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Kristine Jepson
'Having met Sister Helen, I can say she's a very complicated lady'

By Robert Wilder Blue

USOperaWeb spoke to mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson shortly after she had finished a highly successful run at the Metropolitan Opera as Octavian in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. The singer originally scheduled for those performances had cancelled her appearances and the Met called Kristine while she was in San Francisco, alternating with Susan Graham in the role of Sister Helen Prejean in Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking and asked her to step in. (Interestingly, Graham had also moved on to Octavian in San Francisco.)

Like so many wonderful American singers on the scene, Kristine grew up in the midwest. "I was born in Onawa Iowa, on the Iowa/Nebraska border, about one hour north of Omaha. I grew up on a farm - soybeans, corn, wheat and beef cattle. My father was a farmer by profession, but he sang and was the local wedding and funeral singer. My mother was the organist at the church. My brothers are all musical: one is the tympanist in the Kansas City Symphony and another teaches junior high band. I was in the choir and band in high school and the church choir - all that sort of normal, rural, small-school stuff. I think we were really lucky then. Now, even in those rural schools most kids work. That wasn't the case when I was a kid. Very few of my friends had jobs in high school. I played basketball and softball, and I played bassoon in band and saxophone in marching band and jazz band. I played in the orchestra and band half way through undergraduate school at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. But then I decided I'd better get serious about singing.

"I didn't really set off thinking I was going to sing opera though, I sort of fell into it later. As an undergrad, we didn't do any opera - not even opera scenes. But my teacher at Morningside knew some teachers at Indiana University and sort of pushed me in that direction and toward opera. I think I only knew one or two arias before I went to Indiana, although I had a good background in art songs. At Morningside, I had been a big fish in a little pond, and then I arrived at Indiana, which is this big opera school, and that was a shock to me. I studied with Lucille Evans and Carol Smith, who are both retired now. I had a lot to learn, although I discovered that my musical education actually had been a lot better than some of the other singers there. Anyway, it obviously wasn't the wrong choice because I think my voice is best suited to opera.

"After finishing at Indiana, none of the apprentice programs would take me. When I write my book…. [She laughs.] At the time there weren't as many as there are now, but I did audition for the big ones - Chicago, Merola in San Francisco - and didn't get into any of them. But after finishing grad school, the Merola program called and asked me to do one of their Western Opera Theater tours. So I did Carmen on tour for seven months. I did small roles in St. Louis as well, and some educational tours with Virginia Opera -- which was great! At the time, it was a lot of money. The educational programs were funded by the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts], so I made a little more money than if they had actually hired me for small roles in the house. Now, all these years later, I think it's incredibly important to go out to schools and get kids interested in opera. It wasn't that fun singing for kids at 8:30 in the morning, but I still think it's a great thing to do for them. And they love it.

"I met Jake Heggie in San Francisco while I was singing the School Boy and a couple of other parts in Alban Berg's Lulu. It was [General Director] Lotfi [Mansouri]'s idea for me to sing for him. They were starting to cast Dead Man Walking and almost immediately Jake told me he wanted me involved in the project. Jake sent the music as he finished it, but I didn't really learn it seriously until I had the complete score. I wanted to have the entire piece before I started learning it, and I assumed that because it was a new piece, things were going to change. I didn't want to learn it too early only to have things changed.

"It was a little while into the process before I knew that Susan [Graham] was doing first cast. I had already committed by that point and I was very good friends with Jake already. Thank God I didn't decide to go elsewhere, because I ended up doing some extra performances. It was such a great opera and great production, I'm very glad I didn't try to get out of the contract. It ended up being such an incredible thing to do.

"Susan and I became very friendly during the production. She is such a great colleague, the whole experience was really wonderful. We're very different singers and artists and I think most people knew that. We both gave different turns to the role. She gave such an incredible performance and she sang the role so well. I know a lot of people who saw both casts and liked them equally but for different reasons.

