New Album of Jake Heggie’s Latest Opera

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

One week from today, the first album to be produced in a newly-formed partnership between the Houston Grand Opera and LSO Live will be released. The album will present that Houston Grand Opera recording of the opera Intelligence, composed by Jake Heggie with a libretto by Gene Scheer. The title refers to a spy ring run by the Union forces during the American Civil War. The spies were two women, Mary Jane Bowser, a former slave, and Elizabeth Van Lew, a Southern woman of privilege. These roles were sung, respectively by soprano Janai Brugger and mezzo Jamie Barton. Kwamé Ryan conducted the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

The opera’s narrative is clearly highly charged by a violent history. It would be fair to say that the conflict of that period has continued to resonate, even up to the present day. Indeed, that period would provide even the most ambitious librettist to deal with more than he could chew. Simply establishing the narrative would be a major undertaking, and conveying that narrative through music would require another “great leap forward.” (Hopefully, readers will not be offended by a phrase originally attributed to the Chinese Communist Party.)

Some readers may recall the “too many notes” phrase that, these days, is probably best associated with Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (which was subsequently produced as a film with the same title). The misgiving that I have with Intelligence is that it gets tangled in “too many words.” As a result, Heggie could do little more than find the right notes for all of those words. Every now and then, his music finds just the right dispositional stance for the narrative; but, more often than not, the journey through the entire narrative ultimately devolves into a tiresome slog. Perhaps Heggie will be able to extract a suite from his score, which can capture the spirit of the narrative without getting bogged down in its excessive details.