Playbill

How the Late Terrence McNally Inspired Composer Jake Heggie to Write a Moby-Dick Opera
March 2024

Following his Met Opera debut last season with Dead Man Walking, composer Jake Heggie returns this month for the company premiere of Moby-Dick, his grand adaptation of Herman Melville’s heaven-storming classic (now running through March 29). With a libretto by Gene Scheer and an enveloping staging by Leonard Foglia, Moby-Dick welcomes audiences aboard the Pequod to experience literature’s immortal search for the white whale—and for answers to life’s deepest question.

After a harrowing night on the Pequod, as the whaleship rolled wildly in a biblical tempest and the eerie glow of St. Elmo’s fire flickered from the mainmast, Captain Ahab finally spots the white whale. Shimmering strings give way to warlike drums and brass as Ahab assembles the crew for battle, while his first mate begs him one last time to call off the ill-fated pursuit. Uniting as one before their encounter with the leviathan, the galvanized whalemen belt out their final refrain—“His blood will end our crusade!”—with rousing outbursts from the orchestra echoing their rallying cry.

This penultimate sequence from Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick is just one example of the high drama and musical thrill that make the work one of the defining operas of the 21st century, a reputation formed immediately upon its enormously acclaimed maiden voyage at the Dallas Opera in 2010 and burnished by further successes at major houses across the country, including in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago. Now, the opera drops anchor at the Met, arriving in Leonard Foglia’s celebrated production and featuring an all-star cast with Maestro Karen Kamensek on the podium.

The idea to adapt Melville’s novel into an opera originated with the late playwright Terrence McNally, with whom Heggie had worked on previous projects, including his first opera, Dead Man Walking. Though at first intimidated by the scope of an operatic take on Moby-Dick, Heggie found tremendous power in how the novel moves between the individual and the collective. “It’s an intimate story where there’s a very clear problem. You’re out on the ocean. There’s no place to turn,” he explains. “You’re surrounded by God knows what— underneath you and above you and within the heart of the person next to you.”