Talking with Jake Heggie is rather like hearing one of his operas:  intense, fascinating, motivating, melodic, and intensely thought- and emotion-provoking.  In some ways it’s hard to separate the individual Jake Heggie from the composer because he integrates himself so thoroughly into the music.   One of Jake’s greatest strengths as a composer is that he knows so clearly what he does and why he does, and he has structured that personal and artistic clarity by his love of melody, drama, theater, context, and the belief in the realization and actualization of opera as a contemporary communicative art form. 

I chose to center the questions around the creative process and opera as contemporary music. I was particularly struck by the profundity as well as the rich breadth of each of his answers.  

I don’t usually struggle when I write, so when I do, I know there is something I’m missing. And I have struggled to write up this interview.  Finally I realized that the psychologist in me wanted to interpret and analyze, reflect, integrate, and most of all re-say everything Jake talked about in our hour-long interview. And it didn’t work.  Why? Then I had the great aha! moment.  I don’t need to do very much to the transcript of the interview, for Jake is as articulate and eloquent with words as he is with music. There are times it reads almost like poetry (my very favorite moment was when I asked him about opera aria favorites from Puccini or Verdi: “There’s something inevitable about those melodies.  It sounds like it’s been there forever… you can’t imagine a time when it wasn’t there or when it sounded different because it’s so natural and inevitable.”  So, sit back and enjoy, connect, feel the beauty, be drawn into the melodies, just as you would in the opera house.

I started this interview, as I often do, by asking what the interviewee would like to talk about, what he finds he too often doesn’t get the chance to say.  Jake immediately said that he wanted to express his gratitude to all the people who make the musicmagic happen. Acutely aware than none of what he does could happen under just his power, he said, “I never stop being grateful for all the amazing people I get to work with, for the support I get. People always want to hear the negative part but there just isn’t any. I never stop being grateful. People get bored with gratitude, they want to hear about the conflicts, but the conflicts are the stuff and substance of the operas, not of the work to create and actualize them.”    

Jake immediately launched into a description about collaboration. “I work very closely with the librettist from the beginning,” he explained, “so that we have the raw material that inspires music and then the music will start to take me in different directions.  The music will reveal details about the characters, their motivations and their actions that were never exactly in the libretto, which may mean we need to redo something in the libretto or  change or alter a  scene because we’re both learning about the characters as the music unfolds.”

“I start with the whole scenario and the words,” he explained.  “When I’m working with a living writer and the music takes me in a different direction I can call him/her up and say ‘do you have any other words’ or ‘do you mind if I take it this way?’ It often  happens that the music starts going in a certain direction and we have to play catch-up with the words, but same spirit that inspired it originally must be maintained.

“The thing that’s easy to confuse here is that I always write for the character but it helps immeasurably for me to know who I am dressing that character on, who’s going to be the interpreter and the performer, the re-creator of that character, and that I find incredibly liberating because it allows me to explore the character without worrying what the person is going to look like or what the timbre of the voice is going to sound like.”

Describing his process (and reminding me of Mahler and his Muse), Jake said, “I really just get to know the characters and then they just start singing to me and I take it down.  I just try to stay out of their way.  Once they’re very clear to me, it’s really almost like taking dictation.  It becomes so clear and inevitable somehow, what they’re singing to me.  And that’s when I know that it’s right and it feels done and I haven’t interfered.  I’ve just allowed it to happen.”

But for those who also know and love Jake Heggie’s songs, you’ll be glad to know, “I usually have someone in mind for my music.  I really am a theater composer.  I think how it’s going to look, how it’s going to sound, how it’s going to resonate.  The whole thing is in my mind.  Even if I don’t have a particular singer cast yet, I’ll have some ideal in mind as I’m writing. Early on I wrote tons of songs for Janet Baker that I never ended up giving to her, but she was one of my favorite singers always, so it was her voice and her personality that I had in mind when I was writing.”

Opera is music.  For sure, but, as we all know and agree, what makes opera so special is the coming together of music and drama.  The stories that motivate Jake are profound in content and intense in meaning.  He doesn’t compose to entertain but rather to connect. He doesn’t write in or into a vacuum. Communication and connection are the reasons for Jake’s work. “The best stories for opera have a sense of the physical and the metaphysical or the cosmic as well as a sense of that individual struggle with larger forces at work.  It’s what I call that ‘larger sense’ of what a society or community is about.  I’m always looking for something that connects.  That sense of connection is so important.  It’s why a composer writes, it’s why a performer performs.” 

Yet and of course there are thousands of stories that meet those criteria, so I asked how he selects his stories.  “If there’s enough strong resonance in me,” he said, “that I feel inspired and compelled to  share it, that’s my trigger for thinking that I might be the right person to set it to music in a theatrical context and also touch people the way I feel it touches me.”  Expanding, he added,  “A lot of my work deals with, and a lot of the operas I really enjoy, are focused on individuals trying to find their identity within the context of a larger community or society, whether that’s within a family, a working world, a whaling ship, or in the case of Dead Man Walking, in a sense of family and the larger sense of the judicial system.  It’s always the individual struggling to be recognized for their identity within the context of the larger community.  Whatever exactly the storyline, it must matter to a broad swathe of the population--whether social issues, personal feelings, emotional conflicts--things that can be explored in this very heightened way on stage.”

