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Richard Owen: The Judge is a Composer

By Sarah Kishler

Richard Owen

Federal Judge Richard Owen is a man with a formidable legal career who has sent many of New York's most dangerous mobsters up the river. Why did USOPERAWEB want to talk to him? He just happens to write operas also (eight of them so far).

Judge Owen’s love for music began early in life. “I was born in Bronxville, New York and went to the Met when I was four and heard La Bohème. My best friend was the son of Ray Henderson, the pop composer who wrote ‘Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries’ and things like that.”

Though music was a passion, another, equally intense influence also ran in Owen's blood. “My father was a lawyer and I was always going to be a lawyer. It never occurred to me to be anything else. My father had a saying: The world gets out of the way of someone who knows where he’s going. I’ve seen that in the courtroom and it’s always fascinated me. As I look back on it, I think that if I had been more in the musical scene a lot of different things might have happened. But on the other hand, I’ve had a fascinating career as a trial lawyer and now, for 28 years, a trial judge. In the Federal Court you get all kinds of substantial cases. The two fields are not all that different. Being a trial lawyer or trial judge is theater, just as writing an opera is theater. If you are a trial lawyer you are planning to put on your presentation for a jury or a judge and if you’re an opera composer you’re putting on your presentation to an audience. You’re selling the whole package, however you want to look at it.”

One of Judge Owen's most famed cases involved the late Beatle George Harrison. Harrison was sued for plagiarism because his hit song ‘My Sweet Lord’ seemed to have an identical melody to ‘He's So Fine’, a single recorded by The Chiffons. Owen's musical inclinations played a large part in this case. “Perhaps being a musical judge I recognized that the music was the same and the themes were identical musically. (I’m giving you what is public record because I can’t talk about things that are privileged. My opinion regarding the My Sweet Lord trial was published in the Federal Report.) My finding was that this was subconscious plagiarism. He was looking for a second theme and they were in a recording session and it just popped out. I felt that the lawyers weren’t asking the right questions so I came in one day and George Harrison and I sang to each other in the courtroom. And I asked him where he got this theme and that and the other. The transcript read, ‘Judge sings,’ ‘witness sings,’ ‘judge sings,’ etc. We had a very nice time.”

Naturally, we asked Judge Owen what sparked his interest in composing. “I was working in New York and I started going to modern operas. This is in the middle '50s. I’ll be immodest about this and say I thought I could write better operas than what I was listening to. I started studying with Vittorio Giannini who wrote The Taming of the Shrew along with other major American operas. He was a lovely man and a beautiful composer in the tradition of Puccini. There came a point when he said to me that I’d never be able to write what I wanted to without conservatory training. At that point I had been a trial lawyer for ten years and I had my own law firm. Vittorio got me into the Manhattan School of Music. The composers’ classes were every Thursday and I told him that if I weren’t in a courtroom on Thursdays I’d be there. I did that for two years and wrote two very short one-act operas during that time.

“I was writing pop music for Bar Association shows. There were three of us who used to write the pop music for all the shows and one year I told them I was going to write an opera. My first opera was about a lawyer, his law clerk, his daughter and his best client. That's also how I met my wife, Lynn Owen. I was studying at Tanglewood that summer and she was singing in La Rondine and I went to all the rehearsals. I told her I had an opera being done by the New York City Bar Association that fall and asked her if she would sing the lead. She very wisely said, ‘Let me look at the score.’ She was studying at Juilliard at the time. Since then she has gone on to be a leading soprano all over the world. She’s sung The Girl of the Golden West, Tosca and Senta in The Flying Dutchman at the Met. She grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and ended up at the Met. She is going to do my new work, Sadie Thompson, next February.

“I should mention my sons, Richard, Jr. and David, who sang in some of my operas when they were young. They were both boy sopranos at the Met. David is a lawyer now and Richard, Jr. is a budding conductor in New York. He has his own orchestra and has conducted at Carnegie Hall and Merkin Hall. Recently, I rewrote about fifteen minutes of my opera Abigail Adams for ‘mom’ to sing for a performance he was doing.”

Judge Owen describes the common thread running through this operas: “I want to write about people who are of substance, who are rewarding and who matter. I do not want to write an opera about a motorcycle gang. My operas have to be about people of consequence. I write my own libretti and pick my own stories. People suggest things to me of course. I’ve written an opera about Mary Dyer [Mary Dyer] who is our Quaker martyr who is the founder of religious freedom in America and who was hanged. I wrote the opera about Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president and mother of the sixth. I have written operas about Peter, the disciple of Christ [A Fisherman Called Peter], and Tom Sawyer [Tom Sawyer], which was commissioned by the Manhattan School a few years ago. My son sang the lead in that. I also wrote an opera about Caravaggio and who he came to paint [Death of the Virgin]. Sadie Thompson is based on the story Rain by Somerset Maugham of a missionary and a prostitute in the South Pacific.

“My musical influences include Puccini, Verdi and Wagner. Madame Butterfly is my favorite opera. My view of music is that if I can’t sing it and if I don’t think a singer can sing it easily, I don’t write it. Obviously you cannot go back and rewrite Verdi or Wagner or Puccini today. But in my opinion an audience is always going to want singing. You still have to write that kind of thing today in order to succeed because an audience has got to go away feeling they were moved by the music. That is at the core of what I write.”

Where does he find the time to write operas? “I don’t have a lot of time for a social life. For years I used to be at work at 6:30 in the morning and work until 8:00 in the evening, although I don’t do that so much these days. Today I’m working on a section of the opera that I’ve rewritten probably 15 or 20 times because there was something about it that escapes me. When I finally caught it the other day, I was so delighted I felt as though I had had a vacation in Bermuda. That’s what makes it all worthwhile. I don’t mind the hard work. I’m orchestrating Sadie now. It’s being written for a small band and that will take me most of the summer and I have a possible recording of an opera coming up. ”

Judge Owen does find time for at least one other interest, however. “I race sailboats. I’ve been racing sailboats since I was ten on Long Island Sound. That’s how I’ll be spending my summer up the Hudson River. Both my sons are sailors and we often go out to places like Nantucket and Block Island. I race very weekend in New York harbor.”