Recognised worldwide for his natural ease and extraordinary collaborative spirit, conductor James Gaffigan has attracted international attention for his prowess as a conductor of both symphony orchestras and opera. The mutual trust he builds with artists empowers them to cultivate the highest art possible. Gaffigan is uniquely positioned, with music directorships at two international opera houses. He is the General Music Director of Komische Oper Berlin, where he begins his second season in 2024-2025, and Music Director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, where he enters his fourth season with widely acclaimed productions of “Wozzeck,” “La Bohème,” and “Tristan und Isolde.” Gaffigan was first prize winner of the 2004 Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition, which opened Europe’s doors to him as a young American. Passionate about music education and a product of the New York City public school system, Gaffigan grew up in New York City and studied at the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art before pursuing his conducting studies. He believes that access to music education is the method by which America’s concert halls will finally begin to reflect our community and shrink the racial and gender gaps that exist in the performing arts today.

OperaWire caught up with James in San Francisco where he was working with the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus.

OperaWire: Hello James, and many thanks for speaking with OperaWire. I understand you’re about to conduct Wagner’s “Die Walküre” for The Santa Fe Opera?

James Gaffigan: That’s right. Right now, I’m in San Francisco. I’m doing Verdi’s “Requiem” with the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus. And then I go right after this to Santa Fe and we start rehearsals for “Die Walküre.”

OW: I reviewed “Tristan und Isolde” last year and I think I said Wagner was an ‘acquired taste, one which I haven’t yet acquired.’ I think many people struggle to appreciate or ‘get’ Wagner. What would you to say to those people reluctant to see a Wagner opera?

JG: I think, first of all, everyone’s different. My attraction to opera at first was probably like your taste. I thought “La Bohème,” and I still think Bohème is perfect in many ways. Things happen in a short period of time, kind of like real life events. They unfold and it is accompanied by some of the most glorious music ever written. And so, I think these pieces like “La Bohème,” pieces like “Hansel and Gretel,” pieces like “Tosca,” or when we talk about Verdi, things like “Otello” or “Falstaff,” are just magical. They happen quickly. And it’s so well crafted. There’s incredible repertoire out there. Wagner is an entirely different world of music making and musical drama. It happens at a different pace: a slower pace. And the thing that attracted me to it as a young man, when I was in high school, was the massive forces needed to bring this thing to life. Also, the massive storyline that goes along with “The Ring,” for example. I think my generation — and I would say a couple generations after me too — got hooked on this kind of binge-watching thing. You know, during COVID with Netflix, or we’d find a series we liked and we would literally finish the series in a week when it’s 20 episodes or something. I binge watched “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad,” and, more recently, “Game of Thrones.” I think the young, people in their teens, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, are more prepared for the world of Wagner than ever before because they crave this massive storyline. The prequel, the Prequel to the Prequel, you know, it’s like “Star Wars” or “Lord of the Rings.”

And Wagner plants little seeds if you start from the beginning. If you jump into “Siegfried,” you’re going to be very confused by this world. If you jump in with “Tristan und Isolde,” if you don’t have the patience or if you don’t go in with the right mindset, you’re going to be irritated. And I can understand what you’re saying by that, because the first “Tristan und Isolde” I heard live — I fell asleep! That’s honest. And it was with really good singers, a really good conductor. I won’t say who, I won’t say what company — it was great, but I had no patience for it and I wasn’t prepared. So I think there are two very different languages of Wagner. There’s the “Tristan und Isolde” and “Parsifal” language. And then there’s “The Ring” language. They’re very different.

And “Tannhaüser” and “Lohengrin” are even more different. “The Flying Dutchman” is like an Italian operetta but in German. It has its own category. But if we talk about “The Ring,” I think there’s a whole audience for this in America. And I think people dig it a lot more than you would guess. Because I think people have the patience for it. You go in, you have to turn off your phone, you have to turn off your life. And you need to be ready to read an epic novel.

