The Marshall Project

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An Opera Explores the Strain of Prison on a Marriage

Listen if you like: Missy Mazzoli, John Adams, Attacca Quartet

People get into all sorts of niche and surprising passions while in prison, from crocheting to motivational speaking to Dungeons and Dragons. While serving 25-to-life for murder in New York, Joseph Wilson became a devotee of opera, and then enlisted his friends to help him write one.

Parts of the opera, called “9131” after the number of days in a 25-year prison sentence, were just put online by Decoda, a Carnegie Hall-affiliated ensemble of classical musicians. We’re spotlighting the aria “Secrets,” sung by the New York City soprano Kimberli Render at a 2023 showcase at Carnegie Hall. The opera features a man who is seeking release from a parole board, and his unfaithful wife.

Wilson was turned onto opera when he met the famous mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato during one of her many visits to New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility, which has become an epicenter for music, art, theater and writing in the last few decades. Wilson spent years working with two music programs there, Musicambia and Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections.

In a recent message over Securus, Wilson told me one of his teachers gave him a music theory book written by Igor Stravinsky, and he took to the Russian composer’s ballet “The Rite of Spring.” “I also learned that contemporary Hollywood movie scores are the progeny of Stravinsky,” he wrote. “As a movie lover, these elements had already been supplanted in my subconscious mind.”

Decoda’s bassoon player Brad Balliett, who mentored Wilson through Musicambia and helped fundraise to get his work onstage in 2023, told me, “His work has traces of Beethoven and Bach, but also a lot of crazy vocal writing that reminds me of more modern composers like Paul Hindemith.”

A photo shows a group of instrumentalists and three performers dressed in green prison uniform costumes, sitting or lying on beds, each behind a panel of prison bars. On the left are seated audience members.

A performance of excerpts from Joseph Wilson’s opera “9131: A Sing Sing Story” at the Weill Music Room at Carnegie Hall in New York City, on June 9, 2023. Fadi Kheir

Wilson worked on the libretto with an incarcerated spoken word artist, Zontiell Gordon, and co-wrote some of the music with guitarist Xiao Bao He (who also played a role in last week’s song, “Victory”). Some prisons now have tablets offering a wide array of music, but when Wilson first encountered opera, in 2015, he had to rely on the radio, picking up New York City’s classical station WQXR with a paper clip antenna.

As Wilson wrote for The Marshall Project last year, the fact that he had to pen the score by hand, rather than on a computer, made his process closer to canonical opera composers of the 19th century like Puccini and Bizet.

These composers favored melodramatic stories full of violence, tragedy and betrayal, and the genre helped Wilson confront the horrors in his own past. After a childhood marked by sexual abuse, he was sent to prison, in 2005, for murder. Like him, the protagonist of “9131” is facing all the emotions that come with a parole hearing and possible release.

But Wilson made one major change: The character is White, whereas he is Black. He told me he worried that making his protagonist Black or poor — as well as innocent — might invite the audience to see a cliché. As he sought to “highlight disadvantages of trauma, sporadic opportunity, and protective love,” he found his way to a fish-out-of-water story, featuring a wealthier White man who is also guilty of his crime. “A large portion of opera lovers are White… and affluent,” he told me. “I wanted to create sympathy around mirror neurons.”

Wilson says he hopes to be there if and when the opera has a full premiere with costumes and an orchestra. “I have produced loads of music that I cannot hear [and] an opera that I have not seen,” he wrote. “For once, I want to witness it…It gives me a goal and a little hope.”

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