“I’ve always seen all those nuances and everything that’s written on the page and I’ve tried to do them as best I could. But then in French what’s amazing is that it just works,” he said during a recent Zoom call. “It makes more sense. In Italian you had to make sense of it and in French it already makes sense. It makes it easier to sing, but it also makes it easier to understand, not just for us, for the audience. Things are clearer. The text is clear. The intentions are clearer.”

Verdi’s opera tells the story of Don Carlos of Spain (Matthew Polenzani) and Élisabeth de Valois (Sonya Yoncheva) who are betrothed to one another. They have never met. Don Carlos sneaks away to meet this unknown woman. They fall in love. However, their happiness is quickly ruined when Carlo’s father, Philippe II (Eric Owens), announces that he’s in love with her and she is to be his bride.

Even though she is now his stepmother, Don Carlos tries multiple times to woo Élisabeth away from his father.

With the Spanish Inquisition ongoing, the affairs of all three and the appearance of a mysterious monk lead to murder plots, revenge, unrequited love and thievery.

Verdi’s opera debuted in 1867 in Paris in French. Three months later it was performed in London in Italian. That version is the one most commonly performed.

This Saturday’s performance is the last opportunity for audiences to see Dupuis as Don Carlos’ best friend, but it’s also the performance that is being made available around the world as part of Met Opera Live in HD series.

Don Carlos is Verdi’s longest opera, but Dupuis finds much to like in these lengthy works even though they might be a bit convoluted.

“I think that’s a little point, isn’t it? Let’s make this as long as complicated as we can,” he says rhetorically. “You have to understand it from going back in time when they were writing them. These people had nothing like we do to to change their minds and just turn on a machine in their living room. So when they finally got the time to dress up and go to the opera it was a six hour long business. Every opera needed to have a minimum of five acts and a ballet. The only problem when Verdi wrote it was that the opera was too long. The people would have to catch the last train. So you have to shorten it enough so that people had time to go and catch the last train. But he had written even longer than what we’re doing.”

Dupuis counts himself amongst those who are usually most comfortable when opera hues primarily to the way fans and audiences usually see them. But with Don Carlos he thinks there is a great argument for performing Verdi’s work in the original French language.

“We like things the way we know them,” he says. “It is assembled this way, conducted this way, stage like that. And so it’s really hard for anyone to come up with something new. What’s interesting is that in this case we’re not changing what Verdi wrote. We’re using what Verdi wrote. What the French triggers is perhaps the sense that you’re hearing it for the first time. It allows you to re-hear it for the first time to possibly re-experience that first-time experience of the initial moment you actually heard this. But I know it’s not easy for everybody to open up their mindset to that.”

To make his point he brings up an example of his first aria in the opera which he describes as being a bit on the boring side…until it is sung in French.

“My first aria can be very boring. It might still be, I don’t know, but it’s two verses of the same music. The entire goal of this aria is to convince the Queen to have a meeting with Don Carlos. That’s all I’m doing. But I never understood how every word is carefully chosen so that it would make sense for the Queen to accept this invitation. So it’s very interesting how I get to play with those words so much better in the French. Even though I do speak Italian, when I sing the Italian it’s an inversion of the lines. It’s so intricate to be fitting the music that I feel like I’m losing this sense that the whole time my character is talking on a second degree. That’s lost in the translation because they had to make every word fit the the musical line. Instead of fitting the music on the words it did the opposite and it didn’t allow them to have these layers of understanding.”

One of the best known arias in Don Carlo is Dieu, tu semas dans no ames. To be performing an opera that features an aria about devotion to liberty at a time when the world is crisis adds additional meaning to Don Carlo for Dupuis.

“Every word that I say just made more sense. It already made sense in a generic context of war. But if you think of my character as this guy who is following the army. He goes to Flanders and he sees what the king and most importantly, the church, the Inquisition, he sees what they’re doing to those people because they’re not of the same religious belief. They’re Protestants and so the only response that they have is we kill everyone that doesn’t think like of us. And boom! Immediately we’re like, wait, is that what Putin was saying? This country right next to us they don’t think like me. Therefore, I must crush them like this. It seemed to me that that’s exactly what was happening.”

