Opera:
The Garment of Praise
—a libretto of the Annunciation to Zechariah
by Shann Ray
-Leadership and Forgiveness Studies, Gonzaga University
-Poetry, Stanford University
“In the beginning was the Word,” signifies the mysterious and generative force of the Divine in the world, and reveals a new understanding of love. This love, a love imbued with unforeseen and fearful magnitude, is the starting point for the Annunciation to Zechariah. The passage continues, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John the Baptist, the precursor or forerunner of the living Word embodied in the Messiah, is among the great souls, and if we listen, his presence may call to us, asking us to walk with him into the wilderness. Of those who seek to understand or more humbly know God, John is an original voice, crying out.
Rugged, perhaps enraged, beautifully uncontained, revolutionary, in the end John is killed for his beliefs, and so his life echoes all who choose faith and hope when confronted by despair. I’m struck by John’s humility, and the elegant way he attends those who must live their lives against the grain of the common. They are lightning strike and enigma. They are storm and afterglow. In trepidation, distress, and suffering, and by joy, hope, and gladness they lead us through wilderness into the promise of love.
In writing the libretto for The Garment of Praise I felt afraid. Slowly, building incrementally over time, dread came to reside in my chest and did not leave me until I finished the work and gave the libretto to Fr. Kevin Waters, the composer of the stunning score of this opera world premier. In my fear I wanted to be comforted and find peace, so I often took time between writing to rest quietly in the arms of my wife, Jennifer, or to hold hands with my three daughters, Natalya, Ariana, and Isabella. Silence accompanied me. I listened to the music that kept playing in my mind. In the ancient Latin, the Anima Christi takes the feminine form, signifying the Soul of Christ. To be surrounded by my wife and daughters was light and water to me. In the dark of my own limitations and grave doubts my wife and daughters were illumination, and love.
The Garment of Praise is not directly about John, but rather his mother and father, Elizabeth and Zechariah. An opera in five scenes with prologue and epilogue, the story eventuates in the arrival of John but is only opaquely about his life. Rather, the narrative follows the journey of love between Elizabeth and Zechariah, in their gladness, but centrally also in their emptiness. A couple, representing Elizabeth and Zechariah, lie down together. A boy, an echo-song of their son yet to come, attends them in their barrenness and in their eventual fulfillment. We encounter the crucibles they face and the interwoven if also singular nature of their separate experience of the silence of God.
In the Prologue, love is kindled between Elizabeth and Zechariah. The two are seen walking along the Jordan, a body of water akin to the river of life. In young love they seek God and listen for God’s voice, and God’s voice resounds in their own radiant love for one another. As they age, doubt descends, and they find themselves in a barren home. Now, as they go seeking God they find only silence. Elizabeth enters despair and Zechariah seeks to restore her. Faced with the incomprehensible nature of God and God’s future, they question God, grow humble, and receive God’s comfort. As the Prologue ends, Elizabeth has a rebirth of hope, while Zechariah experiences his own initial encounter with doubt.
Scene One begins in the sacred space of the home, with Elizabeth and Zechariah recognizing God in each other. Elizabeth’s fears of the providence of God in her barrenness return, plaguing her. An adolescent boy enters and brings Elizabeth and Zechariah a cup of wine. The couple drink and then move solemnly to the marriage bed. As at the opening of the opera, a woman and a man representing the couple, lie down together. The wine-bearing youth lies momentarily alongside the woman, then the man. The youth then exits the stage amid growing darkness. Again, Zechariah consoles Elizabeth, but she will not be consoled. Separately and together they drink the dark. A symbolic woman remains in bed alone. Elizabeth and Zechariah, with the bed between them, stand apart, looking away from each other, the marriage bed haunting them as they wait for light that doesn’t come. They face the storm with the knowledge that many waters cannot quench love, and love is stronger than death. Still they doubt they are made in the image of God, and their doubt multiplies.
As Scene Two unfolds, Elizabeth and Zechariah continue to stand over a barren bed, symbolized by a woman sleeping alone. They enter midlife and walk into the world separately but fluidly, Zechariah to the Temple, Elizabeth to her work at the loom. Later she walks to the well and as they pass one another they embrace in a loving and sensual manner, despite their emptiness. They lay their necks on one another and hold hands in an intimate embrace until they part. They go out to their separate work, him in the Temple, her at the loom. When he touches water, his hands ache for days. They walk together. They walk alone. When they return home, they return to each other tenderly.
