‘Ask questions. Don’t Provide Answers: Composer Jake Heggie on 25 Years of Dead Man Walking | Opera

‘forYou are so young!” Julie Andrews shouted on opening night of Dead Man Walking, 25 years ago at the San Francisco Opera. I made my way to her through the crowded hall to introduce myself as the composer of the opera, fearing that this would be my only chance to meet my first goddess. My first singing nun.

Was I that young? It was October 7, 2000. I was 39 years old and this was my first opera, the “big break” I had always dreamed of. Maybe I was naive, but I felt young, and the world was full of possibility that night. Very different from today’s world.

The story of “Dead Man Walking” was a bold story for the opera world at that time, especially since new operas produced by major companies were still a rare thing. No one could have imagined or expected that the opera would be such a hit with audiences that, 25 years later, Dead Man Walking has had over 85 international productions in 13 countries, presented by companies, colleges, conservatories and community groups of all sizes. No one could have expected that during those twenty-five years, dozens of new operas would be created each year for every company of imaginable size and performance space by a wide range of composers and librettists.

And no one would have expected that opera would feel more powerful and resonant today than it did 25 years ago.

With the normalization of cruelty in the United States and elsewhere, growing threats to democracy, growing calls for executions, the stigmatization of “compassion” as weakness, the dominance of social media, and the rise of artificial intelligence, opera lands in a very different way in 2025. Following its New York Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2023, Joyce DiDonato, Ryan McKinney, and Susan Graham, and the Metropolitan team to Sing Sing, a closely guarded show. Prison for performing excerpts from the opera. A number of prisoners learned and sang chorus roles. It was a painful experience to listen to the armed guards discreetly wiping away tears.

In the 1970s and 1980s, during my teens and twenties, I was a determined student of piano and composition, dreaming of writing songs for Barbra Streisand and Broadway musicals. Opera has rarely been a viable contemporary expression, thanks to the pioneering works of Philip Glass, John Adams, Meredith Monk, and Carlyle Floyd. But she felt inaccessible and untouchable.

My life was radically changed by a hand injury in my late 20s – focal dystonia. To make a living, I became a public relations and marketing writer and got a job at the San Francisco Opera.

Every day I was immersed in the amazing and hardworking world of opera: rehearsals, performances, meetings with artistic production, development and more. At that time, the company produced 10 operas in the fall alone. I have experienced and felt the majestic power of this art form. You have greatly inspired me. In my spare time, I wrote art songs for singers I was meeting and working with, including Frederica von Stade and Renée Fleming.

Another dramatic turn came in 1995, when the opera’s general director, Lotfi Mansouri, asked me if I would think about writing an opera. He had heard of my songs being performed internationally and was keen to discover a new creative voice for the opera stage. I was stunned.

Lutfi wanted to pair me with the great American playwright Terrence McNally as my librettist, and suggested a comic opera: something light, frothy and bubbly to celebrate the new millennium. Fortunately, Terence was not interested in such opera. He wanted a drama that was gritty, American yet universal, timeless but timely. Lotfi removed the mandate from comedy.

It took some time, but during a fateful meeting in 1997, Terence suggested the story of the walking dead man. I knew this was the right thing. I felt chills from head to toe and began to feel the drama and music enough to fill an opera house. I was on fire with it.

Sister Helen Prejean’s best-selling memoir was, a few years ago, made into a fantastic film written and directed by Tim Robbins, and starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. The story in the national dialogue was highly controversial. A Louisiana nun becomes pen pals with a convicted murderer on death row, then visits him, becomes his spiritual advisor, and eventually accompanies him to his execution. On her journey, she meets families of murder victims and the family of a convicted murderer as she navigates the US justice system. What she experiences ignites the call for justice in her heart and soul. The activist appears.

When Lutfi told us about the idea, he immediately recognized its power and timing. We mentioned that all the popular classical operas of the past carry a message of social justice at their core: The Marriage of Figaro, The Barber of Seville, La Traviata, The Ring, Eugene Onegin, La Bohème, Geneva, The Rake’s Progress, Peter Grimes and so on. Sometimes the message is subtle. Public sometimes.

Terence’s vision for what Dead Man Walking could do as an opera, and what it could not do as a book or film, was to send us deeper into the drama by extending emotional dramatic moments with real people on stage singing without amplification – allowing us to vibrate in the middle of those emotions. The goal was not to stir up controversy, preach, or tell people how to feel. The goal was to tell a deeply human story with honesty and authenticity, and allow the audience to feel it all as part of a community. Raise questions. Don’t provide answers. We can take something that people usually consider only in the abstract – the death penalty – and put a human face on it.

Sister Helen has been a guiding light and support from the beginning. I knew we had to change things for it to work on stage, and that we weren’t making a documentary or putting a book on stage. “The only thing I ask is that it remain a story of redemption,” she said.

Terrence wrote the text quickly, and I responded in kind. We started our business in 1998 and had a workshop in August of 1999. The first demo took place just over a year later. The distinguished cast included Susan Graham as Sister Helen, John Packard as Joseph de Rocher, and Frederica von Stade as Joseph’s mother. Joe Mantello was the director and Patrick Summers conducted. The response was overwhelming. Two shows have been added to the original show. Seven opera companies immediately commissioned a second production and others followed suit.

After the first show, Julie Andrews came backstage to give me a hug that I will never forget. It has been an amazing and unexpected journey of community, connection and transformation. And the journey continues.