Photo: Dario Acosta
According to composer Gregory Spears, we are living in the Garden of Eden. We just don’t know it. “Art is a way to tap into the beauty of the world. It’s a tool to open our eyes,” he says. He tells me about his cat. “I’m obsessed with my cat. My cat lives in the Garden of Eden. She’s there. She looks around, and she sees it. I think the Garden of Eden is everywhere. We just can’t see it.” The claim is wonderfully speculative. To be sure, one of the most distinctive qualities of Spears’s music stems from this premise: beauty and its pleasures cannot be constructed, only discovered. As such, Spears’s work produces a genuine sense of wonder—one that resists the reflexive pretentiousness that often burdens the avant-garde—yet it does so without lapsing into naïveté. This may be its greatest accomplishment; it embraces the totality of experience, with its suffering and its grief, and still makes that embrace pleasurable.
Later this April, Opera Philadelphia will premiere Spears’s newest piece, Sleepers Awake, an opera inspired primarily by Robert Walser’s modernist reimagining of Sleeping Beauty. Directed by Jenny Koons, the piece explores the strange vicissitudes of the sleep cycle, showing how waking and slumbering can both restore and anesthetize. The premiere is the latest work in a career that has wisely resisted the assumption that formal creativity and popular appeal must be at odds. In 2013, Spears premiered Paul’s Case, based on Willa Cather’s short story, which remains one of the most moving American operas of the past two decades. Later, with Fellow Travelers (2016), Spears achieved something rarer still: a contemporary opera that earned both critical admiration and a genuine audience. These are not the only operas Spears has composed, but to my ear, Paul’s Case and Fellow Travelers remain his clearest expressions of a Romantic disposition.
As a singular voice, Spears’s work resists easy categorization. In an essay on Paul’s Case, Alex Ross describes him as “a composer with roots in American minimalism,” while simultaneously “[reaching] back to the bittersweet textures of Renaissance consort music and the vocal ornaments of Baroque opera.” The singer Anthony Roth Costanzo, who has collaborated with Spears extensively, hears a “simultaneous forward-and-backward-looking compositional style that has a kind of contemporary clarity.” Both analyses point toward a transhistorical expansiveness: Spears’s music can feel at once current and time-honored, forward-looking yet lovingly suspended within the gilded luxury of the past.
Repetition, steady ostinati, and rich harmonic textures generate coherence, while older idioms lend the work a kind of ancient mystery. The result is music that feels remarkably un-neurotic and well-adjusted. It’s fresh, yet not unpleasantly experimental. And yet, despite the usefulness of these stylistic markers, Spears’s work may be more precisely understood through a broader aesthetic lens—one closer to Romanticism, with its restless pursuit of the sublime. What distinguishes Spears, however, is not that he imitates Romanticism’s forms, but that he engages its theoretical objectives, the conviction that art can transform the banal rather than merely describe it.
This is especially clear in Paul’s Case. In Cather’s original story, Paul is scrutinized from a distance. She subjects his aesthetic and material longings to a clinical, almost Flaubertian realism. Spears’s setting alters that dynamic, transforming what had been a cool, Foucauldian case study of a problematic aesthete into something altogether different: a shimmering constellation of dreams and longing. Through a harmonically lush palette and rhythmic repetition, the music opens a space the text deliberately closes, granting access to an interiority that feels at once sybaritic and devastating. What had been ironic in Cather becomes luminous in Spears. What had been merely objective observation—the work of empiricism—becomes sensual and lived.
In doing so, Spears’s art enacts what John Keats called the “egotistical sublime.” Keats used the term to describe Wordsworth, whose poetry was shaped by a strong, saturating subjectivity. The phrase was not meant as criticism, at least not in our modern sense of egotism. Rather, it suggested that the artist’s presence could transform the quotidian through the force of imagination. In Spears’s music, that transformation is inarguable. The emotional world we encounter may ostensibly belong to Paul, but it is equally shaped by Spears’s own concern for beauty—an attraction that does not neutralize suffering but intensifies it to the edge of bittersweet jouissance. In Paul’s Case, there is an acidic trace of a shared condition, the pull toward aesthetic transcendence weighed down by the glum baggage of ordinary life. Spears does not resolve that tension; instead, he allows pleasure and sorrow to coexist without synthesis. To borrow Percy Shelley’s famous formulation, his music “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they are not familiar.”