With Scene Three, in the later life of Elizabeth and Zechariah, divine intervention takes place. Water, ever present as symbol and reality, eventually becomes a healing presence for Zechariah. Now as Elizabeth works the loom, Zechariah is seen in the Temple, praying. Initially, his doubt outweighs his understanding. At home she helps him, washing his hands in water even as his hands are in pain. A significant reversal takes place as Elizabeth turns directly toward him, seeking to comfort and console him in his struggle.
In Scene Four, Zechariah kneels before the Temple’s altar. He lifts his eyes and tries to see Gabriel who is masked in darkness. Gabriel stands at the altar of incense. As a bright light suddenly illuminates Gabriel, Zechariah draws back in great fear. Then Gabriel proceeds to reassure and instruct him. The boy seen earlier enters with a glass of wine and pours it ritually on the ground. Gabriel stands with fire beneath and behind as the angel’s body is gradually illuminated in gold. Gabriel departs, and the stage goes dark, then the lights come up on Zechariah on one knee opening his hands in a receiving motion at the altar. He rises and goes out to greet the people and though he can’t speak they surmise he has seen a vision. After a moment he returns home to Elizabeth and they embrace as the stage goes dark. When the lights come up the women are at the well awaiting the pregnant Elizabeth. When she arrives, she serves them by filling their vessels with water.
Scene Five reveals the chorus of women singing praise to God for the miracle of child birth. After the well, the chorus of friends and relatives gather outside the house of Elizabeth and Zechariah. Inside, she pours water over Zechariah’s hands and he pours water over hers, and the water no longer brings pain but joy. When they walk out to greet the people, Zechariah steps forward raising his arm as he uses his index finger to write the name of John in the sky. His tongue is loosed and he can speak again, and now he and Elizabeth and the throng of people walk to the banks of the Jordan. They all move slowly along the Jordan to the Temple, entering the Temple for the presentation of John to God. Zechariah symbolically raises the child John on high.
The Epilogue shows the presentation of John in the Temple of the Lord as the people speak praise to God, affirming God’s everlasting love. All are gathered speaking, then singing of what God has done. Elizabeth, Zechariah, the young boy, the symbolic couple, the women and the men, stand and proclaim the glory of God.
In the end, The Garment of Praise is a story of hope, communion, loss, and return. A woman and a man wait for God’s voice. Patient, with expectation, they read the signs, but hear no answer. God’s voice is not our voice. They are desolated. They lose faith. But still they listen. They listen for God in the silence with the expectation of the beauty yet to come. Below the insistent chatter, below all chaos and fracture, they listen, and in the quiet, they hear an angel of mercy speaking to them. They doubt. They are struck silent. They believe again. The wilderness John represents is found in their anguish but finally also in their kindness and their reconciliation with God and one another.
With them we are given the garment of praise instead of the spirit of despair.
The garment of praise is love.
The Garment of Praise Delivers a Message that Heals from the Heart
As Shann Ray and the Rev. Kevin Waters, S.J. collaborated for The Garment of Praise, the lengthy process of fits and starts mirrored a key point of the opera they were creating: nothing ever goes as planned.
Waters is an internationally recognized composer and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Gonzaga University. He penned a musical score for The Garment of Praise shortly before he retired in 2017. His longtime colleague Ray, an author, poet and professor in the Gonzaga School of Leadership Studies then undertook the arduous task of setting words and staging to that music.
A labor of faith, love and friendship, the project took seven years to complete.
“I thought it would never be performed, after year five,” said Ray, who recalled those long hours the two men spent together in Waters’ crammed office with a piano and musical scores stacked to the ceiling. “Over the years, we’d stay in touch,” he said. “The opera kept developing.”
“The Garment of Praise” will debut on Friday at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center.
“Along the way, it’s been a unified effort from across the campus and it’s been beautiful to honor Father Waters this way,” Ray said. “He’s coming up from California and he’ll be there in the front row.”
The world premiere opera tells a sacred story of hope, communion, loss and return.