A different language and a new awareness are just two factors that allow Dupuis to try to achieve perfection in this production and in his art. Verdi said, “I have striven for perfection, it has always eluded me, but I surely had an obligation to make one more try.” Dupuis completely agrees with the composer.

“I don’t think perfection is achievable, but I think it’s a great goal. I think the people that have obsessed a bit too much about it definitely either changed careers or drowned in their careers. I think one of the hardest things to do is to strive for perfection and then have the humility to recognize that you did your best.”

One of Dupuis’ best attempts at that was in Jake Heggie‘s opera Dead Man Walking in Montreal.

“It was by far the most successful show I’ve ever been in opera. Not one review, not one person had anything bad to say about it. But it wasn’t perfect and I know it wasn’t. What was great about it though is that there was emotion. People lived something. They experienced something. Did we go to the theater for a reason? Do we live something that made us interested in going back? I think that’s what we should strive for, but I don’t think perfection is attainable. And I think that’s OK.”

There is so much more to my conversation with Etienne Dupuis. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel here.

Main photo: Etienne Dupuis (Photo by Dario Acosta/Courtesy of the artist)

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From that experience Gordin has developed a great relationship with Heggie. When he was looking for a unique way of re-launching programming at Festival Opera, he turned to Heggie’s work.

“We have this tradition of producing the sort of standard repertoire and we’ve had a commitment to developing some new works and presenting good works of American composers. We’ve had Jake’s work performed before. So he’s certainly not new to our audience and not new to the Bay Area.”

On Friday and Sunday, Festival Opera will present A Jake Heggie Triptych that will feature three of the composer’s works: At the Statue of Venus, Camille Claudel: Into the Fire and For a Look or a Touch.

Last month I spoke with Gordin about Heggie, the character he’ll be singing in For a Look or a Touch and the battles he’s faced in his life. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

If you go to Jake Heggie’s website there are ten pages of compositions he’s written – most of which the world doesn’t know. So when you have such a broad menu of pieces from which you can choose, how and why did you choose these three?

I heard For a Look or a Touch initially when the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus produced it. It must have been seven or so years ago. And it was moving. I saw that there were other versions of it that had been developed. So I was intrigued.

I didn’t do any more than that until Jake reached out to me to cover the role of Manfred in it. Into the Fire had been staged by a dear friend, Diana Tash, who’s actually doing it in our production. And I thought, why don’t we give that a full theatrical production with our resources. So there was that piece of it. And then I was familiar with At the Statue of Venus from seeing it on YouTube. And so I thought, what’s the heartbeat of these three pieces and it boils down to love. So they are thematically joined by this human desire for love, acceptance and being seen. That’s how they came be this triptych.

When I read the libretto for For a Look or a Touch, I was reminded of a scene in Martin Sherman’s play Bent. [Heggie’s work is based on the true story of Gad Beck and Manfred Lewin, two men whose relationship in Germany during World War II lead to acts of bravery and the execution of Lewin at Auschwitz.] How do the arts allow for a more public expression of ideas that aren’t always common seen or shared elsewhere?

I think it’s the job of artists, and certainly in my position here, to create experiences for people to come together and relate to each other. As far as different kinds of relationships, it’s important to portray the humanity in those relationships and give people the opportunity to experience that.

I’m assuming you didn’t grow up seeing work like this on a regular basis. As a gay man, what priority are you putting on telling gay stories and/or supporting other gay artists like Jake?

I think that there is a deeper integrity when the people in the work are sharing a lived experience. From my perspective I have gone through my own journey of being brought up as a Mormon boy and coming out and having all sorts of rejection and having to rebuild community. So there were certainly moments in the story that I could relate to. And I think that’s an important element. I’ve seen lots of white, Christian, very straight people playing roles that are really not in their lived experience and it provides a different lens that provides maybe a bit of detachment that is not interesting to me.

Isn’t the whole idea of being an artist to be able to enter into these worlds and bring them to life? Either through research, their own experience or through some amalgamation of both to create a character? At the risk of being absurd, should serial killers only be able to portray serial killers?

