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Rhiannon Giddens: Every episode, we shine a spotlight on a single aria, so we can see it from every angle. Today, it's this journey from one of the great American operas, Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie.
Rhiannon Giddens: My friends, it has been forever. And I don't know about you, but these days I feel like every passing year is basically a whole lifetime. Since we were all last together, I've been feeding my opera habit in an unusual way. by following the opera Omar around the country. I wrote Omar with composer Michael Ables, and getting to see each different cast and audience respond to the incredible story of Omar Ibn Said, sold at the age of 37 from his homeland of Senegal and ending up enslaved for over 50 years in North Carolina, it has been a complete honor.
And as strange as it was to be in the audience rather than up on stage, you know, it cinched for me the importance of opera as a contemporary art form. I know you agree, because you're here, listening to a show that's all about the power of music and how these stories reflect and reverberate through every corner of our lives, ranging from the personal to the philosophical.
And sometimes... Today's aria touches on all three. The best way to tell you the story of Dead Man Walking is for me to introduce you to Sister Helen Prejean. Sister Helen followed her calling into the Catholic Church when she was 18 years old, and she's devoted her life to this calling ever since. In the early 1980s, she was living and working in marginalized communities in Louisiana when, out of nowhere, she was asked to be the spiritual advisor to death row prisoner Patrick Saunier.
Patrick and his brother had been convicted of rape and murder, and Sister Helen took on the challenge of supporting him spiritually and emotionally through the final months of his life. Sister Helen wrote about her journey to the execution chamber with Patrick, and others, in her best selling book Dead Man Walking.
It's a captivating and very powerful story, not just about the grace and love that Sister Helen has shown the men that she's advised in their darkest moments, but also about the death penalty in America. What it accomplishes? And what it doesn't, from the perspective of someone who's seen it all from up close.
This story inspired a national conversation, and it captured the imagination of a lot of people, including composer Jake Heggie and playwright and librettist Terrence McNally. It became their first opera, premiering in 2000 in San Francisco to a sold out run. To this day, Dead Man Walking remains one of the most performed American operas.
I think one of the reasons this story is still so gripping is because the questions at its heart are still very much alive in America today. What is the appropriate response to murder in Cold Blood? Is an eye for an eye justice? Or is it vengeance? Is redemption even possible? And what does it really look like?
These are questions that Sister Helen has been asking both privately and publicly for decades. And today, we'll hear how Jake Heggie has set these questions to music. The aria, This Journey, takes place early in the opera, when Sister Helen is driving to Angola Prison to meet the condemned man for the first time.
Sister Helen Prejean: One funny thing mama said, after the book Dead Man Walking came out and everybody's beginning to read this book, she said, now Helen, you're famous, for God's sake, don't do anything stupid.
And the first thing he said was Dead Man Walking. And I just remember I got this shiver through my entire body. My hair stood on end. I could feel and hear music. And I said, stop right there. That's it. It felt so right.
So while you'll hear Sister Helen speaking about the real life Patrick Saunier, you'll hear Jake and Joyce talking about the opera character, whose name is Joseph Desrochers. Alright, I think it's time to join Sister Helen as she makes her way to Angola Prison. Here's this journey from Dead Man Walking.
Jake Heggie: I was at home and the phone rang and I picked it up and uh, this voice says, I'd like to speak to Jake Hagee. And I said, this is Jake. And she said, this is Sister Helen Prejean and I understand you want to make an opera out of Dead Man Walking. Is that right, Jake? And I said, yeah. That's, that's right. And she goes, you know what I said to that, Jake?
I said, of course, we're going to do an opera on Dead Man Walking. But Jake, I don't know boot scat about opera. So you're going to have to educate me. She said, you don't write all this atonal stuff, right? We're going to have a tune we can hum, right? And I said, yes, I'm a very lyric composer. I like big tunes, soaring melodies, arching lyricism.
Sister Helen Prejean: My growing up, it couldn't have been a more loving family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, loving mom and daddy, very affectionate, big two story house, five acres, playing outside, always outside, and then going to a Catholic school with nuns who taught me, but very unaware of justice.
