The House Is Singing: Ricky Ian Gordon on New Opera “This House”

When does a house become more than four walls? When does it start breathing? When does it begin to sing? These questions lie at the heart of composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s newest opera, This House, premiering at Opera Theatre of St. Louis from May 31–June 29, 2025.

A collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage and her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber, the opera tells the story of the Walker family’s Harlem brownstone, occupied since the 1920s. When Zoe Walker returns home after many years away asking to renovate the dilapidated building, she discovers her mother Ida and brother Lindon can’t let go of the past—and for good reason. Every room holds ghostly voices, painful memories, and secrets about the family’s legacy that will change Zoe’s understanding of her home and herself.

Before the opera’s highly anticipated premiere, we sat down with Gordon to discuss his creative partnership with the Nottage-Gerber mother-daughter duo, the musical architecture of This House, and how personal loss continues to shape his compositional voice.

Ricky Ian Gordon. Photo Credit: Fay Fox

You and Lynn Nottage previously collaborated on Intimate Apparel for Lincoln Center Theater. How did this new partnership with Lynn and her daughter Ruby come about?

I met Lynn Nottage in 2005, when I had a piece at Lincoln Center called Orpheus & Euridice. It was part of the Great Performances series—a song cycle where I wrote both the text and music. We won an Obie Award, and Lynn was on the Obie committee. She said beautiful things about the piece.

Years later, I was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center to do an opera. I initially had a different idea about Victor Hugo’s daughter, Adèle Hugo, which I was going to write with Michael Korie, whom I wrote The Grapes of Wrath with. When that didn’t work out, some instinct told me to read all of Lynn Nottage’s plays. She had already won the Pulitzer for Ruined, but Intimate Apparel was breathtaking. I Facebooked her and said, “Do you want to write an opera for the Met with me?” and she said yes. Lynn later told me she’d always thought Intimate Apparel was an opera, which made it a fortuitous collaboration. It went really well at Lincoln Center and was filmed for PBS.

During COVID, when I was upstate living in a little house with my partner, Kevin, and our dog, Lucy, James Robinson called and said, “I would love for you to do another opera for Opera Theater of St. Louis.” When I called Lynn, she suggested we base the opera on her daughter Ruby’s play that she had written at Brown. I said yes without even asking about it because I trust Lynn. I also loved that Lynn always described Ruby as a poet, which is one of my favorite words.

The libretto for This House is incredibly rich. Did it require much adaptation from Ruby’s original play?

It took us a while because if you read the libretto, you can tell it’s rather intricate. At one point, we did a reading of it at Brown just as a libretto, and I felt it was too intricate—I didn’t understand things about it. The next day, we met in a hotel room, and I’ve never taken such a strong hand dramaturgically. I basically said what I understood and what I didn’t, and we really whipped it into shape. Once it was in shape, I knew what to do musically.

Lynn and Ruby start the play with the house breathing. I didn’t want this to be a sound effects opera. I wanted it to be an opera where everything was about singing and music. For example, when the house breathes, all the reed players breathe into their reeds, which creates a great effect. Even the opening lines like “[s]ound of water running through the pipes” and “[t]he sound of an unfinished melody” are sung, not sound effects.

Once I figured out the musical concept, it was a fun piece to write, and very emotional because it goes places. It’s as if there’s this membrane, and each character at one point or another pierces it, and their story gets told. Their stories are intense and interesting. I also used the entire ensemble—no one ever leaves the stage. The whole opera is choral. The house sings, and they are the house.

What was the collaborative dynamic like between you, Lynn, and Ruby?

Ruby was very open—she didn’t hold on to her work or try to gain control. She understood from the beginning it was a collaboration, and in particular, Ruby and Lynn really understood that I know a lot about opera. I’ve written a lot of operas, so I think they trusted me to take what they had written and turn it into something viable for the operatic stage.

They were both very generous, and it’s a lot of what Lynn said it was going to be—Ruby was the poet and Lynn was the builder. There’s this structure, which I feel like Lynn is probably more responsible for, and Ruby is more responsible for the language.

I read that you would sometimes come across beautiful passages and ask Lynn who wrote them.

Yeah, and she’d reply with “Ruby's magic.”

What draws you to a story or text? What makes you think, “This needs to be an opera”?

When you’re thinking about adapting something or writing an opera, there has to be heat in the story for you. It has to be something that will get you going. So many people will say, “Will you read this opera libretto?” and I can tell in three pages if it’s not up my alley.

Lynn’s writing is emotional. Her characters are vividly drawn. She’s brilliant at the scaffolding that makes a play—a brilliant storyteller and architect. Because of those things, I know that I am going to be able to hang my music on her scaffold, and it will make sense to me. That’s why with This House, I had to make sure that I worked with them on getting the libretto tight enough that I knew what to do musically.

I love the characters in This House. I love their plights, their conflicts, their loves, their hates. It’s a very moving piece for me. Yesterday, we staged the end, and people in the room were sobbing—I was one of them.

At this point in your career, how do you select your projects?

At this point, I am lucky enough to be a composer that people ask to compose. People bring projects to me, and I can say yes if they appeal to me, or no if they don’t. The good thing about being where I am now is that a lot of the people that bring stuff to me are really good, and I’m excited about what they bring. For instance, Atlanta Opera wants to commission a new opera of Driving Miss Daisy from me—that’s a great story about Jews and Blacks in the South. I’ll also be working with Michael Korie again on an opera about Ayrton Senna, the fastest race car driver ever, this handsome Brazilian guy who died young.