It is at the point where the personal conflicts encounter the social conflicts, I think, that provides the depth of the communication and the resulting connection that has made Jake Heggie one of the premier opera composers of our time.  But, of course, although opera is drama, it is also music.  Jake Heggie is unabashedly a composer who loves melody.  “Your ear,” he said, “shouldn’t need to work overtime when you go to the opera.”

And of course, if the goal is connection and communication, each part of the opera must be understandable.  “Many of us grew up in the era when you were just supposed to be content with listening to the beautiful sounds without concerning yourself with the meaning of the story, much less the lyrics of an aria or ensemble, but that doesn’t seem enough nowadays. I always strive in my work for understandability on every level, because it’s such a huge thing for an individual to give up an evening of their life and go for three or four hours of entirely new music, characters, visuals, the whole thing that you have to give people something they can grab onto, while at the same time challenging them.”

“Understandability,” he clarified, “goes not only with feeling connected to the story and the characters, not feeling lost or excluded but also in terms of how the words are set so your ear doesn’t have to work overtime.”

I loved the part about my ear not needing to work overtime because, like so many people, I go to the opera after a day of work.  I had to ask,  “How do you get your melodies?”  

“I wish I had a really easy answer to that,” he began. “I’ve been asked that question before.  I think it needs to remain a mystery.  I do know the information that I need for that to happen.  I need there to be a compelling reason for there to be a song or an aria in the first place.  Before the words or the music there is the scene, the actual action and motivation for someone to say or sing something and it has to start there, with a compelling character who is either joyful or deeply conflicted or suffering or feeling something due to his or her situation, so much so that it not only inspires words but it also makes sense for them to sing.  Then the words have to be right for me and I get a lot of sense of the character from the words they use and from all of that, melodies appear.”

The hour was coming to its end, and, frankly, it had been intense.  Still, it was important to ask Jake something about his musical origins, where his thoughts and ideas come from.  

“I grew up not knowing much about opera and not really liking what I had heard, “ he began.  “What I loved was musical theater so my sense of music theater for the stage came from my early experiences with Julie Andrews movies, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, Candide, Sondheim musicals.  It wasn’t until my 20s that I had a sense of what opera was and why it worked so well.  That’s when I started to meet singers in university who could do all these amazing things with their voices.  And then I knew that I wanted to write for those kinds of voices with that kind of lyricism and urgency and story-telling that I felt from the stage pieces that I knew and loved.

“My big opera revelation was Peter Grimes in the early ‘80s with Jon Vickers at LA Opera.  That blew me away. Then I saw a production of Wozzeck that blew me away, and any number of classic operas both in storybook and contemporary productions and great singers and casts and great singing actors, and I became clearer on what was possible with opera, but I still wasn’t convinced that that was my world.” 

“Those were the seeds for what I write, and it was informed along the way by Schubert and Schumann, and then all the song literature of the 19th century that I learned about in college then the opera influences, in particular Britten, Barber, the French guys (Poulenc, Ravel, Debussy) and definitely Bernstein, Sondheim, that whole group, really a whole amalgam coming at me in my teens and 20s, then hopefully I’ve found my way to my own voice, which I can’t really tell, I just know when it feels right.”

It was when writing Dead Man Walking that he realized he had found his metier, ‘This is really what I do,” he realized.  “I write for singers, I write theatrically for opera singers, whether it’s in an operatic context or a song context, even a musical theater type of context, I write for opera singers.”

When we spoke, Moby Dick had just finished its premier run in Dallas, and, of course, I was interested to know how it feels to complete such a project and what Jake has in store for himself—and us!  “My brain feels remarkably fresh and open, which is not usually the case when I finish a huge project.  Usually my brain is kind of clenched for months.  Moby Dick felt so right and so clear that during the whole process of rehearsals I was able to get distance from it, so now I’m writing a bunch of songs for Joyce DiDonato and some choral music and revising a couple of pieces that companies have asked me to expand for different reasons.  I’ve been asked to write a choral opera, which I’ve never thought of exploring, sort of in the vein of the St. Matthew’s Passion.  I look for things that are completely different.  I’d like to go back to song writing, very intimate forms, and back to my roots, which is song writing. 

“I’ve been offered other big commissions from several companies, but I want to make sure it’s the right thing because you’re really talking about 4 years of your life and at least 3 of them are completely dedicated to that one project.  You have to feel that it’s really worth giving those years of your life.  Hopefully there will be many more big projects b/c I really love doing them.  But right now I’m focused on writing a lot of songs and choral music and revising some things I’ve meant to revise for quite a while.”