The men burst into the bedroom in the middle of the night and shined their flashlights into the eyes of the sleeping couple.
“Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?” one of the men demanded.
“I’m his wife,” the woman answered. Her husband gestured to the five-week-old marriage certificate hanging on the wall next to their bed.
“That’s no good here,” said the sheriff before hauling the young couple off to jail.
Their crime? Being Virginians in an interracial marriage in 1958.
Since Mildred and Richard Loving’s arrest in Caroline County nearly 70 years ago, the couple’s story has spawned various movies, books and documentaries, including 2016’s locally filmed “Loving” where a house in the 2300 block of Venable Street stood in for the Lovings’ home in Washington, D.C.
This Friday, the first operatic telling of their tale comes to Richmond as “Loving v. Virginia,” a new work named after the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage in America. Co-commissioned by Virginia Opera and the Richmond Symphony in partnership with the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and co-produced with the Minnesota Opera, “Loving v. Virginia” has been five years in the making.
“It’s a story that celebrates our community,” says director Denyce Graves-Montgomery. “It’s about family. It’s a story about the transformative power of love [and] how the power of love can change the world.”
With a score by Damien Geter and a libretto by Jessica Murphy Moo, “Loving v. Virginia” recounts nearly a decade of the Lovings’ struggle to legalize interracial marriage in this country.
“Tell the court I love my wife”
Softspoken and humble, the Lovings never sought the spotlight.
The couple grew up in Central Point, a small community in Caroline County that was known for having friendly relations between the races. Though Richard was white, his closest friends were Black, and he often drag raced with Mildred’s older brothers. Mildred, who is described as having both Native American and African ancestry, began dating Richard while she was in high school. After Mildred became pregnant at the age of 18 the couple traveled to D.C. to get married as interracial marriage was banned in Virginia at the time.
The Lovings were arrested five weeks later. They pled guilty in Caroline County Circuit Court and were sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for 25 years on the condition that they leave the state and never return at the same time.
The Lovings moved to the nation’s capital but missed their families and rural way of life in Caroline.
Inspired by the March on Washington in 1963, Mildred wrote to then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to ask for help. Kennedy referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union; the ACLU argued it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. When asked by one of their lawyers if they had a message to convey to the highest court in the land, Richard said “Tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”
The Lovings won their case, legalizing interracial marriage across the nation, but their celebration was short lived. Just eight years after the decision, the Lovings were hit by a drunk driver, killing Richard and blinding Mildred in her right eye. After her husband died, Mildred largely stayed out of the public eye aside from a 2007 statement in support of LGBTQ+ rights. She died of pneumonia in the following year.
Prior to the legalization of same-sex marriage, the Lovings’ case was cited as precedent in federal court decisions that found same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional. Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, also cited the Lovings’ case.
A love story with conflict
To celebrate its 50th anniversary season, Virginia Opera decided to go big.
Five winters ago, just before COVID-19 made its first appearance in Virginia, the opera company held an artistic advisory committee meeting at its headquarters in Norfolk. To celebrate the upcoming golden jubilee, artistic director and chief conductor Adam Turner suggested that they commission a new opera that either told a Virginian story or enlisted a Virginian composer. The idea to commission an operatic adaptation of the Lovings’ story came about during a conversation between Turner and a board member after the meeting.
“The greatest operas, in my mind, are love stories with conflict,” Turner says. “‘Loving v. Virginia’ is that. They wanted nothing but to be in love, to raise a family and live in the community in which they were raised.”
Virginia Opera approached Damien Geter, an acclaimed composer and singer who often blends classical music with that of the Black diaspora, to pen the work. Geter, who grew up in the Matoaca area of Chesterfield and attended Matoaca High School, agreed; he’d previously contemplated writing an opera about the Lovings as a short piece for Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative.
“I don’t know if anything like this will happen again in my career,” says Geter, who is also Richmond Symphony’s composer-in-residence this season. “It feels kismet in a lot of ways, and I feel honored to be able to do this.”
To help complete his vision, Geter enlisted the talents of Denyce Graves-Montgomery and librettist Jessica Murphy Moo. As research for the libretto, Moo traveled to Caroline County and visited the courthouse, jail and rural landscape that feature prominently in the Lovings’ story.
“They wanted to get back to this place,” says Moo. “This was their home. This was where Mildred and Richard Loving felt they belonged.”
Like many of the people involved in the creation of this opera, Moo is in an interracial marriage.
“I’ve always felt an immense debt to Richard and Mildred Loving,” says Moo. “They were standing up for themselves, but they really stood up for a whole lot of people 60 years on.”
Flora Hawk, the soprano who plays Mildred Loving in the show, first got involved with the production during the opera’s first singing workshop with piano two years ago. Hawk, who identifies as being of mixed race, is in an interracial marriage and has an interracial child. She says the show is “extremely personal and very close to my heart.”