“I wanted to compose a libretto that would tell the story we all have if we talk about our beloved relationships: a story of the dream of healthiness, intimacy, healing, atonement … forgiveness-asking to restorative principles, and also the story of doubt. We all have doubt, we all face loss, sometimes it doesn’t work out … perhaps most times,” said Ray.
The words, “the garment of praise,” come from the Old Testament and relate to a spirit of faith from the inside which cloaks us from despair on the outside.
Friday’s opera will follow the intricate journey of love between Elizabeth and Zechariah chronicled in sacred scripture as they seek God. The emptiness, doubt and despair they feel growing old together in a barren home and the comfort they receive after God answers their prayers through the miraculous birth of John the Baptist.
“There’s an ancient concept that God dwells in the thick darkness,” Ray said. “I love that notion of life. We are all tasked in a way to eat our own humiliation and to understand and embrace what the shadow means … especially if we want to consider how light lands not only in art, but in the world, like dawn or spring, new life, birth, the significant forms of illumination,” he said.
For Ray, the culmination of this opera brings with it a touching family moment. His daughters, Ariana Ferch and Natalya Fisher will perform as principal singers. Born and raised in Spokane, they studied opera and musical theater at Oklahoma City University and now work as performing artists in New York City.
(note: Natalya was recently cast in Rent in a professional theater near Boston, and Ariana was cast in the national tour forThe Sound of Music).
“The libretto is beautifully written. I love singing my dad’s words. I consider it a gift to have had his words spoken over me my whole life,” said Fisher, who will portray the angel Gabriel. It is a role which is often considered masculine.
“The experience has been fascinating bringing a more feminine approach, and also just discussing that in the art form and the opera singing world,” she said.
Ferch will appear as Elizabeth.
“Father Water’s music is beautiful, captivating and interesting … intriguing. When I get to sing from his orchestral score, the music just makes my soul and my heart open up. The music very much draws you in,” she said.
Jadrian Tarver will join Ferch on stage in his role as Zechariah. A Florida native, Tarver spent years on the East Coast performing vocally as he studied music education. After earning multiple college degrees, his career path veered to Eastern Washington.
“I found myself traveling across the country on I-90 headed toward Spokane,” said Tarver, who now works as a voice professor at Gonzaga University.
“The Garment of Praise” production team consists of 28 orchestra members, 12 chorus voices and nine Gonzaga University dance students. Sparse staging, water-themed elements and single instrumentation will help bring auras of emptiness and spirituality to life.
“Water has a lot of sacred scriptural reference to it,” said Gonzaga dance instructor, Karla Parbon, who is choreographing the opera with her colleague, Joseph Lyons-Wolf. Dancers will portray multiple characters.
“The dancers embody more of a contemporary style of dance … they’re constantly interchanging,” she said.
At the root of this ancient story is a message of the Divine.
“Nobody can define what the Divine is,” Ray said. “I think we make our guesses around the world, saying we believe or hope the Divine is love itself. And, when any of us experience love, I think we all feel we have experienced something of the Divine.”
–Cynthia Reugh, for The Spokesman Review
New Opera by Fr. Kevin Waters, SJ, and Librettist Shann Ray , World Premiere
On Friday, February 7, The Garment of Praise, a new opera by Fr. Kevin Waters, SJ, will premiere at Gonzaga University’s Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center. The opera, a story of hope, communion, loss and the love of God is about John the Baptist’s parents, Elizabeth and Zechariah, in the days before the miraculous birth of their son.
Fr. Waters, 91, served for more than three decades at Gonzaga as a professor of music and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. In 2021, he moved to Sacred Heart Jesuit Center, the health care/retirement community for the Jesuits West Province.
For decades, Fr. Waters, an organist and pianist, would begin each day composing music for an hour. He has been working on The Garment of Praise for many years, pairing with Shann Ray, a poet and professor of leadership at Gonzaga who wrote the opera’s libretto.
This is Fr. Waters’ fourth opera. His first, “Dear Ignatius, Dear Isabel” was commissioned by Loyola University Maryland to commemorate the school’s 125th anniversary in 1977. Fr. Waters knew two things: He did not want his opera to be an all-male production, and he wanted to have a strong woman as its main character. He found his inspiration in a book by Hugo Rahner, “St. Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women.”