Between big pieces, I set poems to music because they enrich me. Poems are the things I enter into my hard drive to make myself deeper and more intelligent.

Your work often shifts between opera, art song, and musical theater. How did poetry become such an important part of your compositions?

When I was a little boy, I had three older sisters, and they—especially the oldest—put me to bed by reading poetry to me. So poetry was very much like a balm or love lullaby for me.

When I first became a composer at Carnegie Mellon University, the composer I admired most at that time, in terms of me being an American composer, was Ned Rorem. Ned had just written a song cycle called Ariel for clarinet, soprano, and piano, using the poems of Sylvia Plath. I thought it was a work of pure genius.

I knew hundreds of poems, so when I became a composer, the first thing I did was start setting all the poems I loved to music. It’s a way of creating a body of work with miniatures because I had to figure out how to manipulate ideas and create structures. Writing art songs was a way to do that.

I knew right from the beginning that I wanted to be a theatrical composer. I’m not someone that dreams of writing a symphony—I just want to write another opera or musical. Even if it’s instrumental music, I like the idea of a ballet. I want something to happen on the stage.

Songs are sketch pads, but they’re very complete. Each song, to me, is like a little three-minute opera, and I’m very aware of what I’m giving the singer to do—an opportunity for them to reveal themselves, to act. I love the voice, so obviously I want to give them something that really extols the virtues of their voice. But my style is my style, and I try to apply it to everything I write so that it matches either the poem or the piece of theater I’m creating.

In This House, there’s a fascinating blend of musical styles that reflect different time periods. How do you approach incorporating diverse musical elements without losing your distinct voice?

I am constantly adding new things. In 2010, I wrote a musical about my family called Sycamore Trees for the Signature Theater. I wrote a rap song for that show. I write whatever I think is right for the drama. If this opera needed a rap song, it would go in it, but it didn’t. It’s more about different periods in time, which are reflected in the score.

Brandie Sutton and Aundi Marie Moore. Photo Credit: Artist Websites.

Did you write This House with specific singers in mind?

It’s basically all my friends. Aundi Marie Moore plays the poet Lucy, and Brandie Sutton plays Young Ida. Some of the singers are new to me, but they’re all fantastic.

After we did Intimate Apparel, we obviously had cast members in mind, including Justin Austin, who played George Armstrong; Adrienne Danrich, who played Mrs. Dickson; and Krysty Swann, who played Mayme. We were lucky to get everyone we wanted.

There was also this bass-baritone, Christian Pursell, whom I’d met when he was a student at Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. I cast him when we did The Grapes of Wrath at Carnegie Hall as Noah Joad. So I knew I wanted him to play a certain role in this.

I've known Adrienne forever—she was in an opera of mine when she was in her 20s. I know her voice so well, and what she can do. She has a final aria in this opera—”You may have left us, but we will never leave you.” And then the whole house sings, “We will never leave you.” It’s balls-to-the-wall singing, written for her, and it’s pretty remarkable.

Isa is specifically for a spinto soprano, which seems like a deliberate choice for the character.

I was thinking yesterday, that’ll be a challenge with casting this opera in the future, but I can always rewrite certain things. But oh my god, when Adrienne sings, it’s so exciting. And there will always be spintos. A lot of times singers of color have those kinds of voices—huge voices, huge high notes. So I’m just lucky. This is a great cast.

Reading the libretto reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude in its multigenerational family narrative. What do you see as the central message of This House?

Zoe and Glenn decide to stay in the house, even with all the ghosts, because I think by the end of the piece, the ghosts have made their peace with Zoe, and Zoe has made her peace with the ghosts. Because there’s redemption, the house is no longer haunted—it becomes benevolent by the end of the opera.

It’s a beautiful moment when she finally sees them all. The only ghosts she could see in the piece were Thomas, Lindon, and her mother, and she didn’t know they were dead. When she finally finds out they’re dead, and then she sees all the other ghosts, there’s been an exorcism. It’s a very beautiful ending. When they staged it yesterday, I was really proud of this opera.

I’ve noticed that themes of loss and grief appear in many of your works.

It really encompasses a lot of my work. After Jeffrey, who was my partner in 1996, died—and that was the tail end of when practically everyone I knew died—it started infiltrating my work. I wrote operas like Green Sneakers and Orpheus & Euridice, and musicals like Dream True and Sycamore Trees. Grief went to the head of the class as my topic.

It’s not like it’s hard to write. It’s so present for me—if anything, it’s easy to access that feeling. It’s not hidden, it’s right there.

Has audience response to your work dealing with grief given you new perspectives on your own compositions?

When we premiered Green Sneakers at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, a critic came to the dress rehearsal. They were the only one there, and when it was over, they were shaking and sobbing, and I had to hold them—which, believe me, I had never done with a critic before.

The next day, when we opened, there was a talk-back in the lobby afterward, and not one person from the audience left. It was just however many people in the lobby crying and recounting their stories about grief.

I realized what a service writing is. You assist people in accessing something they need to. That’s the strength of my writing after Jeffrey died and when grief started inundating my works—my sense of seeing myself as a servant rather than just ego.

What’s the future for This House beyond the St. Louis premiere? Are there plans for recordings or additional productions?

I’m hoping we record it, because I’ve done another opera here, 27, and we recorded it. I have a feeling this will be recorded also. We’ve also presented the process of creating the opera as part of the performing arts series Works & Process at the Guggenheim.

The opera is definitely going to Seattle in 2027, so there’s already a future production planned. We just have to premiere it now and see how it does.

Ricky Ian Gordon with the cast of This House. Photo Credit: OTSL

- Interview by Chloe Yang