On a cold November day, Jeanine Tesori ’83 is at work in her midtown studio. Tucked away inside New York City Center, the storied performing arts venue, the space is quiet and unfussy, with a few sitting areas, a piano, and a keyboard. On the walls hang posters from her past productions and a whiteboard with notes from her powerful, gut-wrenching opera, Grounded, which just wrapped up its five-week run at the Metropolitan Opera.
Tesori — who is the most awarded female composer in Broadway history, with two Tony Awards and two Drama Desk Awards, among numerous accolades — made history yet again this fall when she became the first woman composer to open a season in the Metropolitan Opera’s 141-year history. And she did so, most notably, by creating a moving score, with a libretto by George Brant based on his 2013 play of the same name, which tells the story of a hotshot fighter pilot, Jess, whose unplanned pregnancy forces her to change course. When she returns to the Air Force as a drone operator in Las Vegas years later, she is forced to grapple with a new kind of warfare. The opera mines the psychological, moral, and emotional predicaments that Jess faces and, ultimately, the toll they take on her as a soldier, wife, and mother.
The project, which took six years to write, has been a labor of love for Tesori.
In 2014, Peter Gelb, the Maria Manetti Shrem General Manager at the Met, commissioned Tesori to create a new work for the opera house. She had been exploring different ideas when the Met’s dramaturg Paul Cremo suggested they take a trip to Washington, D.C., to check out Brant’s play at the Studio Theatre. After the production, Tesori knew she had landed on something special.
“I just flipped for it. It had so many of the sweet spots that I had been thinking about and didn’t know enough about. When I write a show, I also try to learn … just like being a science student, a biology student again at Barnard,” says Tesori. “And so I wondered what this world would be like in an opera.”
Though the process was stalled by the pandemic, Tesori dove headfirst into the research. She listened to “hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews,” read books about trauma and the history of war, and pored over transcript after transcript of actual drone warfare. By the time Tesori was working on the opera, there was more documentation on the military’s drone program than when the play first appeared on stage a decade ago. “As part of our history, I think we’re now seeing what the moral universe is like for people. And I was really interested in the lives of these vets and of this woman specifically,” says Tesori.
The story of Jess — searingly brought to life by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo — is layered, Tesori explains. “It was about a woman in a male-dominated industry. It was about a woman who became a mother. It was about someone who had a moral awakening. And of course, it’s about warfare and the industrial complex of war, but it’s also about when you’re at war with your own self and your morality,” she says. “I’ve always been really interested in that idea of what makes you, ‘you,’ in terms of your North Star.”
Her choice of projects is a testament to this curiosity. “Every story, in some way to me, is about who they are at the essence and who a character is — the identity,” says Tesori. “So that Jess is a life taker, but she ends up truly a life giver.”
When Tesori started out, there were few female composers in the theatre world. She recalls the tension she experienced between her own professional life and motherhood — much like what Jess felt. “There’s a moral dividing of oneself, a psychologically dividing of oneself, and then a literal dividing of oneself,” explains Tesori.
It is this splintering of one’s identity that Tesori often examines in her own work. She is drawn to complex characters — especially women who are striving to understand themselves and the world around them. In Kimberly Akimbo, for which she won a Tony for Best Original Score in 2023, the protagonist, Kimberly Lavaco, is a teenager who suffers from a rare condition that causes her body to age faster than others’. As she contemplates her own mortality, she also contends with the dysfunctions of her family life. For Tony Kushner’s play Caroline, or Change, Tesori wove together blues, gospel, and traditional Jewish melodies to help tell the story of Caroline, an African American maid, who is a single mother of four children working for a Jewish family in 1963 Louisiana. Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, the play explores friendship and characters wrestling with their own identity.
“I love those tales where I’m just trying to figure out what the sonic world is but also what the narrative world is,” says Tesori.
Tesori’s own sonic journey started at a young age. At 3 years old, she started playing piano by ear, and by 5, she was taking lessons. She studied seriously for years, but then as a teenager, under one instructor, she started to feel stifled by the classical training.
