MISSION

Heartbeat Opera creates incisive adaptations and revelatory arrangements of classics, reimagining them for the here and now. Our new, interdisciplinary collaborations expand the boundaries of what opera can be. Grounded in the belief that excellent opera-making should build community and radiate beauty, we work toward an equitable and inclusive future for our art form, centered in love.

WORK

In its first nine seasons, Heartbeat has presented fourteen fully-realized productions, often featuring new chamber arrangements and English translations. Heartbeat adaptations, which can be seen as world premieres of classics, speak to the moment, here and now. Fidelio featured a primarily-Black cast and more than 100 incarcerated singers from six prison choirs. Carmen was set on the U.S./Mexico border and featured accordion, electric guitar, and saxophone. In Tosca, a mostly Middle-Eastern cast braved the authoritarian censorship of an unnamed religious regime to tell their story. Heartbeat has shared its work at the Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Broad Stage, The Mondavi Center, Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, and Chamber Music North West. It staged the first ever opera performance on The High Line and has mounted its immensely popular, interdisciplinary Halloween Drag Extravaganza each year at iconic venues such as National Sawdust and Roulette. During the pandemic, Heartbeat took Lady M, its adaptation of Verdi’s Macbeth, online and sold out 32 Virtual Soirées, reaching 740 households across 5 continents; it also created Breathing Free, a visual album, which was nominated for the 2021 Drama League Award for Outstanding Digital Concert Production.

Heartbeat has been hailed across the national and international press, including in four features in The New York Times, in stories on CNN and the BBC, and in an ALL ARTS/WNET documentary: “Bracing—icy vodka shots of opera instead of ladles of cream sauce” (New York Times), “elegant and boisterous” (New Yorker), “fascinating and gorgeous” (Observer), “ingenious” (Wall Street Journal), “gripping and entertaining” (Opernwelt), “a flatout triumph” (Opera News).

Heartbeat has collaborated with organizations such as Atlas DIY and A BroaderWay to bring opera education to young people in NYC, and during its west coast tour of FIDELIO was represented by the world class artist agency Opus 3 Artists. After taking the leap to welcome new leadership last year, as our founders moved onto our Board, we are proud to report that Heartbeat “hasn’t skipped a beat,” and continues to push the boundaries, “demonstrating the strengths that make it so vital to New York’s opera scene” (New York Times).

A Company for Today: Heartbeat Opera

By Thomas May

Visceral, radical, essential: Heartbeat Opera pinpoints the vital pulse that has animated this art form since its origins, seeking to reimagine its fusion of music and drama in boldly revelatory and liberating collaborations. Opera is, at heart, a red-hot physical experience for performers and audiences alike — an artistic medium that articulates and confronts human passions with powerful immediacy. This conviction is what drives Heartbeat’s desire to rejuvenate opera and to transform its recognized masterpieces from venerated relics into freshly challenging encounters.

Founded by Co-Artistic Directors Louisa Proske and Ethan Heard, Heartbeat is led by Proske, Heard, and Co-Music directors Jacob Ashworth and Daniel Schlosberg. All of them share a background as child performers who grew up singing and playing around the world, from Berlin’s Komische Oper to New York City Opera, their paths later converging as students at Yale University’s Schools of Drama and Music.

Through a series of original adaptations of classic works, Heartbeat has earned its reputation as the most vibrant opera company to emerge in New York City in recent years. Since 2016, Heartbeat has been presenting a pair of masterpieces in its annual Spring Festival, one each directed by Proske and Heard: Lucia di Lammermoor and Dido & Aeneas (2016); Carmen and Butterfly (2017); and Don Giovanni and Fidelio (2018).

Heartbeat’s adaptations push opera outside the comfort zone. The starting point is to hone in on the essential drama embedded in both the text and the music. Treating that as their organizing principle, Heartbeat’s directors proceed to rearrange the order of the material, cutting scenes and characters, or recontextualizing them by inventing framing stories that evoke unexpected resonances between the material and contemporary sensibilities. An element integral to these adaptations is the introduction of new instrumental arrangements by Schlosberg, but also, frequently, cutting-edge English translations of lyrics or spoken dialogues.