I remember when I was a kid, Dungeons and Dragons was big, “Star Wars” was big. And you feel like you’re part of a club, you know? This [fantasy] world is the club, you get to know these characters, you see how these characters develop, these gods and these normal people. And the music that goes along with it has an extraordinary depth and it continues to grow with the person. So I’d say, besides Shakespeare, Wagner is the next in line, in my opinion, for this kind of development of character. Like when Wotan’s speaking about his daughter, the way his themes transform and how things join one another, these little leitmotifs change throughout the storyline. And then you don’t have to be a smart musician to feel these things, because when the music of the sword comes or the music of the ring… or love… or the gaze of Sigmund and Sieglinde… something subconsciously keeps track of that.

And as the theme develops with the characters, you’re really brought into the storyline. So I think “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre” are a perfect introduction to Wagner for the non-Wagner person. “Tristan und Isolde” is a very bad choice to hear for the first time. Nothing happens, you know? It’s very abstract. It’s about light and darkness, what’s real, what’s not, are we in a dream? Are we not? It’s very confusing. I would never choose “Tristan und Isolde” as a first opera for a young audience member

But if you’re turned on by “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre,” the next step is to finish “The Ring” and then try something like “Tristan und Isolde” and “Parsifal.” But it’s a meditative thing. You have to be content with shutting off your brain and to start from zero. And that’s very hard for people to do. It’s hard for me to do. I mean, I learned a lot about meditation recently, and it helped me a lot with Wagner, and it helped me a lot with life in general — shutting off and letting things pass. This is hard for people in our time and I get it, but it is so rewarding actually.

I find when I’m rehearsing pieces like “Tristan und Isolde” or “Die Walküre,” they go by quicker and quicker. The first act of “Tristan und Isolde” now seems like an overture to me — whereas when I first started rehearsing, I thought, ‘My God, is this piece ever going to end? How am I going to rehearse all this material?’ But I think this massive world of “The Ring,” of the gods and the mortals and the Nibelungen and the Rhinemaidens and the Valkyrie… It’s pure fantasy. And the music is stronger than any word in the production, whether it’s in German or English, Italian, or whatever. The music tells the story, it paints the picture. And the singers, these heroic singers that have these Wagnerian voices, they’re extraordinary people. And it’s hard to find these types of singers that do it well. And I take a lot of pride in working with the best of them. And that’s very exciting for me.

I think “Die Walküre” is the perfect introduction because right from the beginning, you’re going to love the music. The storm: it’s storm music and it’s repetitive. It’s very Wagnerian. There’s no doubt it’s a storm, with the cracking of lightning. And then this man stumbles upon this house and then the drama starts. It’s really weird. It’s not normal. I mean, this guy falls in love with his sister, even when he realizes she’s his sister, they’re in love and the gods are saying, ‘How sick is this? This is twisted.’

These are real human emotions… Bickering between a husband and wife. It’s very intense and real. Just like the real issues that we have today in life, with our friends or family or lovers or what we have in the news with wars etc… It’s all there. I find it completely fascinating. I don’t know how you feel, but take wine [as an] example. When I first tasted wine, it was all right. Some was good, some was not. I preferred the sugary stuff, the cheap stuff… But now I can’t drink bad wine because I’ve had the pleasure of trying really great wine, and I can’t go back. So, like you said at the beginning of the interview, Wagner is an acquired taste, and you haven’t acquired it yet.

These things sometimes take time, but they’re the most rewarding in the end. I find that it’s the way with whiskey, with wine, with certain foods where I originally thought, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ But now I appreciate these things, and they have a depth of complexity that is unlike anything else. However, I still like a slice of pizza from New York City, or a hot dog, you know? For me, there’s room for everything, but I find the things that give me the most pleasure are things that were not necessarily interesting to me at first.

