‘Loving v. Virginia’ goes from the highest court to grand opera
The opera stage is not a history classroom, but it can serve to preserve and elevate stories that might not make it to either.
This month, Virginia Opera and Richmond Symphony will present the world premiere of composer Damien Geter and librettist Jessica Murphy Moo’s Loving v. Virginia, an operatic retelling of the events leading to the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision that declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional and set the stage for decades of subsequent advances in civil rights.
Denyce Graves-Montgomery will direct this new production starring soprano Flora Hawk in the role of Mildred Jeter Loving and baritone Jonathan Michie as Richard. Virginia Opera artistic director Adam Turner will conduct. As with other company productions, Loving v. Virginia will spring up in multiple cities, debuting in Norfolk (April 25 and 27) and proceeding to runs in Fairfax (May 3-4) and Richmond (May 9-11, with an alternate cast on May 10).
Virginia Opera and Richmond Symphony—where Geter is composer in residence through 2026—commissioned Loving in 2022 for its 50th anniversary season this year. Geter signed on immediately, having considered composing an opera on the Lovings years prior, when tasked to write a short work for Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative. (He ended up composing one act of American Apollo, an opera about model and muse Thomas Eugene McKeller that premiered in full in July at Des Moines Metro Opera.)
Loving v. Virginia spans a tumultuous nine years in the Virginia couple’s life.
In 1958, Mildred and Richard Loving were banished from Central Point, a community north of Richmond, after the two left the state to be wed. The couple, a Black woman and a White man, skirted the state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which barred interracial marriage, but violated two sections of Virginia code: one which forbade out-of-state travel for interracial marriage, and another that declared their marriage an imprisonable felony.
After returning home, the couple was arrested when police raided their home and pleaded guilty to charges of miscegenation, avoiding a one-year prison term by leaving Virginia for D.C. (and agreeing not to return for 25 years). A 1964 federal lawsuit launched a sequence of legal battles that escalated through jurisdictions and culminated in a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the Virginia law as a violation of the Equal Protection Act.
The trials of the Lovings have been the focus of several documentaries, films and television shows. Most recently, the 2016 Jeff Nichols biopic Loving brought the case back into an easily distracted national discourse. But adapting the story of Mildred and Richard to the opera stage presented Geter an opportunity to grant the story of the Lovings a grander scale, and a place of more permanence.
“The operas that are successful have high stakes,” says Geter, himself a celebrated bass-baritone who grew up south of Richmond in Matoaca, Virginia. “That elevation of emotion [in opera] is the thing that helps propel this story just a little bit further.”
To direct, Geter tapped Graves-Montgomery, the acclaimed mezzo-soprano with whom he shared the stage in Metropolitan Opera’s 2020 production of Porgy and Bess, and who has made a confident shift into directing since a 2022 production of Carmen with Minnesota Opera (a co-producer of Loving).
“I and so many people that are involved in this production are either in interracial marriages or relationships, or are products of that,” Graves-Montgomery says in a phone interview. “So it’s obviously one that hits very personally for me.”
But Graves-Montgomery also felt a responsibility to the Lovings themselves. Properly telling the story of Mildred and Richard meant balancing the historical dimensions of their story with the humanity at its heart.
Graves-Montgomery watched every film and documentary made about the couple. She read books and listened to interviews. This was in part to get the details right, but she also wanted to understand a tension at the core of the case: The Lovings wanted nothing more than to be left alone, but for that to happen, they had to draw the world’s attention. To represent the many, they had to be the ones.
“Their story is just the one that we know about,” says Graves-Montgomery, “but they didn’t want it to be that way. Richard Loving kept saying to [lawyer] Bernie Cohen, ‘Can’t you just tell the judge that we don’t want to cause any problems? All we want to do is have our family. We just want to love each other.’”
Murphy Moo, whom Geter calls a “consummate collaborator,” adopted an on-the-ground approach to her research. The librettist—whose past operas include Earth to Kenzie with composer Frances Pollock and An American Dream with composer Jack Perla—was interested in something more akin to field recording, chasing a sense of the spaces the couple inhabited and left behind.
She made trips to Caroline County, where Central Point is located, and visited the courthouse where they were tried, the jailhouse where they were kept, even the cell where Mildred was held in solitary confinement. She took long drives on back roads to take in the view of the landscapes the couple loved and to which they ached to return. “She’s so smart,” says Geter. “Every word on the page was a decision.”
“Damien and I talked a lot about the quiet life they wanted,” Murphy Moo says. “So there’s a real difference in sound between the home they wanted and the urban sounds of Washington, D.C.”
There’s also a difference in the language between the public face of the case and the private longings of the couple. While Murphy Moo’s writing plumbs the personal depths of the plaintiffs, a Law Chorus embodies the intimidating presence of the law, singing excerpts from the warrant for the Lovings’ arrest, the Racial Integrity Act of Virginia, court transcripts and Judge Leon M. Bazile’s conviction.
Meanwhile, much of the opera’s music blooms from Geter’s operatic affection for Puccini, Verdi and Mozart, as well as a simple folkish theme that carries “the idea of home” through the score.
“For me, the center of this is the desire to go home,” Geter says. “That’s what this whole story is all about.”
Loving v. Virginia is the latest in what has been a string of operatic and chamber works that find Geter in direct dialogue with issues of racial and social justice. Right around the time Loving was announced in 2022, the Choral Arts Society of Washington gave the East Coast premiere of An African-American Requiem. Weeks later, the Washington Chorus performed the D.C. premiere of his Justice Symphony. Washington Performing Arts presented his song cycle, Cotton—another collaboration with Graves-Montgomery—in 2023.
Geter says he’s stepping away from opera for a bit—but that’s not the same as a break: He’s got a piano concerto, a tap-dance concerto and a string quartet in the works. But while the forms may vary going forward, the aim of his music remains—especially as sturdy-seeming constitutional rights tempt fresh legal scrutiny. “Art,” he says, “is a weapon.”
“What I can do is I keep creating music that responds to the times, kind of like Nina Simone said,” he says. “I’m not going to back down. I’m not going to change anything about what I’m doing. I create art that responds to social justice issues—not all my music, but a lot of it does—and I will continue to do that. It’s just sort of a privilege and a lucky blessing that this is happening right now, because I think it’s serving its purpose.”
Loving v. Virginia at the Harrison Opera House in Norfolk, April 25 and 27; at the Center for the Arts at George Mason University in Fairfax, May 3-4; and at the Dominion Energy Center in Richmond, May 9-11. vaopera.org
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