Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Dead Man Walking

Dead Man Walking: An Introduction

American opera houses are too often thought of, especially by Europeans, as cherishers of the old and enemies of the new. But that stereotype, which was never entirely accurate in the first place, has now become increasingly false. In recent years, opera houses in New York , Chicago , Houston , and San Francisco , among others, have provided a regular showcase for living composers such as William Bolcom, John Corigliano, John Harbison, André Previn and Conrad Susa to write new works for the stage.

Jake Heggie's opera Dead Man Walking , which was premiered at the San Francisco Opera on October 7, 2000, has made itself into one of the instant centerpieces of this recent flowering of new American opera. It is without doubt a distinctively American work, and proclaims itself as such in every bar and line.

Dead Man Walking is Heggie's first opera, and it very obviously marks a milestone in the composer's emergence before a wider audience. But Heggie has been building up to this operatic moment. He has made his reputation primarily as a composer of song. His work has been taken up by almost all the luminaries of the current generation of American vocal recitalists, including Susan Graham and Frederica von Stade, Renée Fleming, Jennifer Larmore and Dawn Upshaw. The association with von Stade has been especially important, yielding three song cycles, two works for chorus and mezzo solo, and a group of orchestral songs. Two of the cycles, On the Road to Christmas and Paper Wings , feature songs with words written by the singer herself.

Inevitably, much of the immediate stir created by the opera can be explained by its potent subject-matter. This portrayal of a man who faces and eventually suffers the death penalty is a story which illuminates one of the most emotive public issues in today's United States . Between 1976, when capital punishment was reauthorized by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the premiere of Heggie's opera in 2000, 667 people were executed in the U.S. , more than a third of them in Texas , and 26 of them in Louisiana , where the opera is set. Joseph De Rocher, the “dead man” of the opera, is a fictional victim, a composite character drawn from several of the Death Row prisoners whom Sister Helen Prejean wrote about in her remarkable 1993 book Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States , on which the opera is based.

Operas have been set in prisons before, of which Beethoven's Fidelio and Janacek's From the House of the Dead are two of the more obvious. There have been onstage operatic executions as well, in works as dissimilar as Tosca , Billy Budd and, stretching a point, Aïda . Offstage executions play an important, not to say terminal, role in works such as Andrea Chénier or Salome .

In a certain sense also, as the critic Peter Conrad wrote, all operas are “a song about love and death.” But Dead Man Walking is exceptional among all these works in being a song engaged with the meaning of love and death in the composer's own time and country. At the close of the first performance in San Francisco , some members of the audience wept openly. Outside the War Memorial Opera House in Van Ness Street , opponents of the death penalty mounted a torchlight vigil, which Sister Helen herself joined after the curtain came down.

Can any opera composer ever have written so directly topical an opera? It is difficult to think of one. Given this context, therefore, one of the most striking aspects of Heggie's opera is that it is so universal as well as so specific, and that it is so reflective rather than crudely polemical.

Death dominates and pervades the entire work, from the savage murder scene in the prologue, which leaves no question about Joseph De Rocher's guilt, to the latter's final execution by lethal injection, which is enacted in a near silence which seems to go beyond even the ability of music to express.

But song is there, too, in the unaccompanied gospel hymn—and so is love. Perhaps no single moment shows more clearly that Heggie's opera is rooted in the spirit of Sister Helen's book than the stripped-bare profundity of the final exchanges between the two central characters. “I love you,” sings De Rocher in his final words as he is strapped to the execution table. “I love you, too,” Sister Helen responds.

Dead Man Walking is not an “anti-death penalty” opera in an agitprop sense, perhaps to some people's frustration. It works as a drama precisely because it catches subtleties and nuances, and sometimes even humor, within and around its compelling central theme. De Rocher is not a nice man or even a martyr. The Death Row prisoners are scary, not noble. The prison governor is caught between keeping order and wanting to behave decently. And the most immediately accessible characters in the drama are the victims' parents, who continually confront Sister Helen with their own terrible losses.

If the most overwhelming scene in the theater is, appropriately, the execution, the scene which comes closest to it—and which draws some of Heggie's finest music—is the sextet between the victims' parents, Sister Helen and De Rocher's hapless mother. “You don't know what it's like,” the parents sing in a series of heartbreaking overlapping lines. They are right. Sister Helen doesn't know, although she is learning. Moments like these make the opera truly dramatic.

Heggie is an unabashed melodist. His writing is emotionally charged and atmospheric, betraying varied influences from Mussorgsky to Janacek and from Ravel to Britten. But this is ultimately an American work. Like the very best of the American school, Heggie's opera aims to be experienced and appreciated by a wide audience, not an elite one. Quite apart from its exceptionally profound subject, there is a sweep and ambition to Dead Man Walking which only a small minority of debut operas can rival.

Martin Kettle

Box Office Gift Shop Home