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About
Jake Heggie (born March 31, 1961) is an American composer of opera, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. He is best known for his operas and art songs as well as for his collaborations with internationally renowned performers and writers.
Biography
Childhood
John ("Jake") Stephen Heggie was born in West Palm Beach, Florida, to Judith (née: Rohrbach) and John Francis Heggie, the third of four children. His father was a physician and an amateur saxophonist, and his mother was a nurse. Shortly after Heggie's birth, his family relocated to Columbus, Ohio. He began studying piano when he was seven years old.
In 1972, Heggie's father committed suicide after a long battle with depression. Shortly thereafter, Heggie began writing music. A few years after his father's death, the family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Heggie completed high school and continued his studies in piano.
Education and musical training
As a teenager, Heggie studied composition privately with Ernst Bacon from 1977 to 1979. After graduating from high school, he spent two years studying at the American College in Paris. He later continued his studies at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where his teachers included Roger Bourland, Paul Des Marais, David Raksin, and Paul Reale, and where he won the Henry Mancini Award in 1987. Heggie graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Arts in 1984 and returned for graduate school from 1986 to 1988.
Heggie's most significant teacher during his studies at UCLA was Johana Harris, widow of composer Roy Harris and widely considered one of the 20th century's finest pianists.
"She was a magnificent teacher, a brilliant artist in every way, and she was nurturing and encouraging," said Heggie in a 2015 interview with Opera News. "She wanted you to have a broad recognition of what the world had to offer in literature, music, art, food, and daily life. She was all about unleashing inspiration, trusting instincts, opening up your heart and soul to possibility. And she saw something in me as an artist and as a composer that I didn't see or recognize in myself."
Having developed a personal relationship, Harris and Heggie married in 1982.
Early career
Upon graduating, Heggie and Harris toured the country as a performing duo until 1989, when Heggie started to notice pain in his right hand. These symptoms would lead to Heggie being diagnosed with focal dystonia, a neurological condition affecting a specific part of the body – in this case, Heggie's right hand – causing involuntary muscular contractions. Unable to continue playing the piano, Heggie pursued a career in public relations, working for the UCLA Performing Center for the Arts.
In consideration of Harris' failing health and Heggie's desire to relocate to San Francisco from Los Angeles, the couple made the mutual decision to separate but remain married. In 1993, Heggie moved to San Francisco, where he and Harris would stay friends until her death from cancer in 1995.
Heggie worked briefly as a public relations writer for Cal Performances at UC Berkeley in 1993 before being hired by San Francisco Opera the following year as the company's Public Relations Associate, a position previously held by novelist Armistead Maupin. After being hired, Heggie began composing again, and the focal dystonia in his hand lessened to the extent that he could begin rehabilitating his piano playing. His job at San Francisco Opera allowed him the opportunity to interact with key collaborators – including singers, conductors and administrators – who might be interested in performing his music and collaborating on future compositions.
In the fall of 1994, Heggie began a friendship with mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade when she starred in the world premiere of Conrad Susa's The Dangerous Liaisons. On opening night, he decided to give her Three Folk Songs as a gift, and when Heggie visited von Stade during intermission, she was playing the arrangements at the piano. She became an enthusiastic champion of his work and suggested that they begin performing together in recital. In 1995, with von Stade's encouragement, Heggie entered the Schirmer American Art Song Competition and won with "If you were coming in the fall..." (text by Emily Dickinson).
Lofti Mansouri, then the General Director of San Francisco Opera, asked Heggie at a cocktail party if he had ever thought about writing an opera. The next day he called Heggie into his office.
"I really thought it was going to be about a new press release so I brought my notepad," Heggie told the Nob Hill Gazette in a 2013 interview. "[Mansouri] said, 'We have an opening in the 2000 season, and I am going to send you to New York to talk to Terrence McNally because we've wanted to work with him, and I think you two would really hit it off and could come up with something amazing.' Everyone was stunned, but no one more than I – that he was offering a guy on his PR staff the chance to write a full-length opera, when he could have his choice of any composer on the planet."
At the close of the 1997 season, Heggie resigned from his position as the Public Relations Associate, and Mansouri named him the CHASE Composer-in-Residence for San Francisco Opera, a two-year position created especially for him so that he could write Dead Man Walking. The creation of Dead Man Walking would launch Heggie's international career as an opera composer.