Well that’s a bit of a leap. I think it’s all an individual perspective. Any artist, especially in opera, is going to have an opportunity to play roles and to take part in stories that have nothing to do with them. My point here is that we’re lucky to get the people involved who have had their own experiences to bring to the table in their storytelling.

Gad Beck gave an interview where he said, “Look, if I am a hero, I am a little one. Everyone has to fight sometime in their life.” How and when have you had to fight the most?

I grew up in an extremely abusive home. As a child I was subjected to a lot of physical abuse and just surviving through that I had to fight. I certainly had to fight coming to terms with myself. Now as an impresario, an advocate for the opera company, I fight for my artists and I fight to keep this company alive. It’s definitely requiring us to dig deep.

There’s a line that Manfred sings in For a Look or a Touch [the libretto is by Gene Scheer] when he sings, “I hear a voice that ends all doubt.” Do you have that one voice that ends all doubt for you?

I think the closest thing I have to it is nature. The peace that I see and feel when I’m surrounded by a group of redwood trees or I’m looking out on the ocean and I am just part of something that is so much larger than me that there’s no room for anything else but that awareness.

Does that help you conquer the doubt being in that space?

It certainly helps me dissociate. I certainly suffer from a version of perfectionism and I think it has to be tempered with a kind of being able to put that away so that whatever mastery or whatever you have within you can come out.

And the interesting thing is that truth is often changing.

Absolutely. I think that’s part of growing as a being. Like your awareness and your consciousness hopefully shift and your opinions get revised and your life experience brings to you things that change you. And that’s all important.

For tickets for the Friday performance, please go here. For tickets for the Sunday performance, please go here.

Photo of Zachary Gordin by Bradford Rogne/Courtesy Festival Opera

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“When I went to New York, I was sent there by my boss at the San Francisco Opera,” says Heggie. “He pulled me out of the PR department and sent me to meet with Terrence McNally. It was his wish for the millennium to do something celebratory and bubbly. Terrence wasn’t interested at all in that kind of project. He wanted to do a serious American drama. When he told me Dead Man Walking all the hairs stood up and I knew it was the right idea.”

The opera premiered in 2000 as planned in San Francisco. Subsequent productions have taken place in various parts of the United States and also in Australia, Canada and Europe. The production appearing at the Broad Stage is performed by Opera Paralléle.

“I’ve seen it done a few times with smaller ensembles,” Heggie offers. “This is the most spare I’ve seen and somehow because it’s a smaller theatre and pared down you get the human drama more than ever. It feels more visceral. You feel like you are experiencing the story in real time. It can touch your heart in ways that will surprise.”

Sister Prejean recently said when speaking at the University of Dayton that “opera is just a spiritual invitation to go deeper.” Heggie was touched by her comments. “She didn’t know much about opera until her story was turned into one. She has an enormous appreciation for it now. I hope that opera is an invitation to a deeper reflection on something, to reflect on things you hadn’t taken the time to do before. The death penalty is sort of the abstract. When you sit and really reflect on it and see a human drama unfold in front of you, that’s a very different experience.”

As for his own views on the death penalty, Heggie reveals his own journey. “Before I wrote it, I didn’t reflect on it either. I went into it very deeply. I didn’t want to impose my personal feelings at all. My goal is to empathize with every single character and not judge them and get their story out there the best way possible. We are all capable of enormous good and enormous evil. Does repeating the worst behavior of a criminal and putting that onto them solve anything? Does that make us better? Who has all the answers?”

With Sister Prejean as its central character, Heggie believes Dead Man Walking has the right person to ask all these questions. “If you look at most operas, there’s usually an intimate story at the heart of it. Something where the emotions are so big that it makes sense for characters to sing and sing in a way that fills an opera. She’s so real and genuine and she’s walked the walk. She’s gone places most of us can’t imagine going. She has great empathy and sympathy for both sides. She’s a wise remarkable woman.”

Photo by Steve DiBartolomeo

Originally published at LAMag.com on March 4, 2015.

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