Jake Heggie's Songs for Murdered Sisters Is Not for the Faint of Heart.

If you’re lucky enough to have sisters, prepare to be shaken by Houston Grand Opera’s newest digital offering: Songs for Murdered Sisters. Composed by Jake Heggie, it is set to eight poems by acclaimed Canadian author Margaret Atwood.

With Heggie at the piano and Canadian-born baritone Joshua Hopkins as the grief-stricken brother, the atmospherically staged cycle had its premiere Feb. 19 on the Houston Grand Opera Digital platform. Available via free streaming through Mar. 21, it is a co-commission by HGO and Canada’s National Arts Center Orchestra. The score, recorded on Pentatone, and an accompanying film, will be available for download beginning March 5.

Songs for Murdered Sisters grew out of a gruesome tragedy in Hopkins’s family. One morning in September 2015 his sister was murdered by a former boyfriend in her rural home in Canada's Ottawa Valley. By noon that day, the man had murdered two other women--also ex-partners--in nearby rural areas. Arrested that afternoon, he was sentenced to life in prison in fall 2017.

To cope with his grief, Hopkins hit on the idea of commissioning a song cycle to bring attention to gender-based violence. He had been an HGO Studio Artist early in his thriving career and moved to Houston 17 years ago. HGO and Heggie signed on. They approached Atwood, an opera lover, and she composed eight short poems for the project. (The poems appear in her most recent poetry collection, Dearly, published last year.) Premieres were set for Houston and Ottawa. As with all the performing arts, however, Covid-19 upended those plans. 

A "riveting" impact

Heggie wrote two versions of the piece, one with full orchestral accompaniment, the other for solo piano and voice. With live performances on hold, Heggie and Hopkins enlisted the help of film director James Niebuhr. Based in San Francisco, he filmed the cycle with the composer and singer in an abandoned California train station. The effect is riveting. Playing the piano in shirtsleeves, bathed in shadow, Heggie resembles a dive-bar pianist trying to comfort his own lost soul in the dreaded, wee small morning hours. Hopkins stands alone, as dazed as the dejected lover in Schubert's Winterreise, trying to make sense of his newly shattered world.

Baritone Joshua Hopkins on location for the Songs for Murdered Sisters film

With plain-spoken titles like "Lost," "Anger," and "Bird Soul," Atwood's poetry is both unsparing and eloquent. In the opening song, "Empty Chair," Hopkins wanders into the large, weathered room to the slow, unsettled tinkling of Heggie's piano. A vast blank wall behind him, Hopkins turns to the sole stage adornment: an empty dining room chair, its legs gracefully curved, its back open and airy. With his warm, powerful baritone he entones Heggie's somber melody and Atwood's brutally frank text: "Who was my sister/Is now an empty chair." Both words and melody are dark and unadorned, starkly stating the horrific reality the bereaved brother must now confront. 

In "Enchantment," Hopkins becomes a little boy regaling his sister with a story about mountain trolls and twisted magicians who have kidnapped her. The melody becomes heroic as he travels the world and finds the magic charm that brings her home, "alive and happy, come to no harm." But Heggie's accompaniment is ominously agitated, roiling and circling back on itself like the relentless undercurrent of Schubert's "Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel)." It's a fitting touch; like Songs for Murdered Sisters, Schubert's subject is an imperiled sister, the seduced and abandoned Gretchen of Goethe's Faust. By the final lines of "Enchantment," however, boyish bravado has vanished. "This is not a story/Not that kind of story...," Hopkins sings in anguish as Heggie's arpeggios unceremoniously stop.

The most moving moment

The cycle's most moving visual moment comes at the end of "Lost," a lament for the countless women killed over thousands of years at the hands of men. Singing "So many sisters lost/So many lost sisters," Hopkins's voice soars in baffled sorrow as Heggie's piano trudges ahead with heavy chords. As the camera pulls back, we see dozens of empty dining room chairs, set up as if for a meeting no one will ever attend. Hopkins becomes a black silhouette against a glaring white background, the sad chairs bathed in cruelly merciless light. 

Hopkins is linking Songs for Murdered Sisters with White Ribbon, a Canadian project focused on curbing violence against girls and women. On its own, however, the song cycle bears searing witness to the pain of those who loved those forever lost, murdered sisters. 

_{Photo by Zoe Tarshis}