The opera tells the story of the remarkable friendship between St. Ignatius of Loyola and Isabella Roser, a wealthy widow, patron and pen pal of Ignatius who frequently exchanged letters with the founder of the Society of Jesus.
His second opera, “The Mask of Hiroshima,” done in the classical Japanese style of a Noh drama with dialogue and songs, is about the 1945 aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bomb.
Edith Stein, the German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a nun, is the focus of his third opera. Murdered in the gas chamber at Birkenau because of her Jewish heritage, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was canonized in 1998 by Pope John Paul II.
The opera about Edith Stein has never been produced, which is not surprising given the challenges and expense of staging productions. The upcoming premiere of “The Garment of Praise” required a tremendous collaborative effort and many years of fundraising. Sponsors include Gonzaga University’s School of Leadership Studies, the Provost’s Office, the Office of Mission and Integration, the School of Education, and the College of Arts and Sciences.
Fr. Waters is headed to Spokane for the opera’s premiere, while back at his home community of Sacred Heart Jesuit Center, his fellow Jesuits and staff will be watching the livestream.
When asked which of his four operas he is proudest of, Fr. Waters says, “When you have multiple children, you cannot choose one as your favorite.” As he contemplates the excitement of the upcoming premiere he added, “I have the anxieties of an expectant parent.”
Opera World Premiere at Gonzaga, A Local Affair
The Garment of Praise is the world premiere of an opera composed by one of Gonzaga University’s beloved Jesuits, Father Kevin Waters.
Shann Ray, professor of leadership studies, has been a longtime friend of Fr. Waters due to their shared love of arts and music. Thus, when asked to compose the libretto – the text of the opera – to accompany Waters’ original musical creation, Ray immediately agreed.
Ray wrote the libretto after several visits in Fr. Waters’ office – a small room with only enough space for Fr. Waters to sit at a desk and Ray at a piano, with the rest of the limited space overflowing with music compositions. They formed conversations that eventually led to the completed opera over the course of a couple of years. Seven years later the production is in full bloom, showing Ray and Fr. Waters’ put together a compelling story of the miraculous arrival of John the Baptist and the hope, communion, loss, and the return between people who love one another and seek God.
“The Garment of Praiseis about love, doubt, and the eventual deepening and maturing of love,” Ray says.
The narrative follows John the Baptist’s parents, Elizabeth and Zechariah, as they navigate the difficulties of being unable to conceive. In just five scenes with an additional prologue and epilogue, the story follows Elizabeth and Zechariah as they lean toward God throughout their highest of highs and lowest of lows, doubting along the way but eventually being met with the fruition of new life and joy.
Being the world premiere of an original opera composed completely by the university’s own Fr. Waters, Ray says he aims for this project to be “a beautiful and unifying bridge to encounter the heart and spirit of the Gonzaga community, a community of unique leadership and the wisdom that accompanies some of the more fierce and engaging aspects of love, doubt, and faith.”
Fr. Waters is an internationally recognized composer who served as professor of music and as the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Gonzaga University for many years. “Now in his 91st year, this opera may be his final composition,” Ray states.
The Garment of Praise is sponsored by Gonzaga’s School of Leadership Studies along with its Gonzaga co-sponsors – the Office of the Provost, the Office of Mission Integration, the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Education. Additionally, the orchestra performing Fr. Waters’ compositions are all from Spokane with many who teach or mentor music students at Gonzaga, as are the 12 voices in the chorus. The nine dancers featured in the opera are all from Gonzaga, making this a fully local and unified production.
“Our hope for those who attend the world premiere of Fr. Waters’ opera is that they are able to gather with a community of friends and loved ones, experience the beauty of life and music together, and receive the transformative experience of what Gonzaga University and our beloved Jesuits call the cura personalis: encountering a beloved community through wholeness in heart, mind and spirit.” Ray says.
–Annelise Allen, for Gonzaga University News Service
World Premiere
Join us at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, February 7, at 7:00 PM for the debut of Kevin Waters’ powerful opera, The Garment of Praise.
“This evocative work weaves the reflective and deeply human story of Elizabeth and Zechariah, parents of John the Baptist. With its stunning vocal and orchestral elements, the opera offers a clarion of peace, aimed at healing the heart and uplifting the spirit.”
–Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center Ticket Office
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