Read on to discover all about The Righteous, a provocative new opera by Gregory Spears and Tracy K Smith...
The Righteous... what's it all about?
As the sun sets over the distant mountain range, a woman sings of her belief in the power of God to save and heal. The woman is Sheila, a parishioner in the American Southwest. The year is 1986. Sheila has encountered abuse and betrayal in her life, but her song has a transcendental beauty – matched by the purity of her voice. This idealistic outpouring is witnessed by David, preacher and head of Sheila’s church. He is moved by the strength and simplicity of Sheila’s faith. And even though both are married, they kiss – the beginning of an adulterous affair that nonetheless has at its heart a desire to be uplifted by faith.
An intimate account of inner lives set against a bold 1980s backdrop
This is The Righteous, a new opera by composer Gregory Spears and librettist Tracy K Smith, staged in 2024 at the Santa Fe Opera, New Mexico – the company’s 19th world premiere since its foundation in 1957. Set over a period of 11 years, from 1979-90, director Kevin Newbury’s bold and ambitious production tackles big themes of religion, politics, love and betrayal.
But at its heart is a far more intimate account of the inner lives of its characters – David (Michael Mayes), the preacher whose flawed faith gives way to political ambition and adultery; his best friend Jonathan (Anthony Roth Costanzo), who channels his secret love for David into fighting for the AIDS cause; David’s first wife Michele (Jennifer Johnson Cano), whose life is shattered by David’s betrayal; and Sheila (Elena Villalón), David’s second wife, who must choose between her love for David and her desire to be true to God’s teachings.
It’s a work of multiple strands, and despite the larger-than-life 1980s backdrop – of big hair, loud costumes and lurid political events – this is a story told in shades of grey, of imperfect individuals rather than cartoonish caricatures.
Gregory Spears and Tracy K Smith... long-term collaborators
The work is Spears and Smith’s second collaboration of a planned operatic triptych. Their close partnership is founded on a friendship dating back to 2005, when both were living in Brooklyn but spending much of their time at Princeton University, where Smith was teaching creative writing and Spears was finishing his doctorate in musical composition.
Today they’re leaders in their respective fields. Smith, who serves as professor of English and African American Studies at Harvard University, is the Pulitzer Prize winning poet of Life on Mars (2011) and former Poet Laureate of the United States. Spears has written numerous critically acclaimed chamber and orchestral works, and since 2012 has completed eight operas, including Fellow Travelers, written in collaboration with librettist Greg Pierce, and 2022’s Castor and Patience, the first of his operatic projects with Smith, commissioned by Cincinnati Opera for its 100th anniversary.
The two are deeply fascinated by American history and how past events resonate today, ideas that are reflected in both Castor and Patience – a tale of African American cousins in the early 2000s, at odds over the fate of an inherited piece of land – and in The Righteous. ‘As an artist, I’m interested in the ways that history talks to us,’ says Smith. ‘Often, history makes its voice felt when the circumstances of the present fall eerily into step with the upheavals of an earlier time’s conflicts. The uncertainty of our own time makes it more critical for us to hear anew the wisdom and warnings of the past.’
The Righteous... deliberately set in the recent past
Although each of The Righteous’s leading characters have biblical precedents, the work was deliberately set in the recent past. ‘The 1980s was a confusing, uncertain time,’ says Spears. ‘It’s far enough away for The Righteous to be a period piece, and yet it’s close enough for the audience to remember that time personally. Tracy and I want our operas to implicate the audience. We want to bring them back to a remembered time, so they can’t simply watch with detachment. Seeing something we remember represented on stage provides a place for meditation.’
A work of mirrors and symmetries
The pair’s interest in time and memory is reflected in the opera’s technical construction as well. ‘Opera is a memory game,’ says Spears, ‘and this piece is palindromic. There’s a symmetry on either side of the intermission, which is itself the eye of the storm. So, if you look at the opening chorus and the final chorus, for example, they align with each other – or rather they are the inverse of each other. Similar themes are recurring in different contexts over the years.’
