Jake Heggie’s 10th Grand Opera Premieres at HGO • October 2023
Houston, Texas
J’Nai Bridges and Urban Bush Women in Intelligence
Photo by Michael Bishop / Houston Grand Opera
Created in collaboration with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Gene Scheer, Intelligence is Jake Heggie’s 10th full-length opera. The work is believed to be the first grand opera in which words, music, and dance are equally vital to the storytelling. Houston Grand Opera commissioned and premiered Intelligence, which featured the Urban Bush Women dance troupe and J’Nai Bridges alongside Jamie Barton and Janai Brugger, who portrayed real-life Union spies in the American Civil War.
From the Artist: “Intelligence is an entirely new possibility for opera – where worlds, music, and movement are essential to telling and understanding the story. Together, Jawole, Gene, and I have sought to move forward in this enormously flexible art form. In service of this concept, the score is fresh, rhythmic, and lyrical; the language is contemporary; and the movement and dance are bold, inhabiting every corner of the story.”
Opera Now: Risking Everything
The New York Times: In an Opera About Civil War Spies, Dancers Help Drive the Drama
Financial Times: Composer Jake Heggie
San Francisco Chronicle: How an adventurous wave of operas is addressing race head-on
Air Mail Magazine: Double Coronation
Opera Magazine: Composing America
BBC Music Magazine: A Life Less Ordinary
San Francisco Chronicle: Heggie Braces for a Whirlwind Season
Houstonia: Houston Grand Opera’s Intelligence Shows the Power of New Works
Houston Matters: A new opera celebrates two hidden figures of Civil War history
Critical Acclaim
Urban Bush Women in Intelligence
Photo by Michael Bishop / Houston Grand Opera
“Houston Grand Opera has a hit with Intelligence, composer Jake Heggie’s groundbreaking new opera about questioning truths. Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer, director/choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and their superb team of collaborators have delivered a gorgeous, nuanced, layered and suspenseful masterpiece that deftly balances drama and wit. Don’t let the time period fool you; this is an opera even those with 21st century attention spans can get lost in.”
–Houston Chronicle
“Houston Grand Opera’s season premiere, Intelligence, is not just another opera to take in – it’s an experience to be absorbed. It masterfully fulfills art’s big-picture role…a riveting work realized through the collective genius of Heggie, Scheer, and Zollar. Heggie’s compositions are approachable and never veer into the abstract. His music offers listeners recognizable motifs and cinematic quality, ensuring an experience that’s engaging rather than challenging. It feels as if Heggie is extending a warm invitation through his melodies, beckoning listeners to immerse themselves in the narrative. The vocal lines artfully shift between rapid patter and rich lyricism, each used judiciously. The opera’s structure feels through-composed, breaking its musical flow only when essential.”
–OperaWire
“Heggie, Scheer, and Zollar’s powerful storytelling ensures that this tale will unfold on opera stages for years to come. The tuneful score twists as quickly as the plot. It moves from slow, sweeping melodic lines to punctuated rhythms and back again, often within a single aria or duet. Heggie playfully incorporates a variety of inspirations and techniques: jazzy chromatics, nods to blues and spirituals, literal tone painting of text, realistic sound effects (most disturbingly, the cracking of whips and clinking of chains), and ironic repetition of motifs. The music often swells to huge proportions, with multiple voices singing fortissimo above crashing percussion, but Heggie balances this with moments of touching simplicity.”
–San Francisco Classical Voice
“Intelligence arrives with superlative pedigree, composed by perhaps America's most acclaimed contemporary composer, Heggie. If an opera company wants to commission a new work, he's probably the first one to get the call. The score is ur-Heggie, propulsive, jagged and taut, prickly and expressive. There's a lot of blues to be heard in the underpinning, befitting the location of Richmond, Virginia. The best music erupts in Act II after Mary Jane questions Elizabeth about her mother. The exuberant dance is the best piece of the night, and Heggie lets loose with an all-percussion score of rhythmic drums, tambourine, and cymbal. For pure sound and dramatic impact, it's amazingly unique.”
–Houston Press
“Heggie, Scheer, and Zollar built out the Civil War scenario – the result is an opera that delivers powerful dramatic outpourings. When the spotlight is on the singers, Heggie often sends their voices soaring to embody their emotions, anxieties, and resolve. Elizabeth’s big scene in Act 1, denouncing the hatred and ignorance she saw around her, began with Barton almost unaccompanied, singing with hushed intensity. That made the music all the more arresting as it gradually rose in declamatory force—and as her voice swelled into a flood.”
–Texas Classical Review
“As one expects of Heggie and Scheer, Intelligence evinces theatrical and musical experience and skill. Also a prolific art song composer, Heggie writes fluently and effectively for voices. Moments in his orchestral score dramatize wartime turbulence, but the surprise is how much of the music is subtly buoyed by dance rhythms — now a waltz, now jazzy syncopations. Elsewhere are suggestions of spirituals and the blues.”
–Dallas Morning News
“Heggie and Scheer focus on the characters at the heart of the drama, and on their psychological responses to the system of oppression in which they’ve grown up. The choreography, especially during an extended Act 2 interlude accompanied by percussion only, draws an explicit connection between the enslaved Black population and their African roots — another reminder of the presentness of the past. Nowhere is that more hauntingly inventive than in the work’s opening tableau, when Mary Jane, hanging laundry on the line to dry, is joined by a group of dancers. The snap and flap of bed sheets in the wind turns into an ebullient rhythmic dance, as the drudgery of American labor harks back to African freedom. Heggie’s score, ably conducted in Houston by Kwamé Ryan, is built on these dualities throughout. He draws repeatedly on blues tonalities. Much of what’s most keenly alive in the opera is a tribute to Heggie’s gift for vocal writing. The main characters all emerge as vividly three-dimensional figures; even the two antagonists breathe life through their music.”
–San Francisco Chronicle