Gene Scheer - Songwriter & Lyricist

Gene is interviewed about the operatic premiere of MOBY-DICK on THINK, a PBS program produced in Dallas, TX. Click "Read More" and you will be directed to the link.

Longtime Kennedy family friend Paul Kirk gives a touching tribute the memorial service for Sen. Edward Kennedy at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. He concludes his remarks (7: 20 min into his speech) by quoting American Anthem. Click: "Read More" to connect to Youtube link.

After writing concertos for some of the starriest soloists in the United States, Philadelphia-based composer Jennifer Higdon will write her first opera, to be premiered in 2013. The commission by the San Francisco Opera was announced there yesterday. "For any composer, an opera is a massive undertaking. I view it as a wonderful way to extend what I do in a much bigger setting," Higdon said in an e-mail. Though her librettist will be Gene Scheer, one of the busiest and most acclaimed writers in that medium, they have yet to settle on an available piece of subject matter. Higdon has been considering novels and other properties as a basis for her opera over the last year, but rights haven't always been available. Since her Concerto for Orchestra was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2002, Higdon has written 50 works for orchestra, chorus and vocal soloists - all of which could come into play in the composition of an opera. She's at work on a choral piece for the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, to be premiered March 29. - David Patrick Stearns

"It was quite an occasion. The work lived up to its outsize ambitions, and Mr. van Zweden led a beautifully prepared and dynamic performance. Mr. Scheer’s text consists largely of the actual words of characters represented — Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and the mothers of two of the slain civil rights workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman — drawn from a variety of sources, including official White House tapes. Weaving in other elements — a postcard from Mr. Goodman to his mother; a poem by Stephen Spender cherished by Mrs. Goodman; an application to work for the Congress on Racial Equality submitted by Michael Schwerner, the third victim — Mr. Scheer created a tapestry of overlapping streams of consciousness, and Mr. Stucky responded with a varied, colorful and mercurial score."JAMES R. OESTREICH Published: September 19, 2008

Dallas Opera's 2009-10 Season to Present Ben Heppner as Ahab in Jake Heggie's Moby-Dick January 14, 2008 Dallas Opera has announced details of its offerings for 2009-10 — its inaugural season in the new Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House — which will include the presentation of a world-premiere opera by Jake Heggie along with performances of Otello, Così fan Tutte, Don Pasquale and Madama Butterfly. The world premiere, Heggie's operatic adaptation of Melville's Moby-Dick will feature a libretto by Gene Scheer and is to star heldentenor Ben Heppner in the role of Captain Ahab. The opera will take the Winspear Opera House's stage in April and May of 2010. Patrick Summers will lead performances of the work, which is a co-commission and co-production with San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera and Calgary Opera. Heggie and Scheer have previously collaborated on a number of projects, including the modern Baroque chamber opera To Hell and Back — which was premiered last year by the San Francisco period-instrument orchestra Philharmonia Baroque and starred Patti LuPone and Isabel Bayrakdarian — and the song cycles For a Look or a Touch, Statuesque and Rise and Fall. Summers, who serves as music director at Houston Grand Opera, has led a number of performances of Heggie's operas, which include The End of the Affair and the acclaimed Dead Man Walking; in February Summers is also scheduled to lead the world premiere of Three Decembers (Last Acts), another collaboration between Heggie and Scheer. "Melville's masterpiece is a microcosm of the world in which we live," said Jonathan Pell, Dallas Opera's director of artistic administration, in a press release issued by the company today. "On our ever-shrinking globe, the tensions and concerns raised by the clash of cultures and the devastating results of blind obsession — as demonstrated in the classic novel — seem especially timely. This new opera will address important issues while keeping us on the edge of our seats with what promises to be a thrilling new theatrical work!"

