RICHMOND, Va. — This weekend, a Virginia story that changed the country takes the stage in Richmond as an opera about the U.S Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia wraps up its world premiere at the Carpenter Theatre.
The Lovings were an interracial Virginia couple whose SCOTUS victory ended interracial marriage bans in the country.
At its heart, the opera's composer, Damien Geter, said he sees Loving v. Virginia as a love story.
“It’s kind of like a Romeo and Juliet-type of situation,” Geter said. “Except the Montagues and the Capulets are the U.S. government.”
Geter has spent the last four years turning the landmark court case into an opera, which debuted in Norfolk last month and wraps up its world premiere with three shows in Richmond.
“It’s a very important story,” he said. “It’s a very important milestone, and the step up for civil rights as well.”
The opera was co-commissioned by the Richmond Symphony and the Virginia Opera to commemorate the opera's 50th anniversary season.
Sharing the same name as the Supreme Court case, “Loving v. Virginia” tells the story of the interracial Caroline County couple Richard and Mildred Loving.
The pair were arrested and convicted of violating the state’s Racial Integrity Act, something they appealed all the way to the highest court in the land. They won their case in 1967.
Geter said it is a story he grew up knowing, as he was born in Petersburg, raised in Chesterfield (he graduated from Matoaca High School), and studied at Old Dominion University.
He also grew up loving music. His parents had records of all genres, but two stood out.
“They had Beethoven 6 and Tchaikovsky 5, and I remember those records very clearly because it was different than anything else I’d heard before. I fell in love with those pieces," said Geter. "It has to do with the acoustic element, the live performance, the humanity that's involved in playing these pieces, and the emotions that come about from playing this music."
Geter said that while his initial focus was on trumpet, he began singing opera in college and has done so around the world. He’s also conducted in the past, but his main focus now is composing.
"I always wrote music as a child, and it was because when I was taking piano lessons, my piano instructor encouraged me to improvise, and that's kind of how that began… It put a seed in me as a young child that I could actually write music, and I didn't have to perform the music that someone else wrote, but I could actually write the music too," said Geter. "It was not on my list of things to do, and now it is the thing that I do the most."
Geter said he got the call to compose for "Loving" back in 2021, when he was in the middle of composing his first opera. It was an easy yes, he said, as their story is in the wheelhouse of what he’s done previously.
“Being a Black American, and civil rights and social justice issues. I write a lot about those pieces. Not all my music is about those things, but a lot of it is,” Geter said.
Working with Jessica Murphy Moo, the librettist (the person who writes the words to an opera), Geter said the music for "Loving" pulls from an eclectic mix. With that, he hopes to signify that the Lovings were everyday people, just trying to live their lives.
"You'll hear some bluegrass in the very beginning, which signifies how they met, because Richard used to play country music with Mildred's brothers," Geter said. "You don't hear a lot of music from the 50s and 60s. I didn't pull necessarily from those times, except for in a couple instances at the drag strip and also later on within the protest scene. There's some rock moments. There is a guitar in it. Then there's also a guitar that plays in an acoustic way, which is sort of a more folk iteration of a lot of the music that happens in the opera."
"It puts us in the place of Virginia," he added.
Geter said he hopes that people who see the show take away a sense of empathy for the Lovings’ fight, and the knowledge that the power of an individual should not be diminished.
“We can effect change on the individual level, and you don’t have to be this Herculean person to do so,” Geter said.
For more information about the opera’s Richmond debut, visit here.
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