The genesis of 'The Righteous,' a Santa Fe Opera world premiere

Composer Gregory Spears, librettist Tracy K. Smith, and stage director Kevin Newbury are telling a story of their adolescence — they’re all in their late 40s or early 50s — and their collaboration here builds on the success of their first joint creation, Castor and Patience, which premiered at the Cincinnati Opera in July 2022.

It’s an incredibly distinguished trio, to say next to the least. Spears has a highly individual compositional voice that melds contemporary tonal minimalism with aspects of Renaissance and Baroque music. He’s particularly drawn to the operatic medium — The Righteous will be his eighth opera — and has received accolades for the results.

“The agonies and pleasures of Castor and Patience ... are like those of a less densely orchestrated Puccini,” Zachary Woolfe said in The New York Times.

Smith is a former U.S. poet laureate who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for Life on Mars, which the prize committee called a “collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain.” She’s also a professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University.

Newbury has more than 100 stage productions to his credit, including three that have been nationally broadcast on PBS. He made his Santa Fe debut with Falstaff in 2008, followed by Life is a Dream in 2010 and Oscar in 2013. Newbury’s most recent production here, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, had a widely acclaimed world premiere in 2017.

The plot of The Righteous is Biblical in origin, based loosely on the Old Testament story of David (see sidebar, “A testament to character”). Just as a sense of place is critical to Castor and Patience (the American South, where an African American family grapples with whether to sell a long-held piece of land), so it is to The Righteous, which takes place in an American Southwest state that’s home to megachurches and oil barons.

At first glance the opera’s characters seem archetypes — the preacher, the oil man, the military wife, the college student-daughter — whom we might expect to behave in stereotypical ways. (We learn only one last name from the text’s 28 roles.)

However, Spears and Smith aren’t interested in using them as avatars. “Often we think of opera as just being about the big emotions, like love and anger,” Spears says. “I’m exactly the opposite. I think opera is really great at evoking and making confusion and ambivalence and mixed emotions feel very real and powerful.”

Nor is this an opéra a clef, with thinly disguised real-life figures from the era. Three characters are at the heart of the story — David, a charismatic preacher who builds up a megachurch and then turns politician; his first wife, Michele; and his second wife, Sheila, a military spouse with whom he begins an adulterous relationship at the end of the opera’s first act — and they are all fictional.

Spears sees a strong connection between the themes of ambivalence and mixed emotions and the poetic form Smith is using for the many arias in The Righteous, which is a villanelle. “The confusion is poured into this mold of the villanelle, which is about memory and recurrence, circling back to something that’s a little bit different,” Spears says. “She has a beautiful way of folding together naturalism and repetition, in arias that fold very neatly into their situations.”

“For a couple of centuries, librettos were written by poets, not prose authors,” Smith points out. “So this is really back to its original roots in that sense.”

The Righteous is her third libretto, although the first, for a piece about New York’s “Master Builder” Robert Moses and his adversary Jane Jacobs, had much of its shape at the point she joined the project.

Why get involved with something that’s so time consuming and as complicated as opera, especially when compared to poetry? “I was interested in the questions that I could ask with a composer and the performers,” she says, “interested in bringing dialogue into my process. And the sense of being out of my depth is also important for me as an artist.”

Most opera commissions begin with the composer and then proceed to add the librettist, with the stage director’s involvement coming later in the process. Not so with The Righteous, which Smith says is all for the better. “It was wonderful to have Kevin be part of the initial DNA of this project,” Smith says. “Greg and I greatly respect him. He brings a lot of imagination and conscience to everything that he does.”

This is Newbury’s fifth collaboration with Spears, whom he describes as “one of the most emotional composers that I’ve ever worked with. His music is so full of emotion, and it’s also character driven in the way he can get inside the head of each of them in such a profound way.”

He’s enthusiastic about the aria-driven nature of the piece (“I think there are eight or nine, and they’re beautiful gateways into the psychology of the characters.”) and about the care with which Spears approaches the non-vocalized sections.

Some begin their existence to accompany set changes — each act of The Righteous has several different locations — but Spears and Newbury work together to make sure they have an important dramatic function as well.

