Composer Jeanine Tesori: ‘I want to write about subjects missing in the operatic canon’

“America tends to be a very ahistorical place,” says composer Jeanine Tesori. “We move on quickly and often, as if our history didn’t happen, or at least only select bits and pieces of it that get celebrated while the rest recedes.”

It might seem that opera would be the last of the art forms to get involved in re-examining political issues, but American composers have long been shaking up what opera should be about. It is more than a generation since John Adams wrote Nixon in China, a game-changing operatic retelling of the US president’s meeting with Mao Zedong, which spawned a succession of biographical operas on modern figures, from Steve Jobs of Apple to Malcolm X, San Francisco politician Harvey Milk to boxer Emile Griffith.

Now contemporary works are the order of the day in American opera houses. The best of them are being exported to Europe and the latest to arrive is Blue by Jeanine Tesori. Given its premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival in 2019 and much praised in Michigan, Seattle, Pittsburgh and recently Amsterdam, Blue is coming to the UK in a new production by English National Opera.

It tackles the kind of theme that might have seemed unlikely even 10 years ago. The story, set in Harlem, tells of an African-American boy’s divided loyalties as he grows up with a police officer father but protests as an activist himself, and the father’s own conflicts after the son is shot and killed by the police.

It is worth keeping in mind that Blue dates from before the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed. Tesori and her librettist, Tazewell Thompson, were dealing with an issue that already had a long history in the US but were prescient about where a flashpoint in politics was about to occur.

“At this stage in my career I want to write about subjects that I feel are missing in the operatic canon,” says Tesori, who was born in New York state, when we speak over Zoom. “There is a responsibility on me as a white woman with a diverse community of friends to be curious about what is happening around me and to use whatever skills I have in the service of it. I have worked hard for the past 40 years to be a better musician and now I want to put that to work by shining a light on stories that are worth seven or eight years of my time and the money of people to come and see them.”

Part of the reason for Blue’s success is that the story is simple — good for opera — but works on many levels. The focus is the conundrum of how black police officers see the “thin blue line”, finding themselves part of the system and absolutely not part of it, but the opera also probes deeply into family relationships and what Tesori calls “the possibility of a future denied”.

It is not about blame or fault, but what has been decided in our story before we start

“Looking at the story of a young black male, I was interested to see to what degree his fate has been decided already, how much free will there is for him inside the system. It is the same for a woman who works in music when she steps up to the conductor’s podium, or in sport when she walks on to the playing field . . . It is not about blame or fault, but what has been decided in our story before we start.”

As well as a willingness to tackle contemporary issues, American opera composers have been open-minded about the musical world around them. George Gershwin came from Tin Pan Alley to write Porgy and Bess. Leonard Bernstein juggled opera and Broadway with equal panache. A work such as Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd stands with one foot in each camp.

True to that tradition, Tesori has drawn on musical roots that are many and varied. Thanks to an early mentor, she was producing recordings in Nashville at a young age, giving her the skills she needed as vocal producer for Steven Spielberg’s recent film of West Side Story. Her award-winning work in musicals includes stage versions of Thoroughly Modern Millie, Shrek the Musical and most notably Caroline, or Change with Tony Kushner, a big success when revived recently in London and New York.

Tesori is certainly an eclectic composer. Nobody familiar with her most popular musicals is likely to recognise the same hand at work in Blue, where the music is cast in the modernist but approachable style familiar from some other 21st-century American operas. She says musical theatre has taught her about “where music meets narrative”, how to follow a character in the music, where songs or arias should fall and why. Storytelling is “paramount”.

“My grandfather was a composer who grew up in Sicily, came to the US but ended up working in a gas station and died at a young age,” she says. “I have felt that ancestral pull since I was young and I want to honour what he wasn’t allowed to do. In the last scene of Blue [a flashback that shows the son looking forward to his artistic studies], we wanted to leave people with the possibility of something you know will not happen rather than the tragedy. This is the future the son has been denied. I think that is something that can be inherited, so I am in that line myself as a granddaughter and a composer. It was the family business.”

Tesori is currently working 12-hour days orchestrating her next opera, Grounded. As part of its big push into contemporary work, the Metropolitan Opera in New York has commissioned two female composers for the first time in its history, Tesori and Missy Mazzoli, who is writing an opera based on George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

The source of Tesori’s opera is a one-woman play by George Brant. The story focuses on an ace fighter pilot whose career is grounded by an unexpected pregnancy. Reassigned to operate military drones from a trailer outside Las Vegas, she hunts terrorists by day and returns to her family at night.

The opera will place this single female character centre stage with only a male chorus for support. “When George was developing the libretto, I thought this is a play about one woman and 50 men,” says Tesori. “That is how I have felt in music most of my life, though not so much now . . . we have reached a point now where more women are calling the shots. The table has got bigger to meet the talent that was always waiting. It has taken a while, but that is how change happens.”

English National Opera’s production of ‘Blue’ opens at the London Coliseum on April 20, eno.org

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