Heartbeat Opera questions inherited dramatic and musical traditions. The productions Proske has directed of Carmen and Don Giovanni address her interests as a feminist director who critically reconsiders how heroines and male protagonists have been distorted by cultural stereotypes. She locates these iconic works within a contemporary moment that pulses with social and political urgency — which does not necessarily mean setting them in the present. Proske’s adaptation of Lucia di Lammermoor depicts the heroine as an unnamed mental patient listening to a radio broadcast of the opera to escape her own captivity, which sheds revealing light on Lucia’s clichéd “madness” while at the same figuring the art form itself as a tool for salvation.

Heard’s Fidelio sets Beethoven’s rescue story in a contemporary American prison and casts it as the wishful dream of an exasperated wife trying to locate her wrongfully incarcerated husband, a Black Lives Matter activist. Heard and Schlosberg collaborated with more than 100 incarcerated singers in six prison choirs across the U.S. to give a radically new face and voice to the Prisoners’ Chorus (“O Welche Lust”) through an audio/video recording that became part of the live stage performance. “If we look at these familiar pieces or experience them with a different lens,” Heard explains, “sometimes we can unlock tremendous power in the music and the text that gets obscured in a more traditional or heavily decorated version.”

A composer, pianist, and arranger, Daniel Schlosberg is responsible for crafting the original instrumentations Heartbeat uses for its productions. These are not mere reductions for the practical needs of chamber opera performance but represent a deeply considered recomposition of the original score to complement the particular directorial vision. “My instrumentations, in dialogue with the director's concept, feature unusual instruments and unexpected sounds that make the audience hear a familiar piece in a completely new way,” Schlosberg states.

Schlosberg’s chamber score for Lucia, for example, addresses Proske’s provocative question: “How does a mad person hear music?” and thus takes us inside the head of the mental patient. In Carmen, he reinterprets Bizet’s uber-familiar tunes in terms of dance-band imagery, using a jazz-tinged combo. By giving prominence to the solo clarinet in his arrangement of the Don Giovanni score, Schlosberg turns it into an instrumental alter ego of the anti-hero. His Fidelio arrangement uses cello and horn sonorities to establish the sense of yearning as well as majesty inherent in the heroine’s character and her journey.

As trained theater directors, Proske and Heard challenge the singers they work with to instill their performances with the precision and truthfulness of a great stage actor. That means digging into the psychological depths of the music and investing fully in their characters’ physicality. In auditions, the directors look for “Heartbeat singers” -- expert musicians who are hungry to explore their roles with abandon.

Heartbeat draws its instrumentalists from its sister company, Cantata Profana, which was founded by violinist and conductor Jacob Ashworth. “For Don Giovanni,” he explains, “I led from the violin instead of conducting — a thrilling tightrope act. With no conductor in sight, the whole cast and band comes alive as a unified, living, breathing organism and the audience experiences the work pouring forth equally from everyone onstage.” What Cantata Profana brings to Schlosberg’s challenging scores is the electricity and verve of a tight-knit band that knows how to follow the drama, breathe with the singers, and make these new operas thrill to life.

In addition to its adaptations of classics, Heartbeat presents an annual Halloween Drag Extravaganza: populist entertainments that the company refers to as a “gateway drug” for “opera virgins.” These events are usually organized around a theme and/or composer: Miss Handel, Queens of the Night: Mozart in Space, All The World’s a Drag: Shakespeare in Love ... with Opera, and Dragus Maximus: a homersexual opera odyssey. These extravaganzas entail interdisciplinary collaborations with dancers, jazz musicians, fashion designers, Drag Kings and Queens — and audience members who are encouraged to attend in costume. The camp blend of reverence and irreverence — imagine a drag queen lip-syncing to Aretha Franklin’s live recording of “Nessun dorma” or West Side Story’s balcony scene with Tony in the balcony — is experienced as something sublimely beautiful on the one hand, and mischievous and bawdy on the other. Heard points out that underscoring this

intersection between opera and the world of drag is a powerful and enjoyable way to subvert “highbrow” clichés, removing the art from off-putting pedestals and queering it into an object of play and discovery.

Through its radical, dramatic, and musical adaptations, its collaboration with singers and instrumentalists who share an aesthetic of intimate engagement, and its visionary drag events, Heartbeat appeals to audiences across a wide spectrum. Opera aficionados who have a deep history with a beloved work can appreciate the nuances of a particular production’s alterations, while at the same time the company entices complete newcomers through its robust storytelling and vivid theatricality.

Thomas May is a freelance writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work has appeared in The New York Times and Musical America. He regularly contributes to the programs of the Lucerne Festival, Metropolitan Opera, and Juilliard School, and his books include Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader.