Grounded by Jeanine Tesori — When the Skies Close In

The Silence After the Sky

The first sound in Grounded isn’t a trumpet’s fanfare or a jet’s roar—it’s silence. Then, slowly, the low hum of a Nevada desert filters in, followed by the flicker of a drone screen. Jeanine Tesori’s opera, adapted from George Brant’s acclaimed play, opens not with flight but confinement. The Pilot, once a top Air Force ace, has been grounded after pregnancy and reassigned to remote drone duty. The sky that once defined her has been replaced by a glowing monitor, where life and death unfold pixel by pixel.

It’s a chillingly modern inversion of the operatic ideal: where heroines once gazed heavenward, Tesori’s protagonist now stares into the blue light of duty. The effect is as intimate as it is unsettling—and, at moments, darkly ironic. After all, her new “battlefield” comes with an air-conditioner and a coffee maker.

Jeanine Tesori’s Expanding Sky

Tesori has never been content to stay in one creative lane. Known for Fun Home and Caroline, or Change, she writes music that refuses to sit neatly within a genre—it sings in the spaces between. With Grounded, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 2024, she brings that hybrid sensibility to full force: lush orchestral colors fuse with digital soundscapes, creating a sonic world that feels at once expansive and claustrophobic.

The opera’s single character, sung with shattering focus by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, charts the erosion of identity in a job where precision replaces perspective. Tesori’s writing gives us a mind under strain—the rhythms clipped and percussive, the melody sometimes slipping into speech, as though words alone can’t quite hold the weight of her thoughts.

The Weight of Distance

The Pilot’s story unfolds in a single stream of consciousness. She once sliced through the clouds at Mach speeds; now she sits in a windowless trailer outside Las Vegas, piloting drones over foreign skies she’ll never see. Her missions end with a button press—and then she drives home to her family.

That daily whiplash between warfare and domesticity is the opera’s most harrowing tension. Tesori’s score mirrors it beautifully: pulsing electronics dissolve into lyric fragments, then back again. One moment she’s a mother humming a lullaby; the next, she’s watching an explosion bloom like a terrible sunrise.

There’s something unbearably human in her attempt to balance both. She measures the day in screen time, like so many of us—except her notifications carry life-and-death stakes.

The Modern Tragedy

Grounded doesn’t traffic in spectacle; its power comes from compression. The orchestra, like the Pilot’s world, seems to shrink as her psychological space collapses. Yet the opera feels vast in what it asks: How do we hold onto empathy in an era built on distance? When the act of looking—through a screen, through a scope—becomes its own kind of violence?

Tesori isn’t moralizing; she’s witnessing. Her music lingers in dissonance and quiet, as if to remind us that modern heroism rarely comes with clarity. The Pilot’s descent is not about failure—it’s about recognition, about what it costs to see too much for too long.

And in a way, the audience is implicated too. We are all voyeurs in the digital age, tuning in for drama that’s safely happening somewhere else.

From the Met’s Desert Light

In the Metropolitan Opera’s 2024–2025 Live in HD broadcast, director Michael Mayer staged the work in a hyper-realistic environment of projections and LED screens—so immersive that the boundaries between real and virtual seemed to vanish. At one point, the audience could see the desert sky reflected across the Pilot’s helmet, a visual echo of her inner dislocation.

It’s an opera that resists easy applause lines; the silence at curtain is part of its design. Tesori gives us no final resolution, only a woman—no longer soldier, no longer goddess of the sky—rediscovering the fragile gravity of being human.

The Ground Beneath Us

When the music finally fades, Grounded leaves behind a quiet unease. It isn’t a story of redemption or condemnation, but of return—to the earth, to the self, to the awareness that distance does not absolve responsibility. In its restraint, Tesori’s score finds a new kind of grandeur: the sound of the modern conscience.

And maybe that’s what makes Grounded so timely. For all its technology, its core question is ancient—what happens when the gods come back down to earth and must live among the rest of us?

Opera Insight

Jeanine Tesori conceived Grounded for Emily D’Angelo after watching her Met debut. In early rehearsals, Tesori joked that composing for a character who “never leaves her seat” was a new kind of athletic challenge—“like writing a jet stream that never takes off.” The result proved anything but static.

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