James Gaffigan Interview for “Die Walküre” at Santa Fe Opera
Photo credit: Curtis Brown / For the Santa Fe Opera
Review: A Leaner, Meaner Wagner
By Mark Tiarks
The Santa Fe New Mexican
July 25, 2025
Conductor James Gaffigan plans to give Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre a big injection of Ozempic at the Santa Fe Opera this summer.
Fear not, O ye disciples of the Bayreuth master! He isn’t cutting any of the music or using a chamber orchestra adaptation.
“My number one goal is to trim the fat of tradition,” he says. “Wagner has become fatty and heavy and long and lugubrious, and that’s not what he intended. He was an elegant composer, and he knew what he was doing. When he writes ‘langsam,’ in a slow tempo, it’s not deathly slow.”
Achieving variety in volume dynamics is another of his key goals.
“Wagner wrote incredibly transparent textures that a lot of people in a lot of opera houses just plow over because it’s easier to just play loud,” Gaffigan says. “Some of it is like Mozart,” he adds, “and with singers like Ryan Speedo Green and Tamara Wilson, and an orchestra like this, and a wonderful director like Melly Still, we have the ability to really tell the story with simple, direct means.”
Asked what he would tell someone who’s peeking over the fence, intrigued but intimidated by all the trappings surrounding the composer and his music, Gaffigan says, “I think Santa Fe is the perfect place to discover Wagner for the first time.
“It’s not Bayreuth. It’s not extremely uncomfortable chairs and extremely hot and muggy inside,” says the conductor. “Here you have the beautiful breeze of the desert, and maybe it starts out hot, but it ends cool.
“And I would say the most attractive thing about this production is this incredibly young cast, who are so fresh and alive,” Gaffigan adds. “People shouldn’t be intimidated by this music, because it’s glorious. You don’t need to know a thing about it to enjoy it.”
The opera’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” which is the Act III Prelude, has been used in hundreds of scores for film and television — so many that no one seems to know the exact count, but almost everyone who attends the opera will recognize the music, even if they don’t know what it’s from.
For Gaffigan, it was the confluence of film music and his growing interest in classical music during his teenage years that led to his enchantment with Wagner.
“I was fascinated with it because the music spoke to me in a very intense way,” he says. “Because of its epic nature, the closest thing I knew to it was Star Wars, and then later on The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, with these God-like characters and these myths and legends.
“I gravitated to [Wagner’s] music, not because of the language, not because of the composer, but just the way it made me feel. It was like getting lost, getting lost in a very large adventure.”
The New York City-born Gaffigan attended his hometown’s LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts before studying at the New England Conservatory of Music and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He now holds two major European music directorships, at Berlin’s legendary Komische Oper Berlin and at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, Spain. Gaffigan is also a regular guest conductor with the symphony orchestras in New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; his discography is already at 19 recordings and counting.
Gaffigan made his Santa Fe debut in 2018 conducting Ariadne auf Naxos, which calls for a 36-person chamber orchestra and is part of the company’s long Richard Strauss heritage. His return in 2022 for Wagner’s 4½-hour Tristan und Isolde, however, was venturing into terra incognito.
“I didn’t know what to expect from the orchestra,” he says, “because it wasn’t a language they did regularly, and this made me nervous. But [then-Artistic Director] Alexander Neef made sure I had the most rehearsals any conductor has ever gotten here, and I found the orchestra was extremely excited and hungry to learn this language, because a lot of them had never played it before.
“It was really fun to bring what I’ve learned from Europe as an American to an American institution. And the orchestra rose to the occasion. They were extraordinary.”
The production also generated one of Gaffigan’s favorite visual memories, involving Tamara Wilson, its Isolde, who returns as Brünnhilde in Die Walküre.
“I have this image of her, when she was singing the ‘Liebestod’ at the end, of her beauty on stage, the red hair, the dress, the wind of Santa Fe, and the smells of nature in the desert, and that orchestra playing — I’ll never forget that as long as I live. It made me a Wagner freak.”
Gaffigan considers Wilson one of the top three singers in today’s opera world. But the reason we don’t hear about her as much as soprano Lise Davidsen, for example? “She’s a modest person and she doesn’t do social media,” he says. “She doesn’t do any of that stuff.
At the beginning of Die Walküre, Siegmund staggers into the hut where the married couple Hunding and Sieglinde live. He and Sieglinde develop an immediate sexual attraction, not realizing they are brother and sister who were separated years earlier.
Gaffigan describes Jamez McCorkle, the Siegmund, as “a very, very special guy who is just lovely to work with.” A young, New Orleans-born tenor whom the conductor feels is destined to sing many such roles, McCorkle is making his Wagnerian debut with this production.
“He’s one of the sweetest, most sensitive musicians,” Gaffigan adds, “so kind and so willing. It’s really rare to have a Siegmund with so many colors to his voice. He can sing soft; he can sing full. He can sing covered, with a velvety, chocolatey sound, and can also be vocally bright.”
Soprano Vida Miknevičiūtė is Santa Fe’s Sieglinde. “She’s the number one pick of Kirill Petrenko, the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, for roles like this,” says Gaffigan. “It’s miraculous what this woman can do, because when you see her walking down the street, she’s this tiny, beautiful Lithuanian woman, but she has this massive voice.
“When she gives Siegmund his name, the hair stands up on the back of my neck. She’s extraordinary.”
Bass Soloman Howard, who plays Hunding, is a “total pro, one of the best basses in the business today,” Gaffigan says. Howard’s relationship with Santa Fe began in 2016, with the Commendatore in Don Giovanni and the Duke in Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, followed by the Bonze in 2018’s Madame Butterfly. He also sang Colline in the company’s 2019 La Bohème, and is repeating it this season.
“Last night I heard him sing the coat aria in Bohème, and it was gorgeous and sincere and intimate,” says Gaffigan. “He’s extraordinary. There are so many beautiful colors in his voice — he’s not just one of those barking basses. I just wish Hunding sang more in this opera.”
Wotan, ruler of the gods, at first favors Siegmund in his inevitable battle with Hunding, but he changes his mind after being berated by his wife, Fricka, who is also the goddess of marriage. He sends Brünnhilde, his favorite daughter and leader of the Valkyries, to aid Hunding, but she double-crosses her father’s wishes and supports Siegmund instead.
Ryan Speedo Green, last summer’s Don Giovanni, returns to sing Wotan in Die Walküre for the first time in his career.
“This is my first time working with him,” the conductor says, “and we spoke a lot on the phone beforehand, which made me realize this guy’s serious about this being the biggest role of his life.” (Among the role’s many challenges is its soliloquy in Act II, which is almost 20 minutes long.)
Gaffigan says that he and his colleagues are being hard on him “because we want it to be perfect the first time” and that Green is “so well prepared, so willing to try anything, and totally open to all criticism. … He’s risen to the occasion with flying colors.”
Fricka is performed by mezzo-soprano Sarah Saturnino. She was one of the six winners in the 2023 Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition, following two seasons as a Santa Fe Opera apprentice. She’s also a choreographer, intimacy director, and a trained fencer.
“Sarah’s a young woman, but she has this incredible, old musical soul,” Gaffigan says, “and a gorgeous full voice. She’s perfect for this role, because you see the intimacy of their marriage, but also the power of this woman and how she’s right, and she knows she’s right.”
Gaffigan is just as enthusiastic about British stage director Melly Still, who makes her Santa Fe debut with Die Walküre, as he is about its cast. “I love what she’s doing with this, because she’s storytelling on different levels,” he says. “It’s not just stand and sing like a lot of Wagner productions are, where the singers literally just stand in one place and tell their story, and you either go with it or you don’t.
“Melly is telling the story with a lot of wonderful supernumeraries around the singers, dancers almost, helping tell the story of the ring. It’s really great.”
Asked whether there’s anything else he’d like Pasatiempo readers or opera fans to know, Gaffigan says: “The Santa Fe Opera is a highly unusual place, in that its artistic quality is of the highest, [and because] how kind and family-oriented everyone is here. It’s rare, because some opera houses are nice to work in and some are not, but you never feel like you’re part of a family as much as you do here. It’s a very special place.”
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