The Judgment of Paris, the subject of librettist Gene Scheer and composer Jake Heggie’s latest opera, is not the mythological contest that led to the Trojan War. It’s the informal name of the 1976 blind tasting when judges rated Napa wines higher than French ones for the first time. It’s a perfect story for Festival Napa Valley, so the pair readily agreed when Festival Vice President and Director of Artistic Planning Charles Letourneau asked them to write the opera.
There were a few reasons they wanted to work on the opera. The most important, Scheer said in an interview with SF Classical Voice, was the tasting, a seismic event in the world of wine and a great underdog story.
Also, both men have often taken on heavy subjects in their work. They wanted something different.
“We were really looking for something that was fun, silly, and delightful,” Scheer said. “The idea of having fun and just entertaining an audience, especially in a summer festival, seemed exactly like what we wanted to do at the time. That's why it started, and I think what surprised us is how moving and touching the piece turned out to be.”
Since co-founding Festival Napa Valley two decades ago, Letourneau has wanted to commission an opera about the famous tasting. To celebrate a trio of anniversaries — 50 years since the taste test, Festival Napa Valley’s 20th, and the 250th of the United States, he decided to go for it and approached Heggie, whom the Wall Street Journal has called “arguably the world's most popular 21st-century opera and art song composer” and Scheer, who has worked with Heggie on multiple projects including Moby Dick and whose libretto for Mason Bates’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2025-2026 season.
“Commissioning an opera is not for the faint of heart. It's a massive undertaking,” Letourneau said. “We were thinking who do we ask to write this opera, and of course the obvious answer was Jake and Gene, the worldwide all-star team.”
Like Scheer, Heggie thinks that the story, of the struggle between old and new is a great one for an opera. He was
struck by British wine expert Steven Spurrier, and his partner, Patricia Gallagher, who proposed the tasting, which most people in that industry considered a waste of time. Everyone knew that French wines were better than anything produced in America. Only one journalist, a reporter from Time magazine, showed up — but the article he wrote led to a seismic shift in Napa’s reputation and wine growing in general. French officials banned Spurrier from the nation’s prestigious wine tour for a year afterward.
Scheer said the story is primarily about what you hold on to and what you let go of, and he and Heggie immediately thought of including gods, starting the opera with a fight between Bacchus and Venus.
“Bacchus only wants the old ways. He wants tradition, he's stuck in the past, and he thinks French wines are the only ones,” Heggie said. “Venus, the goddess of love, is all about possibility and expansion and ideas and new creations. So, we have the gods duking it out right from the beginning, and they can cue thunder and lightning, so we just started having fun with gods and mortals.”
Heggie said he’s always loved the human voice from jazz to pop to musical theater to rock and roll. He didn’t hear opera until his late teens, and those voices “blew the top of my head off.”
The composer is known for his talent in writing for singers, and he says he’s thrilled to be writing for the show’s great cast, most of whom are friends, including soprano Danielle De Niese as Venus, baritone Quinn Kelsey as Bacchus, tenor Nicholas Phan as Spurrier, mezzo-soprano Simone McIntosh as Gallagher, and soprano Brenda Rae as Odette Kahn, a French judge of the tasting.
When writing for singers like these, Heggie says, the potential seems almost limitless. He compares it to a screenwriter being told to compose a screenplay about Eleanor Roosevelt — and then finding out she will be played by Meryl Streep.
“When I'm writing an opera and there's a great character, and then I find out I'm writing it for this amazing singer there's just joy from the first moment,” he said. “You can write any emotion. If you're confused or you don't understand or it's not clear and you're struggling, it's going to feel like a struggle all the way through, but when there's clarity, that's what I look for. And then they just start singing to me, and it's like I'm taking dictation.”
The Judgment of Paris premieres at the Festival Napa Valley Stage at Charles Krug Winery, 2800 Main Street, St. Helena, CA, July 18 at 6:30 p.m.
