Heggie Masterpiece Opens Met Season • September 2023
New York, New York
Broadway legend Patti LuPone and composer Jake Heggie at the Metropolitan Opera season-opening gala
Photo by Jason Crowley / BFA
Dead Man Walking made its long-awaited Metropolitan Opera premiere, opening the 23/24 season in a star-studded new production by Ivo van Hove. Since its world premiere in 2000, Dead Man Walking has become the most-performed opera of the 21st century, with particular praise for Jake Heggie’s music and the libretto of late Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally. The Met production was led by long-time Heggie collaborators Joyce DiDonato, Susan Graham, and Ryan McKinny, with Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium. Jake spoke with press outlets around the world in advance of this career-defining moment.
Nightline: 'Dead Man Walking’ makes a unique debut
The New York Times: ‘Dead Man Walking’ Makes Its Way
Financial Times: Composer Jake Heggie on his death row opera
Commonweal: This Is Our Opera
Associated Press: Jake Heggie’s Operatic Version Arrives at Met
Vogue: Inside the Star-Studded Opening of the Met
Opera News Magazine: Earned Moment
Air Mail Magazine: Double Coronation
Opera Magazine: Composing America
Barron’s: Heggie’s Favorite Kind of Opera-Goer
National Catholic Reporter: At the Met, 'Dead Man Walking' applauds Sr. Prejean's death row ministry
BBC Music Magazine: A Life Less Ordinary
San Francisco Chronicle: Heggie Braces for a Whirlwind Season
NYT Style: The Fall Galas
Associated Press: In break with the past, Met opera is devoting a third of its productions to recent work
The New York Times: A Death Row Opera Goes to Sing Sing, With Inmates Onstage
Critical Acclaim
Ryan McKinny and Joyce DiDonato in Dead Man Walking
Photo by Karen Almond / The Metropolitan Opera
“Dead Man Walking is a special work. The opening overture, with its flowing line, is full of tension and foreboding. Then there’s the simple beauty of “He will gather us around.” And most prominently, the gorgeous ensemble “You don’t know” when parents confront Sister Helen about losing their children. The melodic development of that piece is gut-wrenching and simply beautiful. It connects and stays with you [and is] the musical high point of Dead Man Walking. Heggie’s vocal writing is brilliant in how simple but varied it is. Nothing has ever sounded so unforgettable at the Met than the silence that accompanied [the final] scene. Not one note. The silence was deafening – uncomfortably but also viscerally.”
–OperaWire
“Jake Heggie’s soaring music is easily digested, and the storytelling of Terrence McNally’s libretto is crystal clear; its emotions are passionate. There is steady, swelling tenderness, for which Heggie’s cloudless lyricism is apt. He’s invented a sweet hymn that becomes Sister Helen’s leitmotif. For a sweeping ensemble bringing her together with Joseph’s mother and the parents of the victims, he turns to clean neo-Baroque chords, richly arranged, to balance emotion and clarity. He gives voices ample room to take flight.”
–The New York Times
“The accessible elegance of the music and the insistence of the dramatic questions it underscores are two of the reasons Dead Man Walking has become one of the most-produced modern operas since its world premiere in 2000.”
–Theater Mania
“Gut-wrenching tale of rage and redemption, Heggie’s score has no thorns. Familiar American musical forms – jazz, gospel, rock – are melded to form a type of cinematic overview; it draws in the audience.”
–Bachtrack
”A riveting performance with the Met orchestra, and the composer was greeted with open arms.”
–Broadway World
“Heggie’s score supported the drama without calling attention to itself. While he was right to say there were opera-size emotions in Sister Helen’s dive from a prisoner’s pen pal to the depths of the death-penalty machine, the composer mostly bypassed showy coloratura in favor of knotty inner feelings.”
–New York Classical Review
“Even Heggie’s music — a roiling and often thrilling concoction of Britten-esque strings and Gershwin-esque winds — leaves little room for daylight. Attempts by the audience to applaud several arias were thwarted by Heggie’s relentless score, insistently ushering us toward De Rocher’s fate and allowing zero opportunities for the illusion to loosen. Heggie’s music rushes between evocations of the cold, mechanistic bureaucracy of capital punishment and the internal anxiety and turmoil of its protagonists.”
–The Washington Post
“Heggie’s score is a blend of gospel, jazz with nods to gritty 20th century opera. It is absorbing, accessible in its reverence of melody and electrically fast-moving. Masterfully led by Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra drove the score with immense verve.”
–Opera Now
“It’s a powerful piece of theatre, and based on the shocked silence that lingered after the final scene, an audience hit. Heggie writes soaring vocal lines that flatter the voice and has an undeniable skill with orchestration in the American symphonic tradition.”
–Parterre Box
“The music is lyrical, with a throb that suits the subject and also a yearning and wistfulness that bring out great feeling.”
–Financial Times
“Heggie’s score triumphed. Clear musical ideas, with a score that references popular styles without losing its own identity and strong vocal writing, a balanced and well-paced story and a timely set of ethical questions that deal deftly in ambivalence.”
–The Observer
“The production demonstrates that the work is unquestionably Met-worthy: a grand opera in a grand space. Yannick brought out Heggie’s gift for creating expressive, emotionally charged vocal lines. The curtain calls were exhilarating – Heggie received a hero’s welcome.”
–Musical America