By Richard S. Ginell, Special to The Times June 3, 2008 With 22 seasons under its belt, Pacific Serenades still makes a major point of trying to freshen the chamber music repertoire with newly commissioned works. Sunday afternoon in Pasadena's Neighborhood Church, the series presented its 90th commission -- the U.S. premiere of "Friendly Persuasions," a song cycle for tenor by Jake Heggie (composer of opera's "Dead Man Walking") built on a great idea. Working in a form crammed to overflowing with sentimental love poetry, Heggie and his lyricist, Gene Scheer, deal instead with snapshots from the life of French composer Francis Poulenc in imaginative ways that ring true. In the first song, Poulenc has a frantic conversation with the pioneering harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who gives him love advice -- go after that young man whom you fancy -- while demanding that he finish his new concerto for her (which turned out to be the Concert Champêtre). In another, Pierre Bernac, the baritone for whom Poulenc wrote many songs, looks on in horror as Poulenc destroys a draft of a new song. Heggie deftly and quickly sketches the multiple musical personalities of Poulenc without imitating him per se: the manic clown in the Landowska and Bernac songs; a nostalgist in the slow waltz that ends the song lamenting a female friend, Raymonde Linossier, who died young; a serious citizen in the martial air of the song featuring French Resistance poet Paul Éluard. Heggie and Scheer also give their tenor a chance to do some vocal acting as if this were an opera, a freedom that the gifted Nicholas Phan exercised to the hilt. And the unusual ensemble for which Heggie wrote this version -- harpsichord, oboe, flute and cello -- relates directly to Poulenc's sound world (the London world premiere in April was for tenor and piano). With the configuration for Heggie's songs as a base, Phan, flutist Mark Carlson, oboist Leslie Reed, cellist David Speltz and harpsichordist Patricia Mabee were elsewhere deployed in various combinations in a clutch of Baroque sonatas, trio sonatas and arias. Phan's fresh lyric tenor found more expressive outlets in three arias from J.S. Bach's Cantatas Nos. 99, 73 and 78. Reed expertly articulated everything she touched in Boismortier's Trio Sonata in E minor, Opus 37, No. 2, and Vivaldi's Sonata in C minor, RV 53. Carlson displayed graceful Baroque chops in Bach's Sonata in B minor, BWV 1030. Speltz brandished a light, leathery, period-performance-influenced tone, and Mabee underpinned everything with solid rhythmic playing. Overall, though, Bach provided more in the way of substance and ingenuity here than his Baroque colleagues.

The Seattle Times - September 14, 2006 > Seattle rates an exclusive sneak peek at Ken Burns' new film about WWII > By Judy Chia Hui Hsu > Seattle Times staff reporter > Jazz. The Civil War. Baseball. Lewis & Clark. > There's a Ken Burns documentary for almost every quintessentially American > topic. > And although his next project captures a global event - World War II - the > award-winning filmmaker has explored the tale through American > perspectives. > He chose four American towns "and just followed their sons into hell," > said Burns, who has been working on "The War" for nearly seven years. The > seven-part, 14-hour series will be broadcast on PBS in September 2007... > > ...Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, Josh Lucas and others bring to life diaries > and newspaper accounts from the period. > The musical track contains sound effects that rang true for select groups > of veterans and those at West Point who've heard it. Wynton Marsalis > composed several original tunes for "The War," and Norah Jones sings > "American Anthem." > "It's almost as good as the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic,' " Burns said of > the Gene Scheer song that he heard on the radio while driving home from > his father's funeral a few years ago. "I burst into tears."... > > ..."The animating question for me in all my work is just the question who are > we - and that same kind of curiosity about what makes us tick, that we > can't possibly know where we're going unless we know where we've been."

There is the family we wish for - and the family we end up with. Last Acts follows the life of an actress and mother named Madeline and her two grown children as they struggle to know and love one another. Commisioned by Houston Grand Opera, this new chamber opera by composer Jake Heggie (Dead Man Walking; The End of the Affair) and lyricist Gene Scheer is based on a play by Terrence McNally and has been created especially for mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade ("Von Stade can do no wrong" - New York Newsday). She will be joined by two artists making their HGO debuts, soprano Kristin Clayton ("a beautiful voice, expressively used" - San Francisco Classical Voice) and baritone Keith Phares ("an utter pleasure" - The New York Times).

