This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
On the face of it, Nuns would hardly seem the most promising territory for opera, what with all that praying and being demure and quietly cleaning stuff up, rather than having massive attention-seeking meltdowns and loads of sex (with rare Black Narcissus-style exceptions, obvs). As with Maria in The Sound of Music, it would seem that music theatre begins where nuns end.
And yet they infest European opera from the start, and there’s scarcely a 19th century romantic heroine who isn’t shovelled off to a convent at some point, usually seconds before her libido violently reasserts itself or she kicks the bucket through some unforeseen (albeit predictable) encounter with poison or a dagger.
Naturally, the Russians approach things differently: opera’s most alarming sister is Marfa in Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina of 1880, a gothy nympho gloombag who takes a breather from her energetic shag-in with Andrei to encourage her co-schismatics to turn themselves into a human bonfire in sturdy nativist protest against Peter the Great’s degenerate, Western, crypto-Nazi anti-beard drive.
Nuns finally hit paydirt in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (1956) as they line up for the guillotine, singing Salve Regina in attractive (if ever-thinning) harmonies.
This whole vexed nun carry-on stems from opera’s specifically European relationship with God — the dawning realisation (developed through centuries of heaping extravagant thanks ’n’ praise on the old lad for “sparing” us the horrors of plague, war, famine, etc.) that in practical terms He had been only fairly helpful.
So, although opera characters are forever going through the standard routines of grovelling around on their knees and doing the bead thing, it’s all pretty performative, and if they don’t already know not to expect too much help from the sky, they’re about to find out.
The resulting humanism and self-reliance is all very butch and grown-up, of course, but, as mentioned, it’s also all dead sophistiqué and Euro, and by no means the way it works over in America; there — somehow ignoring the minor blips of founding genocide, mass enslavement, civil war and Detroit — they remain on terrific terms with the big guy, perfectly sure that He is very much part of the gang.
This stark difference of attitude explains, in a roundabout way, why the upcoming production of Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie — premiered in 2000 and easily the most successful opera of the 21st century — has taken so long to get here, only now receiving its professional staged debut at ENO from November 1st.
You may remember the 1995 film with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn: nun and convicted rapist/killer chumming up in the days before his execution. Heggie’s opera has had an astonishing 70 productions since 2000 (nearly all in the States) and is the poster-kid for a surprising phenomenon: contemporary opera, so heartily disliked, is alive and thriving in the US.
What can be going on? Americans have always got off on the exact notion of opera that Europe has become so mortified about — its frou-frou olde-worlde camp, all wigs and massive dresses, a screaming drag show — and now here they are churning operas out with all that subtracted and everyone mooching about in jeans.
Given that opera people hate anything new, and everyone else hates opera, who the hell is buying tickets to all this?
Well, clearly, plenty are. In part this follows from the cunning policy of basing operas on familiar things: Heggie’s own Moby Dick and It’s a Wonderful Life, Mark Adamo’s Little Women: you’ve seen the film, you’re half-way to tolerating the opera. But what about the other half?
Heggie’s answer in Dead Man Walking — and it applies pretty generally — is an interesting one, based on the mostly unspoken truth that operatic music doesn’t actually have to be much good.
Heggie’s music is certainly well-constructed, dynamic, various, dramatic, even compelling — and utterly unmemorable, simply the motor and background for some pretty plush vocal writing that has the shape of Puccini meeting a power ballad sung by Celine (though again, you won’t be whistling the tunes).
And it helps immeasurably that Sister Helen has usually been sung by superstars like Susan Graham and Joyce DiDonato, whose vocal charisma almost persuades you. In London we have the no less fabulous Christine Rice, along with Michael Mayes as the killer Joe De Rocher.
This undoubtedly generates dramatic/musical power, though the more sensitive might also want to keep a sick-bucket handy to deal with intermittent crowds of cute black moppets and bravely-smiling nuns (and ENO has a content warning for “religious themes”, knock me down).
It knows exactly what it’s doing, and whacks up the voltage on the emotional stress of watching this murderer being strong-armed to salvation by the conflicted but spiritually supercharged nun. (Joe has to go, of course — imagine the let-down of a Macheath-style last-minute reprieve.)
And yet … out of the feast of marvellous American musical idioms, did these composers really have to go with this rather pallid beast? The passion, anguish and thrills it expresses and kindles are 60-watt, decorous, middle-class — basically the exact opposite of opera’s fetishistic excess.
This stuff is in danger of making opera accessible, for God’s sake — and then where will we be?