"Having met Sister Helen, I can say she's a very complicated lady. Although her mission is very simple: She constantly tries to help people and to spread her message of forgiveness and redemption. It was interesting to go through her journey in that opera. Even though it's called Dead Man Walking, it really is about both their journeys, and I think it becomes more strongly about hers. She starts off with the idea that she will do the right thing by visiting this man and listening to him. I don't think she goes there thinking she will be so changed by the experience and that she will have to deal with her feelings about whether she forgives him. The opera leads you to believe that it is important for her to forgive him, which comes through in the scene in her bedroom with Sister Rose. She is so torn and Sister Rose tells her she has to forgive Joe before she can expect him to admit what he's done and ask God for forgiveness. It was interesting to figure the real-life Sister Helen into the character, of course, but the opera was not her. It is based on her and her story, but there were some differences also. So you took the essence of her but you really created your own character. She is all those things - strong-willed, she tells people exactly what she thinks and she's so gregarious. But she had some slightly different feelings about things than the character and she told Jake so. I think she had trouble with the fact that the opera was so much about her.

"It was such an incredibly fulfilling piece to do. But it was also physically and emotionally all-encompassing. You don't get any time down. When you come off stage you have these 30-second changes and right back on you go. The only time off stage is during Joe's aria at the beginning of the second act. At the end of the performance, you feel as though you have gone through something really significant. I found it very challenging, but incredibly rewarding.

"My situation was a little different than Susan's because the second cast didn't get very much rehearsal. We watched it all take place and once in a while we got to do certain scenes. I think we did one run-through in a rehearsal room and one on the set, but not on stage. Ultimately, I was experiencing the thing as I performed it. Susan had been working on it for almost five weeks. It was stressful, but it was interesting because I was finding out things about the character as I was performing her.

"I was familiar with Jake's writing so I didn't really find the music terribly difficult. Jake really writes for singers. He writes so well for the voice that it was a joy to learn the score. He really sets music to text. He previously had only written songs, but he adapted to operatic style so naturally. Although I think he was even stunning himself because he was finding his way as he went. There are some places where he throws you some curves - he likes to change meters and he uses diminished intervals. But I submersed myself in it a couple of months before we started. I did ostensibly learn it on my own, but I'm a pianist also, so that was helpful. It is more difficult to learn a new opera, obviously, because there is nothing to refer to. You are looking at a score and hoping for the best. The only thing really difficult about learning Sister Helen was that it was such a long role. You learn and learn and memorize and then you still have four more scenes to go.

"And of course Terrence McNally's libretto was so incredible. I thought both acts were structured incredibly well and that it was paced incredibly well. You didn't have to wait for scene changes. With such a serious subject matter, I think it was very important that it propelled itself along quickly.

"Certainly, even before the opera, I was not in favor of capital punishment. Doing the opera only reinforced my feelings about that, especially in light of DNA evidence. I have never felt we should put someone to death, no matter what he or she did. As far as I'm concerned, it's committing the same heinous crime.

"Jake just wrote me a set of songs called The Starry Night. Almost all the songs have something to do with stars. The title is from the Anne Sexton poem of the same name. They are a little more operatic and more complex than his previous songs. He still has that simple and honest way of writing, but I think writing the opera has changed a little how he writes songs. These songs are really beautiful. There are seven songs in the cycle: the Anne Sexton poem, two Emily Dickinson poems, and then he set letters from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo. We premiered them in April at Merkin Hall [in New York] with an organization called Evolutions in Song started by John Churchwell. The organization will highlight a new American composer every year and it intends to commission a set of songs every year. I'm so lucky they wanted me and Jake at the same time.

What's on the horizon for Kristine? "I'll be doing Dead Man Walking with Opera Pacific next season. Jake told me that the house there is unable to accommodate the set we used in San Francisco, so it will be a new production with a new director -- Leonard Foglia, who directed Master Class on Broadway.

"I would love to sing Erika in Vanessa [by Samuel Barber] but I can't get anyone to do it. I covered it years ago in St. Louis. Every time a company asks me what I want to do, I bring up Vanessa but I think they feel they can't sell it. I saw it in Washington a couple of years ago and thought it was incredible. I think it's a great opera and certainly a great part. Whatever stigma is attached to it, it is incredibly difficult to get anybody to listen seriously when I suggest it. But I hope to sing Erika before I get too old to do it!"

See also related conversations with:
Jake Heggie
Frederica von Stade
Susan Graham
John Packard
Teddy Tahu Rhodes