If Paul’s Case turns inward, Fellow Travelers situates this same sensibility within a historical context. Based on Thomas Mallon’s novel, the opera nests private longing amid national disgrace, tracking a love story strained by the machinery of McCarthy-era Washington. Here, Spears adopts what he calls “the technology of 19th-century opera,” allowing the narrative to unfold with political weight. Even with this broader approach, Spears remains committed to the same underlying question: what happens when individual desire presses against the parochialism of a larger community? In Fellow Travelers, that tension is dramatized as characters evolve diachronically within a historical context. The scale has changed, but the question remains the same.
We meet on a gray afternoon at a restaurant on the Upper West Side, a block from Central Park. Spears is already seated when I arrive, tucked into a banquette along the wall. He makes an impression of self-contained serenity. There is nothing theatrical about the way he expresses his ideas about music. If anything, he approaches the subject of his own process with self-conscious practicality, an even-handedness that can belie a general disposition toward the spiritual and uncanny. As Jenny Koons asserts, “Greg is very thoughtful. He’s very attuned to detail, aware of how what he’s making is in conversation with whoever is listening to it.”
When I ask Spears about Romanticism, he pauses to consider the term’s usefulness. In fairness, labeling him a Romantic may seem ahistorical and confusing, especially among musicologists. Romanticism—generally the descriptor for composers like Schubert and Wagner—is both an epochal and theoretical term, marked by a programmatic approach to composition, expanded chromaticism, and ambiguous tonality. However, while Spears’s harmony can be chromatic and dissonant, I wouldn’t cite that as significant evidence of a Romantic orientation. To begin with, one can see the influence of Romantic literature on his thinking. One of his early pieces is called The Romantics, in which he sets texts by Shelley, Coleridge, and Poe; more recently, he composed a song cycle for baritone called Walden, based on Thoreau’s famous meditation; and finally, he is premiering a piece called Bartleby, a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano in which he explores the queer negativity of Melville’s most mysterious figure of withdrawal. Even when he engages with modernists such as Cather and Wilfred Owen, he tends to transform their sensibilities, metabolizing them into expressions of wonder and transcendence.
But beyond this, he seems less interested in claiming an aesthetic lineage than in describing the conditions under which his music begins to animate. “The whole point is not trying to understand the world, but to accept that we don’t,” he says. “Whereas science is incredible—it’s a miracle—but to accept that science can see everything? It’s kind of impossible.” With one fell swoop, he sums up the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. To be clear, this position is not anti-scientific so much as anti-totalizing. It defends a space for what cannot be reduced to empiricism. For Spears, artistic creation begins precisely in that space. “This sounds cliché,” he says, “but it’s like you’ve discovered something that’s not you. And that’s when I’m excited. Whenever somebody says my music sounds like something I would write, I think yes, that’s because I went to that place that’s not me. All art isn’t autobiographical.” This is the paradox of the Romantic artist, the generator of the work, who channels centripetal forces to gather experience inward, only to refract it outward again, centrifugally, into form; and yet, while he is the conduit of creation, he is never fully in control.
This approach places Spears in a curious position: both maker and receiver; the art is not made ex nihilo. One cannot help but think of Shelley’s “ever-changing wind” as it plays upon the aeolian lyre. The work does not feel extracted from personal experience so much as encountered, as if it emerges from a space he recognizes but cannot fully command. Just as Plato describes inspiration as a form of madness in the Phaedrus, Spears recognizes that his role is not to impose meaning but to articulate and shape what appears. For Spears, this distinction is essential. “One should never confuse the creator with the created,” he tells me. “That’s idolatry.” To collapse that boundary is to misunderstand the nature of creativity itself. From this follows a particular orientation toward beauty. If art is not entirely self-generated, then beauty cannot be fully mastered or explained. It is something the artist brushes up against, participates in, and gives form to, but never fully fathoms. “One of the things we can’t understand,” he says, “is beauty.” It is this willingness to remain at that epistemological edge that gives Spears’s music its charge and makes his work so spiritually generous. Rather than demystifying complexity into theory, his music remains permeable to something beyond the empirical, beyond knowing.