“I was a very quirky, weird little kid, and I had very quirky, weird little tastes. … I loved rock ’n’ roll and pop. I loved certain kinds of music that were very rhythmic,” she recalls. “I loved playing by ear. I loved improvising. All of that was taken away.”
While she admired singer-songwriters like Carole King and Joni Mitchell and the virtuosity of the singer and classically trained pianist Nina Simone, she didn’t see a path forward for herself as a musician at that time. “I didn’t have my relationship with the instrument that I saw when I went to other music programs,” she says.
Tesori entered Barnard in 1979 as a pre-med student. At the time, the punk music scene was, she says, exploding in the city, and she spent much of her time downtown at clubs, such as Folk City, CBGB’s, the Bottom Line, and the Bitter End. After a year, she realized that pre-med wasn’t for her and took a semester off. When she returned to school, she did so as a music major. She found her footing in Columbia’s music program.
“I started with musicianship, and then I took every single music course that I could — the history, the theory, harmony, all of it — and it filled in the years that I had missed to really understand the science and the design behind music,” Tesori says.
After graduating from Barnard, she made a living doing gigs around town: She played parties, auditions, dance rehearsals. She had her first introduction to Broadway when she was hired as the assistant conductor on the touring show Big River. She continued working as an arranger and conductor off- and on Broadway, where she served as the associate conductor for The Secret Garden and The Who’s Tommy.
In the mid-1990s, Tesori traveled to North Carolina to ask writer Doris Betts in person if she could turn “The Ugliest Pilgrim” — a short story about a young, disfigured girl from North Carolina who goes by bus to Oklahoma on a quest for healing — into a musical. Betts granted her the rights. Tesori teamed up with Brian Crawley, the librettists and lyricist, to write her first-ever musical production, Violet. In 1997, the production debuted off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, garnering high praise and several awards, including the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Musical.
Since then, Tesori has composed music for an impressive number of critically acclaimed productions: on- and off-Broadway productions (Twelfth Night; Thoroughly Modern Millie; Fun Home), opera commissions (The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me; Blue), and film soundtracks (Nights in Rodanthe; Mulan II; ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway), to name just a few.
In addition to her own work, Tesori has long been dedicated to mentoring the next generation of musicians and composers. “Teaching is a really, really big part of my life,” says Tesori, who instructs on composition at Yale University’s Department of Music. In the program, she says, she meets students “wherever they are, whatever they’re interested in.” Recently, she worked with a student who wanted to do a full analysis of a Beyoncé song.
“I was like, ‘Treat it seriously. … If you want to know how the watch works, take the back of the watch off, take out the parts, and put it back together.’ And it was unbelievable to watch his joy come alive — it doesn’t matter what the music is, if you respond to it, if it plucks those strings in you, you [want to] find out more about it,” she says.
In 2016, along with Torya Beard and Darren Biggart, Tesori founded tall poPpy, a socially driven and artist-led organization that, according to its mission statement, “seeks to create systemic change in theatre” by bringing artists together to “create work, develop opportunities, and interact with issues that are relevant to the community at large.”
Supported through microfinancing, tall poPpy has mentored 13 artists. Whether it is offering guidance, software, or connections, the organization is there to “meet students at that critical juncture … providing a bridge onto that next thing.”
While Tesori embraces her role as a mentor, she is also eager to keep learning and broadening her own skills. She recalls, in 2019, when she served as the supervising vocal producer on Steven Spielberg’s film West Side Story. During that project, she worked with the Academy Award-winning audio engineer Shawn Murphy, and watching him in action, she says, made her “feel like she had gone to graduate school.”
It is these collaborations — and the learning and creativity that result from them — that fuel Tesori’s imagination.
“I want to be in those rooms where your tennis game just gets better and better and you leave it much better … to be in these rooms with people and still feel like a freshman at Barnard just wide-eyed,” she says. “It’s not about being meek, [but] it’s about being humble — to think ‘what don’t I know, and that person has a key to some of it,’ and in turn, hopefully I will know something they don’t know. And you get this beautiful circle between the two of you.”
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