Interview: With Grounded, Jeanine Tesori Makes Metropolitan Opera History

The Metropolitan Opera is kicking off its new season on September 23 with the New York premiere of Grounded, a new opera by the Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori.

A collaboration between Tesori and playwright George Brant, who has adapted his acclaimed solo play into this operatic experience, Grounded is the riveting story of a fighter pilot forced to do desk work — that is, to remotely drop bombs on houses in the Middle East — after she discovers that she’s pregnant. Known for hits like Fun Home, Kimberly Akimbo, and Caroline, or Change, Tesori makes history as the first female composer to open a Met Opera season in 139 seasons.

Tesori is alternately proud and dismayed by that factoid. Here, she explains why.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

When you first discovered Grounded, did you see music in it the way the Metropolitan Opera and George Brant obviously did?
I did not know this play at all. Paul Cremo, the dramaturg and head of new works at the Met, is an old friend of mine. He took me to see a beautiful version in DC at Studio Theater, and as soon as it was over, I was just like, “I can absolutely hear it.” I thought it was going to be hard, but, in the end, completely worth the years and years that I would be spending on it.

Is developing an opera from a piece of source material like Grounded similar or different from adapting, say, Fun Home or Kimberly Akimbo as a traditional musical?
It’s a different process but developing is developing. Being inspired by and honoring the source material and, in a certain way, having to leave it, is an interesting dance. It has to move out of its own form into another form and that doesn’t happen right away, at least for me.

My development timetable is based on 40 years in theater. In opera, you don’t have previews and you can’t develop it with the participation of an audience. You develop it with information gleaned from one evening or two evenings and then you’re on your own for weeks and months to go back to rewrites and workshops. For me, I go back to isolation. I can only write well when I’m completely alone.

So, it’s that the development is just more private, and it comes with the work that I would normally do in three weeks of previews in front of an audience. In theater, you cut, and you change, and you rehearse it the next day and they’re doing the show at night. It’s not possible to do that in opera because of the very nature of the way it’s sung and played by the giant orchestra. It takes so long to make changes. There are 70-80 people down in the pit; it’s impossible to do it overnight.

You learn to base everything on impulse reactions, the notes that I received that hit me in a certain way. It’s not taking every note; it’s really editing and thinking “Ok, I understand that.  I get that it’s too long. But what goes? And why?” It’s not arbitrary cutting, because then you get into trouble and lose your show.

Was working at the Met a career aspiration for you after all this time?
Only once I started writing opera. [Met General Manager] Peter Gelb and Paul Cremo and I go way back to when they were at Sony. They had asked Dick Scanlan and I to write a song for Kristin Chenoweth, and we wrote “The Girl in 14G” as a specialty song for her album in just three days, and Ralph Burns orchestrated it. That was way, way, way back. As soon as Peter went to the Met, they contacted me, and we had talked about doing something.

I knew that if I was going to present something at the Met, I had to have my own development about how I hear opera for me. I started writing once I felt more confident about the form and the way you orchestrate for the unamplified voice. That was something that I really had to learn more about: what it means to carve out room for the orchestra to have great charts to play, but also to leave room in the texture for the voice to ring out.

What goes into that? I would imagine you’re so used to writing knowing that there are going to be microphones amplifying voices in a Broadway house.
Yes and no. I was trained by some incredible musicians, and the mentor I had [Buryl Red], who I met was 24 and worked with for a quarter of a century, was a master orchestrator. One of the things he said right away was “You’re a pianist, so you have to be really careful, because the piano is not the orchestra. The piano is percussion.” A lot of pianists write pianistically, and that means a lot of motion. You can’t pedal an orchestra. We studied, from the get, the way that that worked.

He was a classical musician, as well as a gospel musician and a choral master, so he was well-informed when it came to all of that. We would tour the country, we recorded world music, we did so much together. I had a lot of practice in leaving room for the voice and supporting the voice so that the singers can feel that they’re sitting on a pillow of something that gives them the information they need, and that the orchestra is also participating in the conversation. It’s really tricky.

At this point in your life and career, what does it mean to you to be among the first class of female composers that the Metropolitan Opera has ever commissioned?
You know, the press office told me that I’m the first woman ever to open the Met season in its 139-year history, and I thought “Wow, that is late.”

It’s tricky because I feel very proud of it, but there’s a part of me that always bristles. I have ambivalence about being recognized because of my gender. I don’t feel gendered when I write. I write and it’s fucking hard work and my family has always had to sacrifice a lot, because when I write, I go away. I isolate. I always have. My kid has had to sacrifice a lot by going all over with me, and that’s not gendered.

But I feel very proud of it, because in my family, the generation before the generation before me was artistic and musical and they couldn’t make a living in this country doing it. My grandmother was an artist and there was no way she could make a living at it, so she had a restaurant a widow. My grandfather, who was a composer, could not make it work at all, so he pumped gas. I feel proud that I’ve taken some of their gifts and moved it forward.