In March 2020, as the lights dim on his Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater commissioned opera, “Intimate Apparel,” and rise on what will be a lengthy global pandemic, Ricky Ian Gordon reaches for his phone. His first call is to James Robinson, his friend, and the artistic director of the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) at the time (he is taking over the leadership of Seattle Opera). Gordon has a long history with OTSL, which has staged his operas, “27” and the acclaimed “Grapes of Wrath.” Gordon was ready to start a new opera, and contacting Robinson was a no-brainer. The result of the conversation, “This House,” directed by Robinson, has its world premiere on May 31, 2025, as part of OTSL’s 50th-Season celebration and lineup.

The opera takes place in a Harlem brownstone that has absorbed a hundred years of whispered triumphs and personal wreckage. “This House” lets the walls do the talking, literally.

Molding the Libretto

Robinson had a librettist with whom Gordon previously collaborated on “Intimate Apparel,” Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, in mind. Gordon loved the idea. Upon reaching out to Nottage, she suggested using her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber’s play, “This House,” written while she was a student at Brown University, as source material.

The play’s first draft felt scattered and a little confusing; after a muddled Brown reading, Gordon, Nottage, and Gerber holed up in a Providence hotel room, pages fanned across the bed, working the story into shape. “Ruby’s a poet… Lynn is a builder.” And though he called the process “great collaboration, not without fireworks, but what collaboration isn’t?” he praises Nottage’s knack for parking her ego when the work demands it, and Ruby for holding her own throughout.

As they molded the libretto, they paused over a duet set in Barcelona. Gordon suggested Gerber change the locale—Sondheim already owned the former. Gerber popped into his hotel room hours later, blurting out “Valencia!” Gordon noted, “Valencia sings better.” By evening, Gerber has folded the new city into a fresh lyric, a small change that typifies their line-by-line edit in service of “get[ting] the score right for Lynn and Ruby.”

The Valencia duet is the score’s emotional core: two gay men staring down the same terminal illness. Gordon insisted that it not follow anything and that instead, it come after an intermission so the audience can be fresh, having caught their breath after Act one.

Architecture of the Score

The structure became mutable. Originally conceived as a one-act work, the intensity of the individual scenes, once set to music, made it clear that an intermission was necessary. Luckily, each act runs no longer than 56 minutes, which Gordon, a numerologist on the side, finds fortuitous. When a scene feels too short, lacking some salient facts, Gordon lifts the hood and rewrites, trusting the shared voice to hide his fingerprints: “Collaboration begins when no one can remember who wrote what.” He sent what he wrote to Nottage and Gerber. They responded: “We love it.”

One rule: no off-stage voices. Every singer—soloist and chorus member remains in view, doing double duty. Characters become orchestra; effects turn into vocal lines; the house itself sings. The plumbing wheezes, but it is reed players blowing into mouthpieces; the walls breathe.

Gordon’s score is filled with pastiche-like evocations of musical eras and genres, including ragtime, bebop, and ’70s groove. Like changing the channel every few minutes, the remote clicks, and the audience is presented with a musical shift. The trick was to keep the audience situated as the opera moved through different periods.

A Compost Heap of Influences

These days, Gordon calls himself a musical “trash heap.” Nottage upgraded the image: “compost heap.” It’s a metaphor he likes. “The old scraps feed new growth.” Referring to himself as an “elder artist,” he believes he has earned the right to quote earlier scores, stating, “I’ve lived long enough to have a back-catalog worth stealing from.”

With age comes dividends. Act one closes with a rag Gordon wrote decades ago. Two bars from “Grapes of Wrath” hide farther in, a nod to anyone tracking his lifelong work.

Ask where he lives inside the score, and he nods to Linden, a painter who frets he “has not even begun.” That confession feels personal. The composer, himself, “works like a demon,” proving wrong his father’s voice roaming in his head calling him lazy.

The Voices of “This House”

From the start, Gordon had vocalists in mind. His cast was hand-picked: voices he mentored and trusts. He likes casting young singers, saying, “…Get them while they’re young, before caution sets in… and “who can float a pianissimo B-flat one minute and growl the next.” He praises OTSL’s Young Artist Program. “St. Louis has always had the best pipeline; the singers who come through here are extraordinary, and it doesn’t hurt they always seem to know my songs.” He is giving several Master Classes while he is there.

While running down the principal cast, he told director Jim Robinson he “wanted [mezzo-soprano] Brianna Hunter to play Zoe,” the female lead. He adds that Hunter previously sang Gertrude Stein in Detroit Opera’s staging of “27,” so “she’s gotta be Zoe.” For his two male leads, one tenor, one baritone, he looked for vocalists who “sing like angels but act like bare-knuckle boxers.” One of them, Justin Austin [Baritone], as well as Adrienne Danrich [Soprano] and Krysty Swann [mezzo-soprano] all starred in “Intimate Apparel, so they were natural and immediate choices. “Since every soloist functions as part of the pit, versatility is at the top of the criterion. No one exits the stage.”

The Jitters

Cast chosen, rehearsals complete, Gordon will snap the folder shut. He has done this for decades, yet the prospect of first-night silence still lurks in his psyche. “Premieres scare me,” he admits. “I walk out thinking, did I get away with it again? Then I go home and start over. Try yet again to feel entitled enough to breathe the air.”

Door closed, door opened. It’s the cycle that keeps the house singing.

“This House” runs from May 31 to June 29, 2025, at OTSL.