STAGING DEATH ROW : 'Dead Man Walking' as opera.

When Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean's passionate story about ministering to condemned prisoners on death row, bowed in operatic form in October 2000 at the San Francisco Opera, the work's plausibility surprised many. It turned out to be a dramatically strong work with a solid understanding of the opera idiom, using both music and theater to make emotional points. Its tunefulness, characterized by gentle--although not saccharine--melodies by composer Jake Heggie, was an added bonus.

This good news was to some extent unexpected. The critics had aleady sharpened their knives--with headlines like "Dead Man Warbling" and "Dead Opera Balking." But such objections turned out to be mostly about the inherently ridiculous quality of opera, and the risk of addressing serious social, ethical, and religious questions in it. New operas that America's major theaters dare to spend money on are lightweight, even fluffy subjects like John Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles at the Metropolitan Opera, or Mark Adamo's Little Women at the Houston Opera.

By contrast, Heggie's operatic setting of Dead Man Walking, which has just been released on CD in a remarkable performance on Erato (86238-2) and dissected in a PBS-TV documentary, "And Then One Night: The Making of 'Dead Man Walking,'" seemed at the outset to have everything to offend. We can hardly forget that capital punishment is a highly contested issue. Glitzy French Minister of Education Jack Lang rarely misses an opportunity to criticize the United States on this score. At a recent speech commemorating the bicentenary of another powerful opponent of the death penalty, Victor Hugo, Lang branched out into a critique of countries "like the U.S.A. and China" that still cling to this practice.

Unlike Lang's speechifying, the unpretentious and clear prose libretto by Terrence McNally allows the audience to feel the question for itself: We see how the murderer Joseph De Rocher approaches a state of redemption through his interaction with Prejean. The opera's aim is not so much to advocate one viewpoint as to be an occasion for reflection. Its setting, death row, is plenty gloomy, and all that really "happens" is that we see a murder, and then the murderer finally gets a lethal injection in prison, where he had been visited by Sister Helen. Yet Heggie's sensitive but insistent music is a humanizing accompaniment, tailor-made for his remarkable cast of singers (to be appreciated in the new recording), led by the triumphant soprano Susan Graham as Sister Helen and the stellar mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade as the condemned man's mother. Heggie has written song cycles for these singers before, and knows their voices intimately; this may be one reason that their performances ring so true. Graham is particularly natural in the opera's few lighter moments, which add an extra layer of plausibility to the plot.

Heggie has made a remarkable ascent from opera-house publicist and spare-time composer of classical songs for divas like von Stade; a disc of his comparatively bland-sounding tunes appeared on BMG a few years back. It took Sister Helen's intense subject matter to galvanize him into a tough-minded yet lyrical composer. If anything, the operatic version is less glitzy than the much-talked-about film directed by Tim Robbins, since there is something basically glamorous about telling a story on the wide screen with charismatic stars like Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, whereas opera singers tend to move as clumsily as real people with unidealized physiques, which adds bodily realism to the story.

The PBS documentary, which aired nationwide recently, blended interviews with the opera's creators and discussions with people who had lost a family member to murder. Both groups--artists and "real people"--looked interchangeable and seemed to share a sense of compassion. The real matter at issue was Sister Helen's focus on the possibility of redemption, even for the worst criminal. The capacities of the human heart are the point here, rather than any political or even esthetic matter.

The real Sister Helen has gone on record as saying that the opera, like the Hollywood film, "brings people to a deeper level of reflection" about a subject most would probably prefer not to spend much time thinking about. This July, Cincinnati Opera will acknowledge as much by being the first company to restage Dead Man Walking, at a time when few contemporary operas receive the honor of repeat stagings. That may be because in addition to its polemic function, Dead Man Walking is arguably the most moving opera written on a Catholic theme since Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites almost forty-five years ago. Poulenc's martyred nuns might have recognized a kindred spirit in the courageous Sister Helen.