Jonathan Michie, the baritone who plays Richard Loving, took part in the first orchestral workshop a year ago. He is also in an interracial marriage.
“We’re not trying to scream an overly political message,” he says. “We’re trying to just tell this story as honestly as we can.”
The singers say Geter and Moo have allowed them to collaborate in the process and changed words and vocal lines to fit their talents more comfortably. Michie describes the process as akin to “having a tailor-made suit for your voice,” adding that he’s appreciated the ability to give input during the opera’s creation.
“The chance to do this is rare, and we don’t take that for granted,” he says.
Graves-Montgomery raves about her cast, saying that Hawk “has an innocence in the quality of her sound that reaches right across the proscenium arch,” and that Michie “is kind and compassionate, and it comes across in his singing; you hear it through the warmth of his voice.”
“The greatest operas, in my mind, are love stories with conflict,” says Adam Turner, artistic director of Virginia Opera. “‘Loving v. Virginia’ is that. They wanted nothing but to be in love, to raise a family and live in the community in which they were raised.”
Though the opera offers an authentic recounting of real life events, it also includes a bit of magical realism: the law itself is portrayed as a chorus in the show.
“The law really was a major part of their story, so we decided that the law should sing,” Moo says. “You hear a lot of language that’s pulled from the warrant for their arrest, their court summons, their court decision and the racial integrity act.”
Turner stresses that though the opera is modern, the score isn’t atonal or dissonant.
“This is not that,” he says. “This is a very beautiful, lyrical, accessible, rhapsodic, almost motion picture-esque approach to composing, and the text is gripping and beautifully adapted to for the voice.”
Instead, the opera pulls from blues, bluegrass and gospel musical styles.
“For all the contemporary operas that you’re seeing put out into the world now as people try to expand the operatic canon, this one is going to have some staying power,” Turner says. “It’s so powerful in its accessibility and its relevance. People are going to be impressed and entertained.”
Virginia Opera to feature more local stories
The commissioning of a new opera comes amid a period of change and adaptation at Virginia Opera.
When the pandemic made it difficult to attract operagoers inside performing arts venues, the opera resolved to stage 2021’s “Das Rheingold” at Topgolf locations in Richmond and Virginia Beach. Singers rode golf carts into scenes and belted out arias while dressed like Arnold Palmer.
Nationwide, the performing arts organizations that survived the pandemic have struggled to bring back audiences. In response, the opera company has worked to expand its audience base, staging Gregory Spears’ gay romance “Fellow Travelers” in 2023 and Paul Moravec’s Underground Railroad-themed “Sanctuary Road” last year.
While still producing classic works like this season’s “Carmen” and “Don Giovanni,” Turner says Virginia Opera is proactively trying to feature stories about Virginians and by Virginian storytellers. “Loving v. Virginia” is part of that effort.
“We’re ushering in something brand new, something that’s deeply meaningful and resonating with our community,” says Turner. “We’re going to keep welcoming newcomers to opera with open arms, breaking down barriers and showing that opera can be for anybody.”
Additionally, arts organizations are weathering shifts in philanthropy and charitable giving, with younger givers, civic organizations and governments generally prioritizing social causes over arts organizations more than they used to. At the same time, the costs for staging an opera, traveling and housing artists in hotels have become more expensive. Because of financial concerns, Virginia Opera swapped out its previously planned staging of Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods” this season.
“All we can do is ride the wave and try to stay solvent and responsible while finding new people, new sources of revenue, new fundraising possibilities,” Turner says. “We’re always trying to identify new donors and patronage.”
And that’s to say nothing of the second Trump administration’s aggressive slashing of federal grant funding through the National Education Association and the National Endowment for the Humanities; Trump’s recent budget proposal would eliminate both institutions.
“We’re certainly feeling a little bit of that,” says Turner of the cuts. “We just watch our expenses. The most important element to me is that quality is paramount. We have to maintain or even improve the product that we put on our stages and make sure that our audiences are getting the very best orchestral play.”
So far, these efforts seem to be paying off in ticket sales for “Loving v. Virginia.”
“The response has been very positive,” Geter says. “People were subscribing [to Virginia Opera’s next season] before the show was even done.”
For Graves-Montgomery, the ability to honor the Lovings’ sacrifices in song is “the opportunity of a lifetime.”
“It’s a powerful symbol, still, to the ongoing fight for civil rights,” she says of the Lovings’ devotion to each other. “It shows that something as personal as love can become a revolutionary act.”
Virginia Opera’s “Loving v. Virginia” plays May 9-11 at the Dominion Energy Center, 600 E. Grace St. For more information visit vaopera.org or call 866-673-7282.
