New opera from Bay Area composer.
Bay Area composer Jake Heggie continues turning unlikely subjects into music with his latest opera
In his career as an opera composer, Jake Heggie has written about nuns and mad sea captains, death row inmates and the angels among us.
With his new opera, the San Francisco composer explores the very nature of identity. “If I Were You,” with a score by Heggie and libretto by Gene Scheer, takes the Faust legend for an intriguing spin, one that asks what it means to discover who we really are.
Presented by the Merola Opera Program,
the opera makes its world premiere Aug. 1-6 at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. Conducted by Nicole Paiement and directed by Keturah Stickann, the production features two alternating casts drawn from this year’s elite training program.
Heggie is well-known to Bay Area audiences. His first full-length opera, “Dead Man Walking,” premiered in 2000 at San Francisco Opera, which has since produced his “Moby-Dick” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” These, along with his chamber operas and song cycles, are among today’s most frequently produced new works.
But the award-winning composer says he’s never created a work quite like “If I Were You.”
“It’s all about identity,” Heggie explained in a break between rehearsals, “finding an identity where you feel powerful and loved and like you could belong — and be willing to make a bargain with the devil to achieve that.”
“If I Were You,” which marks Merola’s first-ever commissioned work, is based on the novel “Si j’étais vous ...” by American-born Francophile Julien Green.
Heggie admits he’d never heard of Green’s novel until a friend suggested it. “But I read it, and it stayed with me,” he said. “The central idea of someone making a bargain with the devil — the concept just captured my mind. Whereas ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ was all about angels, this is ‘the devil is always nearby.’ ”
The story’s quest for identity struck Heggie as intriguingly contemporary. “You don’t have to look far these days to see people selling their souls and shape-shifting all over the place. The world we live in is dominated by marketing and advertising. You’re told over and over that you’d be so much happier if you looked like this, if you had that.
“It also had an almost mythological element to the characters and the journeys that they’re on. I was hungry to write a piece that explored some dark poetry and still felt redemptive — that was tragic and funny, all at once.”
The opera’s central character is Fabian Hart, an aspiring writer who longs to transcend his mundane life yet lacks the wisdom to understand what’s really wrong with it.
“People think they want money, they want fame,” librettist Scheer explained in a phone call. “Like Shakespeare said, ‘What I most enjoy contented least.’ What he really wants is to be loved.”
As Fabian morphs and changes, his music is divided between multiple singers; the devil here is Brittomara, a shape-shifting character sung by a mezzo-soprano.
Scheer, whose work with Heggie includes song cycles — their first collaboration was the 2005 “Statuesque” — as well as libretti for “Moby-Dick” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” found the concept irresistible.
“To me, it was very theatrical, very musical,” he said. “There was something very compelling in it — the idea of one character being threaded through five or six different people. I thought it was a great theatrical challenge, and also a great challenge for these young performers.”
The result is unlike anything he and Heggie have done before, says Scheer — an opera that’s “part gothic horror, a little bit scary and very Romantic.”
If the choice of Green’s novel was unusual, that’s par for the course for Heggie.
Since his early success with “Dead Man Walking,” the composer, who lives in San Francisco with his husband, Curt Branom, has continued to write the kind of hits that opera companies want to produce. If the reasons have to do with his choice of source material — his “Moby-Dick” certainly defied the expectations of those who said Melville’s leviathan novel couldn’t work onstage — his success is also due to his lush, melodic scores and his ability to bring out the best in singers’ voices.
“Jake is all about putting the voice at the center of the experience,” says Scheer. “He writes vocal music that’s gratifying for singers to sing. That’s no small thing. He just writes so beautifully for the voice.”
With “If I Were You,” Heggie is composing for the future. The Merola singers are brilliant, he says, and the opera’s multiplicity of characters is ideal for them. With two casts, each singer in this year’s program has the opportunity to shine.
Today, he adds, opera companies are just as likely to produce new works as repertory standards.
“These singers are incredible young artists, and they’re all in,” Heggie said. “They’re open to new works. This is what they’re going to be doing to build their careers. They’re going to be doing new work all the time.”