Artist Statement by Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce

In the 2025/26 season, Seattle Opera will present Fellow Travelers, one of the most frequently performed new operas of the past decade, in collaboration with New York-based artistic collective Up Until Now, as part of a national project that brings this important story to stages across the country. Read on for an artist statement from composer Gregory Spears and librettist Greg Pierce.

Opera thrives on stories with rich subtext, where characters cannot fully express themselves in words. Both politicians and gay men and women in Washington DC in the 1950s lived in a world full of coded sensibility—a culture operating under the surface and in counterpoint with the rigid formality of 1950s mores. In our operatic adaptation of Thomas Mallon’s novel Fellow Travelers, the world of backroom dealings underpinning DC’s political life becomes a hazy reflection of the romantic relationship between US State Department employee Hawkins Fuller and a young reporter Timothy Laughlin. In both the political world of the McCarthy Era and the private world of Hawk and Tim, dialogue could only tell part of the story. The musical language for Fellow Travelers would need to foreground the undercurrent of clandestine machinations alongside the love and forbidden longing churning under the surface of the words. 

In Tim and Hawk’s public interactions, love cannot simply “speak” its name. In the opening scene, we witness a conversation between both men on a park bench in Dupont Circle. To most 1950s bystanders, the conversation would seem unremarkable. To Tim it is a pick-up, filled with danger and anticipation. It is also for Tim, a sexual awakening. The music embodies both the excitement and the surface ordinariness of the exchange, a subtle tension familiar to anyone living in-the-closet. From this starting point, we looked for ways to express the innuendo-driven world of the couple while maintaining a relatively cool musical surface, reproducing in the other scenes the layered experience of the original park bench meeting. The score does this by blending two disparate styles: American minimalism and the courtly, melismatic singing style of medieval troubadours. Throughout the piece, minimalist passages represent the hum of office work—secretaries typing, interns rushing about—and McCarthyism’s political machine, ready to crush. The florid troubadour-like melodies, evocative of courtly longing, represent the passionate inner life of the lovers. These two styles are often present at the same time, generating musical tension and propelling the opera toward its tragic conclusion.

In an era where living “in-the-closet” is becoming increasingly rare, it seems important to put characters like Tim and Hawk on-stage — not just as historical victims struggling against homophobia, but as ordinary people fighting through life in an era where a public expression of love could threaten to destroy one’s world. Our hope is that the nuanced machinery of opera might play some small part reminding us of this history, while also preserving onstage the dangerous counterpoint that so often defined the gay experience in the mid-20th century. 

Fellow Travelers opens February 21, 2026, at McCaw Hall. Learn more at seattleopera.org/fellowtravelers.