American composer Jake Heggie is best known for Dead Man Walking (2000), the most widely performed new opera of the last 26 years, with a libretto by Terrence McNally, and his critically acclaimed operas Moby-Dick (2010), Three Decembers (2008), and It’s a Wonderful Life (2016), all with libretti by Gene Scheer. In addition to 11 full-length operas and numerous one-acts, Heggie has composed more than 300 art songs, as well as concerti, chamber music, choral, and orchestral works. His compositions have been performed on five continents, and he regularly collaborates with some of the world’s most beloved artists. The world premiere of Heggie’s opera Intelligence (2023) won Best Opera Recording at the 2026 Grammy® Awards.

Heggie opens the 26/27 season with The Judgment of Paris, his most recent collaboration with longtime librettist Gene Scheer. Inspired by the legendary 1976 blind tasting that transformed the world of wine, the opera premieres in both America and France – as part of Festival Napa Valley’s 20th anniversary season and at Opéra Royal’s Château de Versailles. The Olivier Award-winning production of Dead Man Walking from English National Opera travels to Opera North, while a new production is mounted at the Seagle Festival. Elsewhere, two new productions of Before It All Goes Dark, Heggie’s opera about Nazi-looted art, open at Theater Koblenz and Piedmont Opera, where it will be presented in a double-bill with Another Sunrise during the company’s 50th anniversary season. The monodrama Earth 2.0, written for countertenor Key’mon Murrah, opens Aspen Summer Music Festival’s season, before traveling to the Bellingham Festival of Music. Additionally, Heggie works appear at Tulsa Opera, Staunton Music Festival, Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, and Zephyr Symphony.

Often blurring the storytelling lines between art song and opera, Heggie consistently champions women in his work. In collaboration with Margaret Atwood, Songs for Murdered Sisters was created in response to the global epidemic of gender-based violence, premiered by baritone Joshua Hopkins, and was nominated for Classical Album of the Year at the Juno Awards. Other recent commissions include Crossing Borders, commissioned by the George and Nora London Foundation, and the monodrama Earth 2.0, written with librettist Anita Amirrezvani, and co-commissioned by Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Summer Music Festival, and Grand Rapids Symphony.

Heggie delights in uncovering hidden stories, and his artistic relationship with Music of Remembrance has brought lesser-known perspectives from the Holocaust, including those of queer people and political dissidents, to the stage in MOR-commissioned works like Before It All Goes Dark (2024), recently released on Warner Classics, Another Sunrise (2012) and For A Look or a Touch (2008), as well as in Intonations: Songs from the Violins of Hope (2020), commissioned by Music at Kohl Mansion.

Fresh off an acclaimed season of 25th anniversary celebrations and a Metropolitan Opera house premiere, Dead Man Walking has been lauded by the Chicago Tribune as “the most celebrated American opera of the century.” Since its San Francisco Opera premiere in 2000, the work has received more than 80 international productions for enthusiastic audiences all over the United States and at major theaters in Dresden, Vienna, London, Madrid, Copenhagen, Sydney, Montréal, Calgary, Dublin, and Cape Town. Likewise, Three Decembers has received over 40 international productions. Moby-Dick was telecast in Great Performances’ 40th Season, subsequently released on DVD, and served as the subject of the book A Grand Opera for the 21st Century and was featured on the Metropolitan Opera’s 2024-25 Season.

Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “arguably the world’s most popular 21st-century opera and art song composer,” Heggie is a long-time mentor of young composers, singers, and pianists. Named Musical America’s 2025 Composer of the Year, Heggie also received the San Francisco Opera Medal and was recently inducted into the OPERA America Hall of Fame. His teachers have included Ernst Bacon, with whom he studied composition as a teenager, as well as pianist Johana Harris and composers Roger Bourland, Paul DesMarais, and David Raksin at UCLA. Prior to composing Dead Man Walking, he was mentored by his friend, the late Carlisle Floyd. He continues this legacy with the next generation of composers and performers as the Diane B. Wilsey Distinguished Professor of Composition at San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Heggie continues to write all his work by hand, believing that a visceral, physical connection to the score is an essential part of composition. Since 1993, he has made his home in San Francisco, where he lives with his husband, Curt Branom.

Banner image by James Niebuhr