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Jeanine Tesori watched the world premiere run of her “Grounded” with director Michael Mayer last fall at the Kennedy Center and noticed audience fidgeting.
“It didn’t need a transplant of a liver, but what it needed was maybe just a different approach,” Mayer recalled.
“Some rhinoplasty,” Tesori interjected. “A tracheotomy at one point.”
Tesori becomes the first woman composer to open a season in the Metropolitan Opera’s 141-year history when a revised “Grounded” starring mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo is given a gala premiere on Monday night. Thirty-five minutes have been cut since the six Kennedy Center performances, the first act trimmed from 82 to 60 and the second from 62 to 49. A Trainer character was eliminated.
“You don’t know until you know. And then you know,” Tesori said.
This is the fourth opera by Tesori after “A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck” (2011), “The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me” (2013) and “Blue” (2019). She won Tony Awards for the scores of “Fun Home” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” and Mayer won for directing “Spring Awakening.”
They have to adjust far less stage rehearsal time for opera than theater.
“The work doesn’t really start until you’re in previews when we’re doing musicals, whether it’s out of town or Broadway,” Mayer said. “It’s like triage. You deal with the bleeders right away, but then you have the time to look at what the next major things are.”
Based on George Brant’s one-woman play, “Grounded” tells the story of Jess, a fighter pilot grounded due to her pregnancy who becomes a Las Vegas-based drone pilot and crashes her Reaper rather than kill a young girl as collateral damage to a Middle Eastern target.
Brant wrote the play in 2011 after reading about the drone program in a “Stars and Stripes” online report. It opened in 2013 and gained attention with a 2015 New York Public Theater production starring Anne Hathaway. Brant also wrote the libretto and expanded the cast to include a husband Eric (tenor Ben Bliss), Commander (bass-baritone Greer Grimsley), Sensor (baritone Kyle Miller), an alter ego character Also Jess (soprano Ellie Dehn) and a chorus.
D’Angelo, the only holdover from the Washington cast, spoke with fighter pilots in her preparation.
“So much care was taken in really honoring and being true to what they do,” D’Angelo said. “There’s no caricature at work here. It’s all taken very seriously.”
On the day of the final Washington National Opera performance last Nov. 13, Tesori met in an upstairs rehearsal room with Mayer, dramaturg Paul Cremo, choreographer David Neumann and Mayer assistant Marcus Shields. The meeting started at 12:30 p.m. and stretched for 9 1/2 hours, resulting in a book filled with bullet points detailing needed changes. Tesori composed in a rented house on Long Island’s North Fork, taking a break for a January workshop and completing the revised score by April 1.
Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin was surprised Tesori made more cuts when rehearsals started in August. About 45 minutes of music was jettisoned from the world premiere version of last Oct. 28 and 10 minutes of new composition added.
“I was kind of defending the composer as we would do today if Verdi was alive or Donizetti: ‘The music is perfect as it is. Let’s not cut,’” Nézet-Séguin said. “It was fascinating to see that the composer herself was more like: `No, this needs to be cut because it’s detracting from what I want in the story line.'”
Ethel M. Smyth’s “Der Wald (The Forest)” was the first opera by a woman composer at the Met in 1903 and Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin (Love from Afar)” the second in 2016. After “Grounded,” the Met has three works by women scheduled in 2026: Saariaho’s “Innocence” (opening April 6), Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (May 14) and Missy Mazzoli’s “Lincoln in the Bardo” (Oct. 23).
“If we are claiming that opera needs to appeal to everyone and needs to be related and connected to the life experiences of everyone in the audience, we do have to present on the stage the vision of everyone,” Nézet-Séguin said. “I’m convinced it’s a very different perspective, and even the music sounds different because it’s a woman composing it.”
Mimi Lien’s set is dominated by 224 LED tiles, 140 panels and 28 half panels manufactured by ROE and rented from 4Wall Entertainment in a video design by Jason Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras.
“I was interested in the kind of combination between image and space or between actual physical, tangible structure and virtual imagery and how to combine those,” Lien said, “colored with the overall context of drone warfare and surveillance and the kind of preponderance of imagery into our daily lives.”
There will be eight Met performances through Oct. 19, with the last televised to movie theaters worldwide.
Met opening night puts a spotlight on performers, productions and composers for an audience attending the start of New York’s social season, whom Nézet-Séguin termed "people who come to the opera just rarely or civic leaders or socialites and people from different industries.”
“It’s important to show them what our values are and who we are as an institution," he said.
Met general manager Pete Gelb has put a post-pandemic emphasis on contemporary composers.
“I’m living right now,” Tesori said playfully during a Sept. 9 creative team and cast discussion at the Guggenheim Museum. “We’ll see how next week goes.”
