The hardest part of creating an opera is working out what sound world it lives in. i try to terrify myself! jake heggie

THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW

‘In my teens, I wrote a lot of songs for Barbra Streisand,’ says composer Jake Heggie with a smile. ‘This was the 1970s and she was a superstar. She never saw any of them but she was the voice that blew me away – voices have always been my inspiration.’ If Heggie wrote a song for Streisand today, it’s hard to imagine she wouldn’t leap at the chance to sing it. Heggie is now a superstar in his own right. The Wall Street Journal has declared him ‘arguably the most popular 21st-century opera and art song composer’ and he has achieved breathtaking success with his richly scored, emotionally charged vocal works for stage and concert hall.

This year has brought some especially glittering engagements: a new production of Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (2000) starring Joyce DiDonato and Ryan McKinny opened the Met’s new season; a double-bill of one-act operas commissioned by the groundbreaking Music of Remembrance toured the US this summer to mark the organisation’s 25th anniversary; and Heggie’s newest opera, Intelligence, receives its world premiere at Houston Grand Opera this autumn, starring Jamie Barton and Janai Brugger as Civil War spies.

For all his accolades, Heggie is still astonished at the shape his career has taken. Talking from his home in San Francisco, he remarks how ‘it still feels very miraculous, all of it’. Born in West Palm Beach, he grew up with ‘music all around when I was a kid. My father, who was a medical doctor, was an amateur jazz saxophonist who played for fun, and the record player always had a big stack of records by it.’ The family listened to big band vocalists – Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra – alongside musical theatre like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. When Heggie started learning the piano ‘at age six or seven, you couldn’t get me away from it. Music meant storytelling, it meant adventure – it meant possibility.’

Heggie started composing more seriously at 11 ‘and from then it was central to my life. I just never put down the pencil.’ His early works were ‘music-theatre type songs, before I was introduced to classical music in a more profound way’. He spent time studying in Paris, then UCLA and ‘around this time saw Sweeney Todd and Peter Grimes back-to-back. Wow. I mean, the top of my head blew up because I didn’t know this was possible in the current day for the lyric stage.’

But just as Heggie was hitting his stride as a pianist and composer in his twenties, ‘I developed what’s c