Joshua Hopkins and the National Arts Centre Orchestra perform in the Songs for Murdered Sisters, created by Margaret Atwood, right, and Jake Heggie.Curtis Perry/Supplied
At Philadelphia’s Marian Anderson Hall on Jan. 9 and 11, and at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Jan. 15, Canadian baritone Joshua Hopkins and the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Montreal’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will perform Songs for Murdered Sisters, a song cycle inspired by Hopkins’s mission to combat violence against women.
It is the American orchestral premiere for the piece that made its symphonic debut last year in Ottawa, performed by the National Arts Centre Orchestra and Hopkins.
His sister, Nathalie Warmerdam, was one of three women (along with Carol Culleton and Anastasia Kuzyk) murdered in their separate homes in the Ottawa Valley in 2015 by one man, an ex-partner of theirs. Hopkins spoke to The Globe and Mail about collaborating with American composer Jake Heggie and Canadian poet-novelist Margaret Atwood to create the piece.
How does one recruit such heavyweights as Jake Heggie and Margaret Atwood as songwriters?
To put it in the most simplistic terms, I asked them a question and they were very positive in their responses. But, to backtrack, once it was established that the National Arts Centre Orchestra was going to co-commission the piece, I felt like I had a solid backbone for it to become a reality. When the Houston Grand Opera came on board to also co-commission, the search was on for who would be my creative team.
You had some history with Heggie, correct?
Yes. It just so happened that in 2016, one year after the piece was commissioned, his opera It’s a Wonderful Life was having its world premiere in Houston. I had a supporting role, Harry Bailey, the brother of George Bailey. Jake and I actually knew each other from way back when I was first in the Houston Grand Opera’s Butler Studio for young opera artists, and we stayed in touch over the years. After the opening night of It’s a Wonderful Life, we went to lunch together. We spoke about the project, and it was an immediate yes from him.
How did Margaret Atwood come aboard?
It was important to Jake and I that we also have a female voice as part of the triad of the creative process. And since the National Arts Centre Orchestra was co-commissioning the piece, it was also important that it would be a Canadian female writer. Jake encouraged me to think big about collaborators.
How big?
We were kind of rolling around the names of Canadian singer-songwriters, such as k.d. lang. We then expanded the idea to someone who would be affected by the subject matter of intimate partner violence and femicide. The clear choice was Margaret Atwood.
Songs for Murdered Sisters is inspired by Hopkins’ mission to combat violence against women. His sister, Nathalie Warmerdam, was one of three women (along with Carol Culleton and Anastasia Kuzyk) murdered in their separate homes in the Ottawa Valley in 2015 by one man, an ex-partner of theirs.Curtis Perry/Supplied
I imagine she gets a lot of pitches, but none quite like yours.
Her response to Jake and I was pretty much immediate, but she wasn’t exactly sure what we were going for in terms of structure. So, Jake was able to formulate that for her. He envisioned seven or eight songs that would tell a narrative, and he was definitely seeking original texts from her. Literally within one month of us having been in touch with her, she sent the texts in an e-mail to Jake, saying ‘How about something like this?’
Can you describe the circumstances of reading the texts for the first time?
She actually doesn’t call them texts, or poems. She calls them songs, because they were written to be songs. But I was in New York at the time working at the Metropolitan Opera. Jake was at home in San Francisco. We connected one evening by phone, sitting down in silence in front of our laptops as we read what she had sent. Both of us were weeping. She just got to the heart of the matter and the core of the emotional context so brilliantly. I felt like she had reached down inside me and dredged up all of these dormant emotions that had been sitting there. For many years after my sister’s murder, I just felt numb about it. I didn’t know how to respond to something so horrific. So, reading what Margaret had sent us was an emotional outbreak of all of these feelings of sadness and loss and grief.
Given the subject matter of the piece, you’re asking a lot of your collaborators, emotionally.
Yes, exactly. One of the first things that Margaret mentioned to us was that she had known women who were murdered by partners or ex-partners, and that she had a couple of women in mind. So, the song cycle is not only dedicated to my sister, Nathalie, and Carol Culleton and Anastasia Kuzyk. Margaret personally requested that it also be dedicated to Pat Lowther and Debbie Rottman. Pat Lowther was a Vancouver poet who was murdered by her husband in 1978. I think the narrative hit a chord with Margaret right from the beginning.
Where are you now, emotionally, with the piece?
At this point, I’m only a vessel. I’m only a storyteller of this text in this music. Of course, I want to be as vulnerable and as honest as I can be, telling it with the sound I can produce. But the emotional catharsis of the song cycle is no longer for me. It’s for the audience now.
