Limelight Magazine

Recording of the Month: Jake Heggie’s ‘Intelligence’
October 2025

The Limelight Recording of the Month for October is Intelligence, the latest opera from Jake Heggie, one of the world’s leading musical dramatists and composer of Dead Man Walking.

A gripping thriller, it’s based on a true story set in the South during the American Civil War. The cast, captured here at its Houston Grand Opera premiere, stars Jamie Barton as Elizabeth Van Lew – White, privileged and sharp as a tack – and Janai Brugger as Mary Jane Bowser, an enslaved Black woman who worked at the Van Lew mansion. An unlikely partnership saw them infiltrate the Confederate White House, sending crucial information north.

Clive Paget caught up with Heggie to learn more about this remarkable story and find out how the composer went figured out how to tell his tale.