Operagoers may be able to spot the real Justice Ginsburg at opera that gives her second billing
Illustration by Jeff Dionise.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be in the audience on Saturday for the premiere of Scalia/Ginsburg, the opera based on her ideological differences and friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia.
Scalia is in Rome and won’t be able to attend the opera by Derrick Wang, Ginsburg tells the Washington Post in an interview. The opera uses words from the justices’ opinions and sets them to music.
“I think I was a little bit more enthusiastic about it than he was,” she says when asked about their reaction to the idea for the opera. “I thought the idea of taking the two of us and including this lovely duet toward the end—‘We are different. We are one.’—was a good one. So we start out with Scalia and his rage aria. ‘The justices are out of line, how can they possibly spout this?’ And then I tell him the great thing about our Constitution. …
“What [the opera] says is what we have in common. That we revere the court and we want to do our best and leave it in a good state. You might get the impression that there’s a great deal of tension on the court, but we all generally like each other.”
Ginsburg tells the Post that Scalia, noted for his fuming dissent in the gay-marriage case, sang a different tune at a party, joining in a singalong of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
“He sang with great verve,” Ginsburg recalled.
Ginsburg also revealed that some of her feminist friends asked how she allowed Scalia’s name to come first in the opera name. Ginsburg says she replied that at the Supreme Court, seniority counts. Though she is two years older than Scalia, he joined the court in 1986, while Ginsburg was appointed in 1993. “He is senior, and he goes first,” Ginsburg said.
Related articles:
ABA Journal: “Opera based on Justices Ginsburg and Scalia is written by attorney”
ABAJournal.com: “Forget law review articles. Law grad portrays views of Scalia and Ginsburg in opera”
