Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? In 1942, the insurance executive Emil Freund of Prague perished miserably in the Polish ghetto of Łódź, sent there to die by the Nazis. Jump cut to 2001, when an unsuspecting Viet Nam vet named Gerald McDonald, living in Lyons, Illinois, and raised Lutheran, learns that he is the rightful heir to the modern art collection of a Jewish great-great-uncle. The swag is worth millions, and the Czechs are declaring it an unexportable national treasure, effectively stealing it a second time. Flying on borrowed airfare, his liver ravaged by hepatitis C, “Mac” strikes out for Prague.
And there you have the back story to Jake Heggie’s 60-minute chamber opera Before It All Goes Dark, filmed live in May 2024 by Music of Remembrance, of Seattle. Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2025, Heggie exploded onto the scene from nowhere with the 2000 premiere of Dead Man Walking in San Francisco. Based on the bestseller by Sister Helen Prejean, which militates against capital punishment, and scripted by the ace Broadway playwright Terrence McNally, Heggie’s firstling has since chalked up some 100 productions on four continents; in September 2023, it opened a new season at the Metropolitan Opera, affording Heggie his belated house debut.
Before It All Goes Dark has a distilled libretto by Gene Scheer, a cast of two, and eloquent underscoring by a septet consisting of flute, clarinet, piano, and strings. Compared to the grand-operatic Dead Man Walking, it’s as an easel portrait to a wide-screen thriller. Even so, the affinities between them verge on the uncanny.
Partly, that’s a function of trompe-l’oeil casting. Mac is Ryan McKinny, the strapping Wagnerian bass-baritone seen at the Met as the condemned murderer Joseph De Rocher. But the more significant resemblances lie beneath the surface. Like Joseph on Death Row, Mac is an angry bruiser hiding a lifetime of hurt behind his crusty macho façade. With blood on his hands, Joseph has accounts to settle with the survivors of his victims. Before it all goes dark, Sister Helen’s truthfulness and compassion help him own who he is.
Mac, deathly ill, is likewise running out of time. Three supporting characters, all sung by the fine mezzo-soprano Megan Marino, commune with him as he tries to figure life out. The difference, and this matters, is that Mac has nothing to atone for—and that the three of them don’t add up to one Sister Helen. Mac is mostly on his own as he reflects on his distant relation’s fate as a Jew and develops an understanding for what artists have to say. Through these efforts, he glimpses his place in the world.
Curiously, Joseph’s and Mac’s stories both popped up on Heggie’s radar at moments when he had commissions in hand but no subject. “Then Terrence suggested Dead Man Walking, and it set me on fire,” the composer said recently. “Like an electric fire! And when my friend the music critic Howard Reich, who located Mac in the first place and wrote up his story in the Chicago Tribune, told me about it over dinner one night, it was exactly the same. I was on fire! I just knew this was exactly the right thing.”
Before It All Goes Dark is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii