Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Dead Man Walking

Sister Helen Prejean on the Opera

I love the opera. I love the way it captures essential human conflicts: love or hate, compassion or vengeance, redemption or condemnation. All of life's deepest struggles are in this opera. Guided by Heggie's probing music, it takes us into places of our hearts that we don't even know we have. I was amazed watching my story unfold on stage—but I'm only a window: through my journey the audience goes on its own spiritual journey. In the prologue everyone is witness to an unspeakable crime and everyone knows who did it, and then when we meet him, brash and unremorseful, we want to see him executed for his terrible crime. There is no question as to guilt or innocence, so all the energy of the audience gathers around the outrage we feel about the crime and wanting to see “justice” done. But when the killer's mother begins to sing before the Board of Pardons for her son's life, we are all brought into a terrible moral dilemma: by killing the killer are we achieving “justice” or are we creating another victimized family? I could hear the audience breathing. And then, as “justice” is enacted before our eyes and we all witness the execution of the killer (an opera with a minute and a half of silence ), our moral dilemma is compounded. So now the state has killed in our name—where are we now? Have we achieved “justice” and cleansed ourselves, or have we become crass imitators of violence, killing the killer?

I love the opera because it is clean and spare and pure and brings us into the deepest recesses of our own hearts. At heart, this opera is about the search for redemption—everybody's redemption. That's mostly why I am so moved by it. From the beginning I told McNally and Heggie that I'd trust them to compose the opera if they wove into its center the quest for redemption.

They got it. They really got it. And I could tell by the stillness in the auditorium and the tumultuous applause at the end that the audience also really gets it. I hope the opera is performed in every city in the world. Its theme is bigger and deeper than the question of the death penalty. It helps us journey into the deepest places of our hearts where we struggle with hurt and forgiveness, with guilt for our failings and the need for redemption.

Sister Helen Prejean

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