Heggie - Dead Man Walking (New York, 2023)

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.

External Links: The Metrooolitan Opera, The Met: Live in HD season

Wagner - Götterdämmerung

Richard Wagner - Götterdämmerung

Metropolitan Opera, New York 2012

Fabio Luisi, Robert Lepage, Deborah Voigt, Wendy Bryn Harmer, Waltraud Meier, Jay Hunter Morris, Iain Paterson, Eric Owens, Hans-Peter König, Erin Morley, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Tamara Mumford, Maria Radner, Elizabeth Bishop, Heidi Melton

The Met: Live in HD, Feb 11th 2012

The evolution of the Metropolitan Opera’s Ring cycle has been gradual but noticeable through each of the four parts spread across its 2010/11 and 2011/12 seasons. Initially in the prologue, Das Rheingold, the spectacle of Robert Lepage’s Machine was clearly an impressive and revolutionary piece of stage technology, but its concept and purpose were not entirely proven. At the very least however, the opening section of the Met’s Ring cycle delighted with a stunning display of powerful singing. Neither the staging nor the singing were entirely consistent across Die Walküre nor Siegfried, but as James Levine’s illness forced him to gave way to Fabio Luisi on the conductor’s podium, a more equitable balance seemed to develop between the production and the performance that played to the strengths of Wagner’s masterwork, even if that meant a little less power in the vocal delivery. If Siegfried held out the promise that Lepage’s vision could end up being a memorable Ring production, that promise was satisfyingly achieved in its epic final evening. With Götterdämmerung, the Met’s Ring has come full circle.

Following on from Siegfried, Fabio Luisi again conducted a Wagner of Romantic sweep over the traditional heavy Germanic declamation, perhaps in favour of two leads who don’t have the full force that is usually demanded for the roles of Siegfried and Brünnhilde – Jay Hunter Morris and Deborah Voigt. The toning down of the dramatics and tone also worked fittingly with a subtlety in the stage design that belies the sheer weight and imposing presence of the Machine. Like Wagner’s score for Götterdämmerung, the underlying power of the tools at one’s disposal can be a temptation for overstatement, but it can be even more effective if that huge mass of force is suggested and used only sparingly. Clearly both Luisi and Lepage understand that. This is a Ring for the 2010s then, faithful to Wagner’s vision of the power of mythology and of the music drama as the highest expression of human artistic endeavour, taking it to a new level through the modern technology that is at the disposal of an imaginative director.

Lepage’s vision for the production didn’t appear to yield any grand conceptual theme other than how best to make Wagner’s daunting and problematic series of operas work in a modern context without all its accumulated history and tradition. Particularly in the earlier parts, the morphing planks and projections worked mainly on a literal basis to create the imposing presence of Valhalla, an impenetrable forest or a mountain cave housing a dragon, but as the cycle progressed, the emphasis shifted more towards the abstract conceptual. The polymorphous nature of the technology was still well-employed to give solidity to the physicality of the story – the riverside playground of the Rhinemaidens for example actually looking more realistic here than how it was projected during Das Rheingold – but the colours, lighting and abstract patterns elsewhere in Götterdämmerung seemed to be more attuned to mood.

It may seem like making excuses for slightly underpowered performances, but it was actually refreshing to find a Siegfried and a Brünnhilde playing not as mythical god-like figures, but as the human characters they essentially and necessarily are. No excuses however need to be made, even for the fact that both Jay Hunter Morris and Deborah Voigt were taking on enormous challenges way beyond anything they have ever done in their careers; on their own terms their performances were exceptionally good and fitting for the production. The chemistry that seemed to be there between them at the end of Siegfried didn’t extend however through to the first act of Götterdämmerung, both seeming a little overwhelmed, the lack of lower depth in both their voices even more noticeable when combined. Voigt however raised her game when paired with the formidable and experienced Wagernian mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier as Brünnhilde’s sister Valkyrie, Waltraude. Their sequence together was simply magnificent. For his part Morris won through from sheer determination and stamina in a severely testing role that demands a concentrated effort for six hours, but he also had a down-to-earth personality and charm that made the final scenes of the opera intimate and touching as well as being epically apocalyptic.

If there were any misgivings about the appropriate Wagnerian tenor of the main roles not quite matching the earlier powerhouse performances of the likes of Bryn Terfel, Stephanie Blythe, Eric Owens and Jonas Kaufmann, there was again magnificent support here not only from Waltraud Meier, but Wendy Bryn Harmer proved to be a fine Gutrune, Hans-Peter König a formidable Hagen – blankly sinister in acting, but deeply menacing in tone of voice – and there was another impressive turn from Eric Owens who made the brief reappearance of Alberich more than memorable, particularly as his character is a vital link (and leitmotif) that sustains the overarching development and tone of the entire work. Only Iain Paterson failed to make his presence felt either as Gunther, but his weak-willed character was at least dramatically appropriate and fitting, and certainly not a weak element.

I can’t say what the experience would have been like in the theatre, but there was no evidence during the HD-Live broadcast of any noise from the stage equipment, or indeed any of the problematic breakdowns that have been the cause of complaints in some quarters. Everything on the stage flowed smoothly and impressively. On the big screen, Götterdämmerung was as grandly spectacular and as intimately moving as it ought to be, perfectly attuned to the score and the performances. The camerawork – directed a strong visual flair as usual by Gary Halvorson – was also well-judged to pick out the strengths in the performances and the production design, working with it, flowing with the mood of the piece. Although there are a few Ring productions still to come this year and next (the Munich one in particular should be interesting), when eventually viewed together as a full Ring cycle (it will be interesting to see if the first two are revised slightly to suit Luisi’s approach to the work) I think the full impact and consistency of this Met Ring will be better appreciated and it may even be regarded as one of the best of recent times.