For example, Wotan’s recitative in the second act of “Die Walküre” is typically known as the most boring passage for the audience, because he’s literally retelling the story of the ring and everything that happened before. And unless you have a true artist doing this and you have a conductor that cares for the material, it could be worse than going to the dentist. It could be extremely painful. It could be boring. You need a storyteller. It needs to be like a Liederabend, like a Schubert song cycle. You need the orchestra to be active, interacting with the singer, and you need a smart director not to just have Wotan stand there and sing — it’s deeper than that. “Tristan and Isolde” is another one too. Tristan has a mad scene that’s literally seven mad scenes in one in the third act. He keeps waking up and falling and waking up and fainting and having these visions. I found it so irritating at first and now I think it’s the most genius passage in the whole opera. But unfortunately, these things take time and I feel the same way about Shakespeare. When I first read Shakespeare as a kid, I wasn’t ready for that. But then I had a good teacher in high school that lit my imagination and turned me on to some things in the language. And then I was hooked. And I think it’s the same way with music. If you don’t have that friend, or if you don’t spend the time, you’re probably not going to be rewarded with this depth.

OW: I had the pleasure of visiting New York for the first time earlier this year and I was mesmerized by it. I found it had an amazing vibe. It must have been a great and fascinating place for you to grow up in.

JG: I loved it. New York City is one of the greatest cities on the planet. And it’s like you say, there’s an energy there that’s unlike any other place. And I loved growing up there because when I went to high school, I was in the minority, not the majority. So, I, the white kid from a suburb like Staten Island, I was the weirdo, you know? There were more Black, Asian, and Latinos than white kids. And I loved it. I loved being a part of something much bigger and [surrounded by] all these different types of socio-economic backgrounds.

My parents were kind of lower middle class. We lived in… townhouses. And some of my friends lived in these gorgeous penthouses in New York City. Some of them lived in really bad neighborhoods, some of them in neighborhoods that were being gentrified, and everyone was different: I just loved it. All the food that was available, all the different types of people and cultures: I loved it.

OW: What was your grounding, musically? Did you want to sing? Did you want to play an instrument?

JG: Yes. As a kid, I gravitated towards the piano and I learned music by ear. So I kind of I figured out my own way to playing chords. I thought to myself, ‘OK, that sounds happy. That sounds sad. I want to remember this chord pattern. I’m going to make a song about this.’ It was never with words, really, but just different tunes. I love music. My parents always had music playing, but it was like, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Michael Jackson, pop music. It was not classical music. And then I learned guitar by ear, and my parents realized I had some kind of talent for it. [My parents are] not musicians but they knew it came naturally to me… They bought me a guitar, and I had a band with my friend. We wanted to be rock musicians. I wanted to be a rock guitarist and I loved a lot of bands at that point. Bands like Jane’s Addiction and when all the grunge stuff was coming out, like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, that was fascinating to me. I loved that world, but when I went to junior high school I played in a band and I played clarinet. And then I switched to bassoon because my father said, ‘Look, I don’t have money for you to go to college. If you go to college, you need a scholarship. You need to play an instrument nobody else plays.’ So the band director said, ‘You should play a double reed instrument, like an oboe or bassoon.’ I chose the bassoon because Frank Zappa said really funny things about the bassoon. He said, ‘Oh, the bassoonists I know are cool cats.’ And I thought, ‘I want to play that instrument.’ And then it came very easily to me. It was an easy instrument to learn, easy to have a nice sound, easy to play in tune. And I got a scholarship. I did exactly what my father needed me to do.

When I played in my first orchestra… I couldn’t believe the sound of the strings and the woodwinds around me. And when something was in tune, it felt unlike any Led Zeppelin song or any Beatles song. I thought, ‘This music is extraordinary.’ And I didn’t know why the music made me feel sad or made me feel good or made me feel anxious or whatever. But I fell in love with looking at scores and looking on the page to see what it was that these composers did to make you feel that way. So I became like a detective. And I fell in love with scores more than I fell in love with playing music or singing music. I never wanted to sing, I never wanted to write music. But I thought what these dead composers left, especially Wagner, Stravinsky, Mozart, Brahms, Schumann, it blew my mind. It was very different to anything that was on the radio. And I couldn’t put my finger on why. And then that was my life mission: to bring this music to people who don’t necessarily know it. Because I’m pretty sure that any guy from New York City that’s working a shitty job, if they hear the first act of “La Bohème,” they’re going to be moved by it. Any hardcore guy, any gangster, if you play for them ‘Nessun Dorma,’ they’re going to have a reaction to Pavarotti singing. There’s no doubt about it in my mind.

So these composers, Puccini, Mozart, Bach, they had something. I’m not a religious person, but once in a while, these guys come up, these geniuses… And they have the ability to make your life better with vibrations, with sound. And that’s just such a beautiful thing. For me to be able to do this as a profession and offer it to people… It’s a dream.

OW: What qualities do you need to successfully conduct an orchestra? And what, if any, are the big differences in conducting, say, a symphonic piece and an opera?

JG: It’s a very good question. There are a lot of symphonic conductors that can’t conduct opera because they’re control freaks. And if you’re a control freak, you should never work with a singer. They’ll drive you crazy.

I would say working with singers could be the most gratifying thing in the world, but it could be the most frustrating. So you need to have flexibility. That’s the biggest quality you need as an opera conductor: to be able to breathe or to be able to do things to help someone do something that you necessarily don’t always agree with. But it’s the way their voice spins, it’s the way their voice moves. Some singers can’t do the tempo you originally wanted. Some singers can’t move as fast. Some singers need more time to get into a certain register. And I love that. I love the compromise. I love the give and take [that comes from] accompanying a singer.

For me, the greatest quality you need as a conductor is empathy for the people making the sound. When you have a great orchestra in front of you, you need to mold them and clean things up, bring them all together. But in the end, you’re not making the sound. So you need to have respect for what they’re doing. You need to lead without leading. It’s very strange, it’s more psychological than anything else. You could prepare, you could be a genius, you could have everything memorized and know what you want, but it doesn’t make you a good conductor with these particular people. You need chemistry, you need trust with the people, you need to know how to organize things without being a nasty person. You need to know how to encourage people to do things without telling them to do things. You also need to be very aware of what people can fix on their own and what they need help with. So, a lot of my job has to do with staying out of the way but getting in the way when they need me. I always make the comparison to a football coach: you’ve got all of this talent, but if they work together well or not, that’s another thing.

It’s a very strange profession. It’s not for everyone. It’s not for the faint of heart. But I love it. It’s a lot of pressure, but I enjoy having a lot to multitask. I enjoy [it when there are] thousands of things going on at the same time and [I’m] staying calm. In real life, I’m a nervous wreck. Little things bother me all the time. I’m irritated by things. But when I’m in front of a full orchestra and a chorus, or in an opera pit, I have to be calm. And the musicians need me to be calm and to be in charge and to be dealing with things because anything can happen. So, opera just has a lot more balls in the air, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of things going on and anything could go wrong. I think with symphonic, it’s a little bit more manageable. You rehearse it, you go right up to the performance, you do it. You never know how the singer is, how their health is going to be. If there’s a problem with the lighting on the stage, if someone gives a false cue to enter… there’s so many things that can happen. But I like it. I like this world.

OW: I find conducting to be such an esoteric thing. I read other critical reviews of performances and they will frequently denigrate the conductor or lambast him or her for some perceived flaw, some loss of pace, tempo, control, or something: things that the audience, unless they are particularly musically gifted or educated, couldn’t possibly perceive.

JG: A lot of the critics have their favorite recording from the past and they can never get over that. And I understand that. I have some favorite recordings, too. Ones that I will always hear in my mind. And that’s why now when I learn new music, I listen to many recordings at first and then I never listen again, because you could be easily influenced by these things, whether you like them or not. So I think it’s that. I mean, when we talk about pacing, that’s a very individual thing. Some people think Mozart should always be quick and fast, and some people think it needs more time and should be slow, but there’s no real truth to this. It’s just that we make decisions based on our knowledge and what we feel, and sometimes people agree, and [sometimes they] don’t…

OW: How faithfully do you try and reproduce the original score as the composer intended it, and how much of yourself do you try and put into it? Can you actually do both?

JG: That’s a great question. I get asked that a lot from people when they’re talking about conducting. There are many different theories on this. I don’t think your individual self and your experience should affect the piece of music in any way. Some other people would disagree. Bernstein put a lot of himself in a Schumann symphony or in a Mahler symphony. He took liberties that, let’s say, I don’t think Mahler would have been happy with. I really believe we have to do 100 percent justice to what these composers left for us, whether they’re alive or dead. Puccini is so specific in a piece like “La Bohème.” What’s so unfortunate is that these traditions that are only traditions because of laziness, or because a singer needed more time, or it was easier for orchestra to slow down at a certain point. It’s very dangerous because I believe in trimming the fat from these things. I think when you look at something like “La Bohème,” something that’s so perfect, every little rubato, every time taken, it’s clear in the score when Puccini wants it. And if we follow these instructions, it’s glorious. The pacing is great. The music makes sense. The dramaturgy makes sense. But once you start taking liberties because someone says, ‘Well, I just feel it this way…’ That’s heartbreaking to me. That bothers me. But then in the music of Bach, for example, there’s very little instruction. So you have a lot of freedom artistically. There’re not as many dynamics, there’re no tempo markings, there’s no phrasing and very few instructions. So you need to make a lot of these artistic decisions. I think in a piece like “Wozzeck” by Berg, or “La Bohème,” or a Strauss opera, you should really try to follow [the composer’s] instructions because they knew what they was doing. And I think it’s the way the composer intended the music to be heard. When you reinvent the wheel every time — I don’t see the point.

I could understand a director doing that, because it’s a director’s job to not do the same Zeffirelli production every time you see “La Bohème.” You know, it’s beautiful, it’s charming, but I think it’s healthy to see a modern version every once in a while, you know? As long as the music is good… But as far as the conductor’s job is concerned, I think it’s our job to do justice to the score that has been left for us.

OW: What is your dream piece to conduct? Is there anything that you aspire to be involved in?

JG: Well, the obvious thing is the entire “Ring Cycle,” because I’m just doing “Die Walküre” now and I’ve never done “Das Rheingold,” “Siegfried,” or “Gotterdammerung.” This would be a dream of mine: to do all four in a great house, or, let’s say, a great city, or a great environment, where it will attract tourists and all the Wagner fans (because they come from all over when there’s a “Ring Cycle,” it’s really funny).

So, this would be my dream. Verdi’s “Otello” is also a dream of mine. I’ve done “Falstaff” a lot and I’ve done “La Traviata,” “Simon Boccanegra,” and “Rigoletto,” but “Otello” is a dream piece for me. It is very hard to cast. It’s very hard to find a suitable tenor. And a Desdemona — a soprano that has a big enough and beautiful enough voice without hurting themselves in the role. As far as what I’m working on in the future, I have a new, very strange opera that I’m excited about that’s coming out two years from now: “Król Roger,” or “King Roger,” by Karol Szymanowski. It’s very, very beautiful, and it’s not known. Pieces like this are exciting for me because I get to bring it, I get to showcase it. It’s very exotic. It has amazing melodies. It’s this story that takes place in Sicily a long time ago, and is a cross between pagan music — like very exotic, sexy music — and the language of Szymanowski, which is very interesting and rarely performed.

So, things like that excite me. I’m also doing a Mahler Symphony No. 8 for the first time in Berlin. And that is the biggest piece Mahler wrote. And it’s the only symphony I haven’t conducted yet. So, there’s a lot of fun things in the works for me now, which I’m very excited about.