emphatic perhaps if not overly sentiment stirring. And it turns out there is some truth in this, Heggie and his librettist Terrence McNally designing the opera to play out as much like a movie screenplay as an opera follow along similar lines, which is where the choice of Ivo van Hove to direct it comes across as a true masterstroke.
Ivo van Hove is a theatre director who is used to working with cinematic drama. He has adapted Bergman's 'After the Rehearsal' and 'Scenes From a Marriage', Cassavetes' 'Opening Night' and Visconti's 'Ossessione' among many film adaptations for the stage, but he also brings a cinematic quality to his plays, using on-stage cameras and projections. His opera productions have similarly benefitted from these kind of techniques that open up backgrounds and underlying tensions, but his success with opera is as much in his ability to draw marvellous acting performances out of the principals and the secondary singers, using every means to express the maximum impact and insight out of whatever he is working on.
Surprisingly, for Dead Man Walking he is much more restrained in how he presents the work, settling for a minimalist set with lots of open space and limited use of on-stage camera-operators and projections. I thought at first that he might be reining in any excesses for an audience less used to experimental European theatre, but it soon became clear that van Hove was actually just serving the needs of the opera Dead Man Walking. Aside from the filmed opening sequence depicting the murders, the menacing prison scenes with guards and prisoners seeming to erupt out of swirling infernal mists, his direction here allows the drama to focus and bring out what is already well-scripted and scored in the relationship between Sister Helen and Joseph De Rocher, letting the characters come alive through their words and interaction rather than employing and of his usual tricks and techniques.
That is almost certainly the right way to approach Heggie and McNally's Dead Man Walking. Ivo van Hove makes what could otherwise be film-like theatrical, as well as theatrical for the big screen in the cinema broadcast. Such is the nature of the subject, the direct way it is handled in the superb libretto and the sometimes heavy-handed score by Heggie, that any further emphasis or extraneous action would be too much. Scene after scene had huge emotional impact, and the director doesn't get in the way of that. The final execution scene, as is surely intended, is almost devastating, the director here choosing to get right in close on the act of delivery of the lethal injection with a hand-held camera projecting the procedure. If the rights or wrongs of capital punishment are largely left to the viewer to decide, the inhumanity of taking another's life is not and the production makes sure you see exactly what it entails.
I'm not sure what I expected from Heggie's score, not being familiar with the composer, but his writing for this opera surprised me. He is stated as being in the American tradition - whatever that is, Bernstein maybe? - but Dead Man Waking reminded me of Poulenc and Dialogues des Carmélites. Perhaps the amount of nuns on stage influenced that idea, but I think emotionally, thematically, structurally and musically it's a close match. It's powerfully composed for maximum impact, if perhaps a little too over-emphatic and bombastic in places under the musical direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, but I'm sure he delivered it the way the composer intended. It certainly achieves the desired impact; invigorating and draining at the same time.
As well as every other element of the production being up to the extremely high standards of the Metropolitan Opera, the casting of the principals, the singing and acting performances are simply beyond reproach. Every role, not just the central relationship between convict and nun, is filled with character, the performances consequently utterly committed to doing them justice and superbly delivered. You couldn't expect more from Joyce DiDonato and Ryan McKinny, both absolutely rivetting, but it's hard to imagine anyone surpassing the deeply felt emotional delivery of Susan Graham as De Rocher's mother. Secondary roles are just as well written and performed, with Rod Gilfry in particular standing out as the father of the murdered girl, but impressive performances also from newer Met singers Latonia Moore, Krysty Swann, Wendy Bryn Harmer, Chauncey Packer all providing notable performances, particularly in the family scenes with overlapping dialogue and raw emotion pouring out.
While I am instinctively suspicious of work that is this emotionally charged and direct, it's almost impossible for any aspect of Dead Man Walking to be "too much" considering the subject and the way it demands to be presented. No one element however overshadows another in the Met's 2023 production, everything comes together to present Jake Heggie's opera in the best possible light, from these incredible singing and acting performances and the perfectly pitched direction. Even the Live in HD presentation is just perfect, engaging the cinema audience with the filming, the close-ups, Ivo van Hove's own on-screen camera and split-screen shots, making this feel like they were sharing something truly remarkable and even momentous. Impressive on big screen, the video capture of this final performance will no doubt continue to resonate and secure the place of Dead Man Walking in the American contemporary opera canon.
