Lovers struggling to prevail over those who would thwart them is a familiar trope of opera. So is the struggle against oppression. Both inform “Loving v. Virginia,” an opera by composer Damien Geter and librettist Jessica Murphy Moo receiving its premiere this weekend by Virginia Opera.
The opera, the finale of the company’s 50th-anniversary season, will be staged at 7:30 p.m. April 25 and 2:30 p.m. April 27 at Harrison Opera House in Norfolk; 7:30 p.m. May 3 and 2 p.m. May 4 at George Mason University’s Center for the Arts in Fairfax; and 7:30 p.m. May 9 and 10 and 2:30 p.m. May 11 at the Carpenter Theatre of Dominion Energy Center in Richmond.
The production, conducted by Adam Turner, is directed by the celebrated mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves. For ticket information, call the Virginia Opera box office at (866) 673-7282 or visit http://vaopera.org/events
The opera, commissioned by Virginia Opera and the Richmond Symphony, where Geter has been composer-in-residence since 2022, is based on the trial and eventual triumph of Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple – he was White, she was of mixed race, at times identified as American Indian, at times as Black – who married in 1958, and were soon arrested for violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law. Convicted in 1959, they avoided imprisonment by agreeing to leave the state and not return.
The Lovings appealed, and their conviction was overturned by the US Supreme Court in a 1967 ruling that laws against interracial marriage, which had been in force in much of the country, violated the equal protection clause of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
After the decision, the couple returned to their hometown, Central Point, a rural community in Caroline County between Richmond and Washington. Richard Loving was killed in an auto accident in 1975 that left his wife blinded in one eye.
In 2007, a year before her death, Mildred Loving said: “I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”
June 12, the day of Supreme Court ruling, is widely known as Loving Day, celebrating interracial marriages.
Geter, a native of Chesterfield County and alumnus of Old Dominion University and Indiana State University, knows opera from both creative and re-creative angles. His compositions include two previous operas, “American Apollo” and “Delta King’s Blues,” as well as a number of other vocal, orchestral and chamber works. As a bass-baritone, he has performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Opera Theatre and Portland Opera, where he serves as interim music director and artistic advisor.
Geter’s works draw extensively from African-American music tradition and often address the Black experience. “American Apollo,” introduced in 2023, was based on the life of Thomas Eugene Keller, a Black hotel worker who was a model for the painter John Singer Sargent. “An African American Requiem” (2019) was a setting of the Latin Requiem Mass incorporating Negro spirituals and declarations against violence toward Blacks. Among his other works are “THE TALK: Instructions for Black Children When They Interact with the Police” for chorus and the song cycle “1619” (the year when Africans arrived for servitude in Colonial Virginia). He envisions writing a piece based on Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”
Describing his compositional style as “definitely not on the atonal side,” Geter seeks “to make music for people to feel. A lot of my music sets up a groove” as a grounding element, aiming to let audiences “listen to a piece and forget where they are.”
More from Geter and an excerpt from “Loving v. Virginia:”
Letter V 