It’s a mirroring that occurs at both the macro and micro level – the latter in Smith’s use of the villanelle as a linguistic device. ‘The psalm is something I really wanted to gesture toward,’ she says. ‘So, I needed a vocabulary to suggest that same intimacy with God. The villanelle is a poetic form that’s rooted in direct repetition and a closed rhyme scheme. There are two refrains, and each recurs several times throughout the course of the poem. But these repeats begin to tilt and shift, and sometimes undermine previous iterations. It’s a great form for thinking about obsession and compromise – to think about disrupted resolution and obstacles to growth.’
The Righteous... ancient tools to construct a modern work
If the villanelle presents a distorted circle, it is just one of the opera’s paradoxes. Spears speaks of his love of tension and contradiction, embodied not only in The Righteous’s language and themes, but in its musical structure. ‘I’m very interested in the operatic canon and operatic tropes – what I sometimes call the “technology of opera”,’ he explains. ‘These tropes have developed over some 420 years of European history, and I think a lot about how to reanimate them using minimalist language. I love the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass – their music elicits an emotional openness. So, I’m using the operatic tools of Verdi and combining them with the musical language of Glass. This evokes a contradiction, a kind of uncanniness – a strangeness and familiarity at the same time.’
This juxtaposition of epic and intimate musical languages deliberately mirrors the opera’s depiction of intimate, personal stories on a grand operatic stage. ‘After all,’ says Spears, ‘sometimes the personal is epic. That’s the paradox. If you had your heart broken as a 15 year-old, that’s mythic. The theatre can magnify that experience so that our inner world becomes as significant – as operatic – as we feel it to be.’
The Righteous... How do you write an opera?
The language of minimalism also informs the way that Spears and Smith work together to create their operas. Both Castor and The Righteous are original stories, rather than adaptations, which involves much discussion from the outset. For The Righteous, Smith then wrote an outline for the plot. ‘From there, I started realising scenes,’ says Spears. ‘I don’t initially compose music in direct response to the poetry or structures of dialogue. Rather I try to evoke a more general sense of that world. I create dozens of short “sonic environments” in response to the topic and themes, and once the writing comes in, it’s like a little matching game, a puzzle in which I trial my musical ideas with sections of text. They almost never fit as planned!’
For Spears, there’s a mystic – dare I say, spiritual – guiding hand throughout the compositional process. ‘Tracy and I both feel that if you’re writing a truly interesting piece, you should feel like you’re falling into the fiction. Writers often talk about following where their characters lead, and this is similar. It’s as if all these pieces have a kind of magnetic force between them, and rather than applying music to text in a formulaic way, we’re shepherding the puzzle pieces. When the work starts to pull itself together, I get very excited because I can feel something bigger taking over.’
How to bring the words to life through music
Approaching the creative process in such similar terms is key to a happy working relationship for Spears and Smith – reflected in the way that text and music generously enhance the other. ‘Certain kinds of writers – Hemingway comes to mind – are very direct in terms of the language they use, and yet there’s so much space and life inside it,’ says Spears. ‘It’s like an iceberg – there’s the visible part above the water and a whole apparatus underneath.
Tracy’s work is like that. When I read it, I instantly like it, but it’s not until perhaps the third reading that I fall into it. With my music, I’m trying to transport the listener to that third reading upon first hearing. Her writing is so subtle and gentle, so my hope is that the music, instead of underlining emotions and ideas with big, bold markers, is heightening the ambiguity and the mixed emotions.’
It’s certainly true that many of The Righteous’s big cadences correspond with an acceptance of doubt – an obvious analogy for faith itself. So, what of the pair’s third, as yet unwritten, opera? Will it link thematically to the first two? ‘I’m not sure how to answer that,’ admits Spears. ‘But Castor and The Righteous are connected – they are opposite sides of the same coin. I feel that the third one will tell us more – and it will certainly engage with recent American history.’