“One of the things I love about Greg is that I can ask him for more music in certain places,” the director says. “We talk a lot about the story we’re trying to tell at each moment and whether it could be told in a musical interlude or transition or repetition.”

Part of what the creators discovered during the workshops for the opera were the places where music had to be added to let the story breathe. Spears says the workshops were “incredibly helpful,” especially since the story isn’t derived from an existing play, novel, or film. They took place over a period of two years and led to many conversations among the creators.

“I really believe that an opera is something you meet along the way,” the composer says, “rather than conceive of and then execute. You have to follow the piece as it develops.”

This organic process is also seen in the parallel paths Spears and Smith follow long before the piece reaches the workshop phase. He begins crafting musical ideas and themes at the same time she is crafting ideas and themes in text. “He’s bringing his vocabulary into the space, and I’m doing that in my way too,” Smith says. “My work then enters into a conversation with all these pieces he’s been building.”

The Righteous benefited from three different types of workshop during its gestation. The first was a libretto workshop very early in the process, which was followed later by two vocal workshops with a sing-through of the score as it stood at the time. The most unusual workshop was for the orchestration, in which student performers from the Cincinnati College of Music, one of the country’s leading training programs, played through the full score. This is a rarity for most new operas under development.

The cast, which is led by baritone Michael Mayes as David, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano as Michele, and soprano Elena Villalón as Sheila, will have some unusual colleagues onstage.

Don’t be surprised if you see such 1980s icons as Ronald Reagan, Michael Jordan, and Ayatollah Khomeini joining in the action, via several television sets that are part of the production design. “My family watched Tom Brokaw’s newscast every night,” Newbury says, “and the images that I saw affected me so deeply as a kid that I thought it would be interesting to make them central to the narrative.”

He cites the character Jonathan as one example. “He’s a closeted gay man. When he sees and hears news of the AIDS crisis on TV, does he leave the room? Does he turn it off? I haven’t seen media used in this diegetic way before, where it can affect their action onstage,” Newbury says. “There’s an intimacy and an immediacy to approaching it this way. And most of the audience will recognize these images, especially those of us that lived through the ’80s.”

While Spears has written concert music for large orchestras and for large choral groups, his previous operas were scored for smaller forces. Castor and Patience calls for an orchestra of 35; Fellow Travelers, his most frequently performed opera, about a gay relationship between two State Department employees during the “lavender scare” of the 1950s, calls for 22.

The Righteous will have an orchestra of close to 60, plus a large chorus of opera apprentices, and the 17-member cast. “It’s so exciting,” the composer says. “This piece has to do with large forces that exist outside of us, so having a big orchestra and being able to evoke the community through the chorus will reinforce it as an epic tale that spans 11 years.”

Spears also says he’s not worried that he’ll go overboard with the orchestra, which would threaten the orchestral clarity that many critics have praised. He’s not planning to use all of them all the time, but he is looking forward to having a wider dynamic range to call on. “You’ll have the intimacy of accompanying a singer,” he says, “and afterwards the cataclysmic roar of the universe, which you just can’t get with 17 players.”

Another unique aspect of The Righteous, which becomes apparent only as the story progresses, is its presentation of multiple types of religious faith, something Smith says religious communities don’t always want to talk about.

“We go to these spaces, we’re in a sanctuary, and we sit, and we listen,” she says. “But your imagination is also carrying you down another path because you can do both at the same time, and I like being able to shed light on those alternate paths that are also present.”

When asked to expand on the themes of righteousness, self-righteousness, and humility that are the bedrock of the opera, Newbury says, “I’m really drawn to the idea of what does it mean to be humble, to live a life of humility, and grace, and kindness? How do these characters hold onto those qualities or lose their way in the course of the piece? Who are you to a stranger in a moment of need, when no one else is watching?

“The structure of the piece is so beautiful. It starts out as David’s story, and then it becomes much more about Sheila and Michele. I don’t want to give too much away, but the final image is a moment of grace and humility and what it means to be willing to change the things you think you believe in.” ◀