A Whale of a Tale

For the opening of the 1966-1967 season, Rudolf Bing and The Metropolitan Opera commissioned Samuel Barber to write a new piece to celebrate the first season of the opera company in the new house (the house at Lincoln Center we know and love). During his search for a subject, Barber briefly considered but rejected the classic novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, saying supposedly that, "an opera that had a lot of whales and water, but no soprano, had a doubtful future."*

Apparently, composer Jake Heggie disagrees.

In May of this year, Heggie's new opera, "Moby-Dick", will premiere at the Dallas opera, starring Ben Heppner as Captain Ahab. Not unlike Anthony and Cleopatra, this production will be the first premiere of a new work to be produced in the Dallas Opera's new location, the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts. A lot of energy and faith is being put into this production, and Dallas Opera has teamed up with San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, Calgary Opera, and the State Opera of South Australia to co-produce the work. The librettist is Gene Scheer, with whom Jake Heggie has worked on his past few theatrical compositions, including Three Decembers and To Hell and Back, and the production team will also feature Leonard Foglia (director) and Patrick Summers (conductor), both of whom worked with Heggie on his recent compositions: Three Decembers, The End of the Affair, and Dead Man Walking.

So how has Heggie dealt with the problems Barber foresaw in setting the work?

Well, for one, like Anthony and Cleopatra, Scheer and Heggie will try to honor the intentions of the author and the poetry of Melville's language as much as possible** , without being chained to it. Most notably, they have culled some of Ahab's speeches directly from the book. Additionally, Heggie and Scheer have chosen to switch the original beginning and ending of the book, in order to make a more effective story line for the new work, so that the opera now ends with the famous line, "Call me Ishmael". Secondly, there will be a soprano in the work, although she will be playing a pants role (Talise Trevigna will bring the role of the young boy Pip to life). As far as the whales and water are concerned, Heggie has said that they are the problems of the director and designer** but that he feels that the technical capabilities of the new space will allow for an effective staging of the work. One can only hope that this remarkable project will run more smoothly than the premiere of Anthony and Cleopatra.


For more information on the premiere:

• See the short interview with Jake Heggie about the new work and several interview sound clips here: **Audio Files: A Conversation with Moby-Dick Composer Jake Heggie
• or see the Dallas Opera site here

*Heyman, “A New Opera House,” Samuel Barber: The Composer and his Music, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 430.