Jake Heggie can never predict where he will find the topic for his next opera. But the American composer has an instinct for recognizing when he has alighted on a story that will send his imagination into overdrive.
Such as when he heard about a Vietnam War veteran who discovered he was heir to an art collection looted by Nazis.
“I felt the hair going up on the back of my neck, because I knew this was the right one,” Heggie said in a recent interview about “Before It All Goes Dark,” his latest collaboration with librettist Gene Scheer.
On May 19, Seattle-based Music of Remembrance presents the world premiere of this one-act chamber opera as its season finale before taking the production on tour to San Francisco and Chicago.
Heggie was recalling a dinner conversation he had had a few years ago with veteran Chicago Tribune arts journalist Howard Reich. The composer mentioned he was in search of a story for his new chamber opera commission from MOR.
Reich told him about a series he had published in 2002 portraying the odyssey of Gerald “Mac” McDonald, a down-and-out Vietnam War veteran with PTSD and hepatitis C who was getting by on disability benefits in the Chicago suburbs.
Reich’s investigation into a collection of some 30 priceless artworks stolen from by the Nazis and held by the Czech government had led him to identify an unsuspecting McDonald as the sole living heir.
In an in-depth, two-part series, Reich recounted McDonald’s journey to Prague to try to reclaim the artworks, despite being seriously ill and awaiting a liver transplant. In the process, McDonald confronted traces of their original owner, his great-great-uncle Emil Freund, who had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Even before reading Reich’s vividly detailed series, Heggie became convinced of the musical-dramatic potential embedded in McDonald’s story: “I love stories about identity crises and transformative journeys in which we learn how we fit in the world. Because I think everyone goes through a journey like that.”
Reich’s deep reporting provided the basis for the opera’s narrative, but Scheer was free to develop the libretto in directions he and Heggie found best suited to opera. “In this art form, we want to try to explore what something felt like,” the librettist says. “We’re really in the business of emotional archaeology.”
Scheer points out that while McDonald initially traveled to Prague to get the paintings back, he discovered an unexpected sense of connection to Emil and the Jewish heritage his family had kept hidden from him. “Mac’s journey is as much about finding out the history that he was denied as it is about the paintings that were taken.”
In fact — unlike the successful court battle to reclaim the famous Gustav Klimt portrait (dramatized in the 2015 film “Woman in Gold”) — the Czech government refused to relinquish Freund’s artworks and instead designated them “national cultural treasures.” This preempted any attempt to take the art abroad or to sell it on the international market. McDonald returned home with nothing, dying three years later, in 2005, at age 55.
Nevertheless, McDonald came back transformed, Reich says, because of what he learned about his own heritage. “This opened the door for me the next year to pursue the truth of my own family in ‘Prisoner of Her Past,’ ” Reich’s book and documentary about his mother’s lifelong trauma as a Holocaust survivor. “So this experience changed both our lives.”
This has been a banner season for the San Francisco-based Heggie, 63, one of the most successful of contemporary composers. “Dead Man Walking,” his operatic debut from 2000 about a convicted murderer on death row, has become the most frequently performed new opera of the 21st century.
Only a month after “Dead Man Walking” opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2023-24 season in a new production, Houston Grand Opera premiered Heggie’s “Intelligence,” which was inspired by the true story of two women spies — one free, one enslaved — working together during the Civil War.
Heggie says “Before It All Goes Dark,” which calls for two singers and an ensemble of seven instrumentalists, “is not like anything I’ve ever done. It starts off with this very aggressive musical texture but then is overcome by the world of art Mac discovers and his sense of identity and connection.”
Ryan McKinny, the bass-baritone who starred in the Met’s “Dead Man Walking” and for whom Heggie wrote the role of Mac, says the new opera “paints the big picture by focusing on a deeply personal story. Mac is someone in search of a community as well as in search for himself.”
Heggie credits MOR and its founder and artistic director Mina Miller with giving him the opportunity to expand his perspective on how the medium of opera can tell stories.
As a prologue to the opera, Miller suggested a short concert of chamber music featuring Czech composers who perished in the Holocaust — presented as if at a salon in Emil Freund’s home in Prague in the early 1930s.
“Mina’s idea is a stroke of genius,” says Heggie, “because we can see the art on the walls and experience what that moment would have been like, before it all went dark for Emil.”
“Through an aging veteran’s odyssey, we’re reminded of how we are never too old to learn, to change and to understand the world and ourselves in new ways,” Miller says. “We talk about how art can be a catalyst for change. This opera actually shows that happening.”