“God has wrought many things out of oppression,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his opening remarks at the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival. “He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create, and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.” His insights certainly apply to the Black musical tradition in its many forms, but also any music used by marginalized people to resist, liberate and connect themselves with a communal identity across generations. Music is how we stay alive; music is how we remember.
“Loving v. Virginia” — a new opera with a libretto written by Jesuit Media Lab contributor Jessica Murphy Moo, a score composed by Damien Geter and directed by Denyce Graves — is a powerful musical act of memory. It’s a “dangerous memory,” in the words of Johann Baptist Metz: a story that challenges us to look at the past with clear eyes and to accept the demands of the present.
On Sunday, May 4, 2025, I was fortunate enough to attend one of opera’s world premiere performances at the Center for the Arts at George Mason University, along with other friends of the Jesuit Media Lab. Despite being a lifelong lover of musical theater, this was my first trip to the opera, and I was excited to experience an unfamiliar artistic medium. In particular, I was fascinated to see how Murphy Moo and the rest of the creative team translated history into operatic drama.
The opera tells the true story of the titular Supreme Court case, spanning from 1958 to 1967. It centers on an interracial married couple — Mildred Jeter Loving (Flora Hawk), a Black woman, and Richard Loving (Jonathan Michie), a white man — who fought to have their union legally recognized by the state of Virginia during the height of Jim Crow. Mildred enlists two young lawyers from the ACLU — Bernard Cohen (Troy Cook) and Philip Hirschkop (Christian Sanders) — to represent them. Their ultimate victory is one of the watershed moments in American civil rights, spelling the beginning of the end for segregation laws and laying the foundation for future progress, including the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015.
As it turns out, the answer to my question about how this story would translate to opera was: compellingly! Murphy Moo and the rest of the creative team tell the story with verve and humanity, weaving a richly emotional story around all of those legal briefs and appeals. I’ll admit that I’m not very (at all) conversant in the law, but I could easily follow the Lovings’ journey thanks to the strength of the storytelling. “I’m always thinking about the story and the audience and how they’re going to receive it,” Murphy Moo said in a pre-show Zoom event hosted by the Jesuit Media Lab.
An accomplished librettist and editor of Portland Magazine, Murphy Moo approached writing “Loving v. Virginia” with a researcher’s care. She visited the Lovings’ hometown and toured the courthouse where they were convicted and the jailhouse where Mildred, pregnant and alone, was held for several nights. “I sat in those spaces to try to feel them and to try to convey some of that to Damien,” she said, “because sometimes the music is the most powerful way to get an emotion across.”
You can hear it in the contrast between the warm strings that define the Lovings’ home in Virginia and the frantic horns that accompany their exile in Washington, D.C. Geter’s score — performed by the Richmond Symphony — creates an atmosphere that roots you in the Lovings’ emotional experience even before they begin to sing. And when they do sing, it’s euphoria: Hawk’s powerhouse soprano and Michie’s rich baritone are the sounds of hearts laid bare. These are two people who will face down the world to hold onto what they love: their home, their children, each other.
Going into “Loving v. Virginia,” I had been thinking about music’s ability to connect us across time, space and culture. There’s a reason, after all, that music has so often been used in evangelization, including by Jesuit missionaries (in fact, an opera written in the 1700s to tell the story of St. Francis Xavier to Indigenous people in Bolivia was recently rediscovered and performed). Music reaches us in a way that goes beyond reason. It makes emotions — the singer’s and our own — immediate and palpable. It’s too easy to forget that the people in our histories were as real and vibrant as we are. By translating their story into song, Murphy Moo, Geter and the performers allow us to connect with them as human beings.
This isn’t merely sentimental: It’s a powerful tool for empathy. Hearing that a law is unjust is one thing; it’s another to have to feel the terror, shame, frustration and heartbreak that it inspires in actual people. I found that very Ignatian: “Loving v. Virginia” is, at heart, an exercise in contemplation. If you want to learn more about the case, it will give you that information. But the real purpose is to feel along with Mildred and Richard, and to reflect on what those feelings call forth in you.
Murphy Moo spoke to this at the Jesuit Media Lab call: “It’s really about a person who used her voice. And opera is about voice! In a very real way, you feel the power of the human voice.”
Driving home, I found myself reflecting, inevitably, on how the story resonates with our present moment in American history. The Lovings endure a painful contradiction throughout the story: The state of Virginia is both their adversary and their beloved home. Hasn’t that always been the story of marginalized people in America — and isn’t it the story now? That’s why we need stories like “Loving v. Virginia”: to remind us that injustice doesn’t have the last word, that other stories are possible.