Photo: Dario Acosta
With Sleepers Awake, Spears continues his long collaboration with Anthony Roth Costanzo, though this time Costanzo appears not as a performer but as President and General Director of Opera Philadelphia. Costanzo first met Spears when they were both students at Princeton University: Spears was working on his Ph.D., and Costanzo was an undergraduate. “He was skulking around the music department as a mysterious grad student,” Costanzo tells me. “Eventually I got to meet Greg, and I learned he was composing quite beautiful music.” Not long after, the two collaborated with the soprano Daisy Press to perform Spears’s Owen Songs. “It was very, very beautiful music,” Press says of her time working on the piece. To hear her describe it, the rehearsal process sounds almost like a complicated game. “Anthony and I both had these triangles that we would be beating on in polyrhythms and little triangle hockets—while we were singing vocal hockets—with this Wilfred Owen poetry. It was whimsical and beautiful and ridiculous. We laughed a lot.”
That refreshing ability—to take one’s frivolity seriously—carries over into Sleepers Awake, where Spears turns to fairy tale, a genre aligned with the Romantic imagination. Here, Sleeping Beauty becomes less a matter of sexual awakening than a narratological structure: a template for thinking through the strange, recursive rhythms of consciousness. Sleeping and waking are no longer opposites but states that bleed into one another, producing a sense of spiraling recursion.
What distinguishes the opera, however, is not only its subject matter but also how that material is expressed. Rather than centering the drama on individual protagonists, Sleepers Awake shifts focus to the collective. For this project, the community is intentionally foregrounded. Costanzo, in his role at Opera Philadelphia, wanted Spears to create a work that would specifically feature the chorus. “It’s the inverse of a normal opera,” he says. “It’s like twenty percent solo singing and eighty percent chorus.” The structural innovation is also thematic: the chorus is no longer the background against which individual drama is projected but the primary vehicle for the work’s emotional labor.
For Elizabeth Braden, Opera Philadelphia’s Chorus Master, this shift is foundational. “It’s very exciting,” she says. “In this opera, the chorus is really fundamental to telling the story.” What emerges is a different kind of operatic experience. Sleep, in this context, becomes shared, almost social: a condition that moves across individuals rather than remaining fixed within them. This formal intervention is, in its way, risky. Contemporary opera already occupies an uncertain cultural position, and a work that further unsettles conventions may only amplify that instability. At the same time, the logic of Spears’s creativity suggests that such risk is necessary. Costanzo acknowledges as much without hesitation. “Do I think the piece is risky? Yes,” he says. “But the risk is not what scares me.” Something else concerns him entirely: “The only thing I worry about is whether we’ve done everything possible for the piece to speak.”
Koons, for her part, describes the work as “bold. Artistically bold.”
But when confronted with the proposition, Spears prefers a different word: ambitious. “As an artist,” he says, “I’m always trying to give the audience what they actually want. That’s different from trying to please them.” That distinction highlights something essential about Spears’s broader project. It assumes that audiences can recognize something they cannot fully explain. They, too, can perceive beauty in its more enigmatic forms. The Garden of Eden, as Spears figures it, is neither a prelapsarian origin nor an eschatological event toward which we move. It is a condition that persists, humming just beyond perception. In this sense, the task of art is not mimesis but epistemology. Spears does not seek to construct beauty but to make it perceptible, to bear it, however briefly, into being.
Seen this way, the perennial question of whether it is socially responsible to value beauty in a world structured by injustice begins to shift. For Spears, this is not about ignoring injustice but about how one perceives the world within it. The beauty he engages with does not exempt us from responsibility for our bleak reality so much as it radically shifts our experience of it, allowing formal pleasures to coexist with grief and suffering rather than deny them. A concern for beauty is not a retreat from the world but a way of remaining within it despite all its inadequacies. Arguably, the perception of beauty and the experience of pleasure are among the few conditions under which transformation becomes imaginable; only by accessing the beauty of the immanent might we reveal that which is transcendent. For Spears, that act of revelation is not a matter of explanation but of attention. For his audiences, his role mirrors that of his cat. He helps us attend to what is already there, the beauty he acknowledges but that we often miss.