Philharmonia Baroque's November programs in Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Berkeley, titled "Metamorphoses," will offer Locatelli's Concerto Grosso, Op. 7, No. 6 "Il pianto d'Arianna," Geminiani's The Inchanted Forrest, and the world premiere of Jake Heggie's To Hell and Back, with soloists Isabel Bayrakdarian and Patti LuPone. The short lyric drama, with libretto by Gene Scheer, is based on the legend of Persephone, queen of the Underworld.

Statuesque, ( Music by Jake Heggie Text by Gene Scheer) performed with a septet of winds and strings from the University of Kansas faculty, with Heggie at the piano. Scheer’s intelligent poetry succinctly dissected the art works at hand. His verses about Giaccometti were especially enlightening. .... The final movement “ We’re through” Winged Victory was a tour de force, a Weill inspired tango in which Castle took on the disgruntled voice of the sculpture. At the denouement she angrily dismissed an inattentive lover....Stauesque was an invigorating set, with Castle confidently conveying its sense of serious fun. OPERA NOW JAN 06

A new Musical collaboration in New Orleans involves jazz giant Wynton Marsalis and African drum master Yacub Addy that blended American jazz with intricate African rhythms.... One of the brightest highlights was Odadaa! vocalist Imani Gonzales, who delivered Billie Holiday-like heartbreak ("The pain I feel, it never goes away"--Words by Gene Scheer Music by Wynton Marsalis) in a torch song that was much deeper and resonant than just another love-gone-wrong ballad// Times Union April 24 2006

This opera, (AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY)at nearly three hours, holds your attention and conveys the story. Mr. Scheer's libretto must necessarily compress Dreiser's complex 900-page novel, with its long ruminations on status, envy and compulsion. But the essential elements are there…with an effective libretto by Gene Scheer based on Theodore Dreiser's landmark 1925 novel, "An American Tragedy" has its own kind of sweep and passion...Anthony Thommasini Dec 05

Opera-te - Thérèse Raquin ROH2 Production/Linbury Theater Tobias Picker EUROPEAN PREMIERE March 14, 2006 Thérèse Raquin is a red-blooded and sinister tale of adultery, murder, and remorse among the lower orders of Parisian Society. Zola's novel scandalised 19th Century France by presenting characters who transcended and broke the contemporary moral code. The plot charts Thérèse's journey as a young woman trapped by circumstance, driven to find escape and release through desperate action and fatal attraction, only to find that the noose has tightened even further. As its inaugural production opera-te is presenting the European premiere of Tobias Picker's gripping music drama. French mezzo-soprano Isabelle Cals makes her UK operatic debut in the title role, with Carole Wilson as her oppressive mother-in-law. Artistic Director Lee Blakeley, whose restagings of Die Zauberflöte and Faust on the ROH main stage received widespread critical acclaim last season, directs; Timothy Redmond conducts.

The world premiere of Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and based on the 1925 novel of the same name by American writer Theodore Dreiser, is on December 2. The libretto is by Gene Scheer. James Conlon conducts, with Patricia Racette as Roberta Alden, Susan Graham as Sondra Finchley, and Nathan Gunn as Clyde Griffeths. The cast also includes Dolora Zajick as Elvira Griffeths, Jennifer Larmore as Elizabeth Griffeths, Kim Begley as Samuel Griffeths, William Burden as Gilbert Griffeths, and Richard Bernstein as Orville Mason. Francesca Zambello directs, with sets designed by Adrianne Lobel in her Met debut, costumes designed by Dunya Ramicova, lighting designed by James F. Ingalls, and choreography by Doug Varone.
Subsequent performances are on December 5, 8, 12, 16, 21, 24, and 28.

"In turning the novel into a libretto, my task was to imagine this material as an opera; that is to say, not to worry about changing things, adding things, even going in different directions if it seemed more operatic, but to leave the guts of the piece well represented. Tobias gave me an enormous amount of freedom to tell the story as I saw it and to come up with something that appealed to my own imagination. The point of departure was to be faithful to the spirit of the piece but not necessarily to the letter of it. I think you can get in trouble just cutting up a book and setting it to music. When I finally handed Tobias a version that sparked his imagination, the collaboration began."