Moments before the premiere of the new opera “The Righteous,” at Santa Fe Opera, an assassination attempt was made against candidate and ex-President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. In Santa Fe, audience members were drinking champagne before the curtain, suddenly gathering around Iphones as they heard the news. It is a testament to the way that politics and our culture have devolved over the last decades in our country that none of this was surprising. “The Righteous,” set in the 1980’s, is almost an origin story for this kind of crisis—it places a volatile and timely mixture— religion and politics— at the center of its story.
The good news is that composer Gregory Spears, librettist Tracy K. Smith and a talented group of collaborators did not take a biting look at these issues with a satirical emphasis on 1980’s hair and clothing styles—a Tammy Faye Bakker story about the rise of televangelism. Instead, the opera grapples with a different idea—that at the forgotten core of the values of the Church-people who came to participate in a frenzied, anti-abortion politics—the Religious Right and its takeover of the Republican Party—is actual Christianity. Among the followers trapped in the culture wars are people like the character of Sheila, who just wants to love God. With a voice like a bell, Elena Villalón embodies both humanity and hope through her deeds and spirituality. To her, belief is “light caught in a falling raindrop.” In the opera, Sheila stands by her preacher and second husband David as he finds a calling into “something bigger”—the governorship of a state that seems a lot like Texas. It’s a pathway downhill to the present, but her voice, and her poetic arias, offer an emotional reminder that Christ never intended all this.
Spears opens “The Righteous” in church, where ominous chords keep interrupting the flow of beauty. Spears writes hymns on steroids— music sung by the superb chorus throughout the opera keep reminding us of Christianity in powerful, cathartic melodies. The orchestra rises to a climactic volume (Spears favors the horn section over violins throughout) at this opening. Then, as the churchgoers walk upstage, where the open-air stage showed the Jemez Mountains on the horizon bathed in a pink, beatific sunset, the story turns, as it must, to human frailty, to adultery, to greed and power and all the usual dramatic elements of an opera. However, Spear’s music and Smith’s lyrics for Sheila and her sense of Christianity continually save this work from falling into a rut of operatic conventionality.
Dramatically, the opera is a bit of a soap opera. Preacher/politician David falls for Sheila and leaves his first wife, Michele, an oil-heiress who had helped his career thanks to her well-connected father, the Governor. David’s best friend is the closeted gay Jonathan. Why Spears chose a counter tenor (the excellent Anthony Roth Constanza) to play the opera’s only gay character is a bit of a mystery to me—it could only have been more offensive if he were presented as a comic character. Or a Paul Lynde imitation. And David himself, sung securely by Michael Mayes, a baritone, comes across as less conflicted and more purely venal a man. As a politician he becomes the buffoon you would expect, but even his earlier role as a preacher is offered in the style of egotist, a leader who would condemn people “on the other side of the river,” rather than embrace his followers in a blanket of love. As written by a black librettist who spent time in a Baptist congregation growing up (and no longer attends any church) David is hopelessly human.
It is the two female leads—David’s wives—who get all the juicy arias, but stacked against each other as they are in the order of things—two lamenting females lessen the impact of one. A more powerful solution would be to isolate Sheila’s moments. As played by Villalón, she is informed by a higher power. Michele gets stuck being a jilted wife.
AIDS, the crack epidemic, encounter groups, the growing ubiquity of television in the lives of Americans—it’s all there. But as Sheila keeps saying, “the message should be love.” This is an opera where love almost conquers the mundane, and yet, since it is set in America and written in English, the mundane is part of the story. This is an accessible work—every churchgoer should see it—it reminds us that poetry (“I look at the lake aching to be filled with moonlight.”) serves a spiritual purpose. It offers moments of beauty, emotional reckoning, and a look at ourselves. Religion and the religious have always been morally bankrupt, but within the doctrine, and the songs, still lives an essence that we all long for, Christian or not.
