Law and order: ‘Scalia/Ginsburg’ opera comes to Tucson

When he would come upon those three magic words — “SCALIA, J., dissenting” — he’d hear music.

“Every time I read a Scalia dissent, I would hear music in my head, a rage aria about the Constitution,” said Wang, whose journey to law school followed music degrees from Harvard and Yale. “And then when I read the contrasting counterpoint from his colleague and fellow opera aficionado, Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg, I realized the unlikely friendship between these two justices could be the basis for its own opera.”

In between studying copyright and constitutional law, Wang composed his comic one-act opera “Scalia/Ginsburg,” which Arizona Opera is bringing to Leo Rich Theater this weekend.

Wang drew the libretto from Supreme Court opinions and “other landmark legal documents,” he said during a mid-September phone call from home in New York. Then he applied what he likes to call “operatic precedent.”

It works something like this: In law, judges need to understand landmark cases going back decades and centuries in order to create new legal opinions that ”would seamlessly fit into the tradition and the precedent that was set forth in these landmark earlier opinions,” Wang explained.

“I thought just as a Supreme Court justice has to refer to and cite and quote these previous landmark opinions when writing a new decision, perhaps this opera could do the same thing with the music and the text,” he said.

“Scalia/Ginsburg” opens with Scalia in legal purgatory, trapped in a sealed courtroom because of his relentless and “excessive dissents.” His only hope of escaping is to pass a series of legal and philosophical trials similar to the premise of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” (Here’s where Wang’s “operatic precedent” comes into focus.)

Ginsburg, who enters the courtroom through a glass ceiling to comply with the rule that “no man shall enter,” serves as Scalia’s defender, helping him to navigate the trials as the pair spar over their legal differences.

In the end, they and the audience discover that for all their differences, they are the same.

Wang’s libretto references landmark cases including McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Morrison v. Olson (1988) and Bush v. Gore (2000), while his music borrows stylistically from landmark composers including Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi and Puccini.

He also threw in some jazz rhythms and referenced popular Christmas carols and “The Star Spangled Banner,” all in service of the comedy.

“I did say this was a comedy, right?” Wang told a small gathering of opera fans last Thursday at the University of Arizona School of Music after Marion Roose Pullin Arizona Opera Studio artist/tenor Cameron Howard performed Scalia’s rage aria.

Arizona Opera hosted Thursday’s “An Evening With …” event at Wang’s request to make up for his absence at the Tucson performances.

In addition to performances by Howard and two of his studio artist colleagues — soprano Francesca Herrera and bass-baritone Jose Olivares — Thursday’s event included UA voice instructor and lyric soprano Yunah Lee performing excerpts from Wang’s latest opera, “Fearless,” about the trailblazing World War II aviator Hazel Ying Lee.

“Scalia/Ginsburg” premiered at the 2015 Castleton Festival in Virginia; a revised version of the opera premiered two years later at the 2017 Glimmerglass Festival in New York.

Opera America last year listed “Scalia/Ginsburg” in the Top 5 most-produced operas in North America, while the Los Angeles Times in its 2015 review of the show famously suggested that it be “a constitutional requirement that no one can be sworn into office in the White House or Congress without having first seen ‘Scalia/Ginsburg’.”

Arizona Opera President and General Director Brian DeMaris, who has conducted a couple of productions of “Scalia/Ginsburg,” will be at the podium for the Tucson shows.