Sister Helen Prejean: I joined when I was 18. I really knew, I went, this is what I wanna do. Sat between Mom and Daddy all the way to the Novicia to New Orleans and we said the rosary together. I cried all the way. In those days, it was really, really strict.
I was never going to be in my family home again. Got to the novitiate, wiped my tears, walked in and said, I can't think about mom and daddy right now. I just got to get into my new life. It was a life of prayer. It was a life of study and to learn how to be a good nun. Long time to get the nun's walk, because I kind of had a freewheeling way of walking, swinging my arms around and all.
Jake Heggie: You know, sometimes people have this idea of a nun as this very sort of solemn, quiet, devout, prayerful. And she is the opposite of that. She is outspoken. She is on fire with purpose and energy. And that allowed me, musically, to explore a much wider range.
Thomas Housing Projects and lived among African American people in the city. And I saw the other America. All the rules were different. I saw the suffering of what it meant not to have health care and to have to go sit with a sick child in the charity hospital. At two o'clock in the morning until some tired little intern's gonna see a sick child, I saw what was happening with the young men being picked up by the police.
Louisiana had the highest incarceration rate in the whole nation, and how race played a part. I'm learning all those systems. I could see all this that was happening, and it's while I was in that environment and working at a place called Hope House. That one day I got an invitation, Hey, Sister Helen, you want to be a pen pal to somebody on death row?
And suddenly we are In the woods at night and two young people run on stage. They've been skinny dipping and they are about to make love. They're totally vulnerable, sort of like in the Garden of Eden almost, and that's when these two brothers Come on stage and rape the girl and murder both. And we see Joseph Desrochers commit this heinous crime.
Jake Heggie: Sister Helen is teaching this hymn to all the children that come to Hope House where she works. We see the very worst of humankind and human nature, and then immediately we're surrounded by youth and optimism and joy with the children.
Joyce DiDonato: But Sister Helen's quite distracted, and it comes to find out that The man she's been writing with, the rapist and murderer, Joseph Desrochers, has asked her to come visit him at Angola.
There's something very different to writing a weekly letter and actually going to Angola and meeting him face to face. Because she knows, in a way, once you step through. Those gates and you start to commit to a friendship. There's responsibility there.
Joyce DiDonato: So this is where the tipping point starts in her life, where the idea of being a good and faithful servant, a good nun, a good teacher, a good human being. It's time to put her money where her mouth is, really, and she's now going to be faith.
Jake Heggie: She's determined to go, and we transition to the next scene, which is the drive to Angola, which is where Sister Helen is now on her own in the car. and faced with the journey ahead.
Sister Helen Prejean: Well, it was a long ride. It's two and a half hours to Angola, the prison from New Orleans, and it's a Louisiana ride. You know, fields, there's a lot of farmers, there are cows along the way, there are trees, there are swamps. After you go through Baton Rouge, then you're really moving out into the rural part of Louisiana.
Jake Heggie: I tried to write music for the car ride that reflects Sister Helen not knowing what to expect. At first there's a lightness to the score because she's in the car, it's moving, I'm trying to capture that forward momentum and motion, which she also feels inside.
Joyce DiDonato: And what we hear in the orchestra, this da da da da da da da da da da da da, part of it is the sense of the car, the journey that's going forward. But we also have the sense that from the very beginning, the clock is ticking towards the execution. The clock is ticking towards the inevitable outcome. And so you'll feel this propulsion and this drive in the orchestra underneath as she gets in her car and starts making this long journey from her home to Angola.
So she recognizes sort of the subversive Jesus, not one that's tucked away and and meant to be just reverenced and worshiped, but one that is flesh and blood and alive and is doing work on earth. And what starts to emerge is that we really have a passionate woman on our hands. It's somebody who is probably getting in over their head, but going in and not looking back because she feels called to do this.
Sister Helen Prejean: I don't know what to expect, except there's this man, and I've said I'm gonna be a spiritual advisor, and one part of me was just really glad to be awake about some of these really significant things. And to be open, to really be open, I'm not going to go and wag my finger at him and preach at him. I really just want to accompany him.
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