Opera has always loved brutality. Sweet singing softens the effrontery of cruel murder, illicit sex and base perfidy, allowing it to grace opera stages with greater ease than the front pages of a newspaper:

		'Dead Man Walking' WHO: John Mauceri, conductor; Kristine Jepson, John Packard, et al, singers. WHERE: Benedum Center, Downtown. WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday, 7 p.m. Tuesday, 8 p.m. June 11, 2 p.m. June 13. TICKETS: $16-$115; 412-456-6666.

Jump off a parapet? Just say how high. Poison a ruler? Only say how much. Sleep with your sibling? Just say where. We don't care as long as the arias are sensational.

It helps, of course, that operatic plots are usually set in the past. Jake Heggie's "Dead Man Walking" doesn't have that luxury.

Based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean that led to the film by Tim Robbins, Heggie's opera covers much of the same landscape the genre has always traversed. Not unlike Mozart's "Don Giovanni," it opens with a rape and murder scene and ends with the killer's death as it tells the story of a nun's heart-wrenching interactions with a death-row inmate in Louisiana.

When it premiered in 2000 at the San Francisco Opera, the hot-button issue of the death penalty and the work's bald depictions of death shocked many opera lovers. So much so that a British critic previewing a week of American opera at the Barbican Centre in London felt the subject matter must have been chosen for non-musical reasons.

"[It] seems more like the product of a consumer survey than a genuine artistic impulse, with every ingredient carefully weighed," Andrew Clements wrote in The Guardian. "You choose a controversial issue (capital punishment), fashion it into a convincing linear narrative, set the text to music of impeccable anonymity, and you have the perfect, painless new opera, which fulfills all the audience's requirements and won't frighten away the sponsors."

The threat of this sort of response didn't stop San Francisco Opera's then-general director Lotfi Mansouri from supporting composer Heggie, 43, and librettist/playwright Terrence McNally when they offered it as a subject for a commission Mansouri had granted to them in 1996. Widespread acclaim and multiple productions later, "Dead Man Walking" may not yet be considered a classic, but its place in the present-day repertoire more than justifies Mansouri's risk.

"Why I think it works so well as an opera is that, at its heart, it is a love story between two people, not romantic or sexual," says Heggie. "It transforms [convicted murderer] Joseph de Rocher's life and [is] the birth of Sister Helen the activist."

John Mauceri, the Pittsburgh Opera's music director and conductor, goes further. He sees "Dead Man Walking" as a work "in the grand tradition of rescue operas like Beethoven's 'Fidelio,' in which the pure feminine element rescues the wounded male." De Rocher's redemption does not shield him from death, but it is redemption nonetheless.

The Pittsburgh Opera wasn't about to succumb to a myopic view of opera just because the traditional themes have been placed in a contemporary setting.

"We have a strong conviction that our audience, even though it might be initially reluctant, will understand that it is the art form that is being celebrated, that opera can encompass anything from Monteverdi to Puccini to Heggie," says artistic director Christopher Hahn.

"[Art forms are] the only ways we have of taking people close to reality, because the death penalty is not one of those moral issues that hits a lot of people personally," says Prejean, 65. "They don't think about it or discuss it. Art forms take people into deeper reflection."

New composer on the cell block

The ongoing controversy about the death penalty in the United States overshadowed the additional marvel about "Dead Man Walking" -- that an unknown and untested composer was chosen to write it. Heggie was only 36 when he was commissioned to write "Dead Man Walking," his first opera, for one of America's most prestigious companies.

"Jake was working in the PR department of the San Francisco Opera and was composing on the side and got to know some of the singers that came through," says Hahn. "He started to show his songs to some of these singers, just to see if he was on the right track. They started saying that they were good, and soon they were being programmed on recitals."

The likes of Renee Fleming, Thomas Hampson and Frederica von Stade endorsed Heggie's music.

"It surprised me that even singers of that stature would be interested in finding new music and championing it," he says. "That inspired me to write more."

Still, he thought his career as a composer might never take off until Mansouri tapped him to write an opera. "Part of why it worked as well as it did is 'cause I was rather naive," says Heggie. "I didn't think it would be such a big deal."

Early on, Heggie felt he had something good, as Prejean humorously relates. "They did excerpts, as the opera was being done, for the big donors," she recalls. "Jake calls me all excited and tells me we really got something, that they had all cried. I said, 'Jake, maybe they see their money going down the hole!' "

Although not as involved in the opera as she was with the film, Prejean got Heggie's ear about the music.

"I told Jake at the beginning, I don't know bo-scat about opera; I have only been to two ('Aida' and 'La Boheme')," she says. "But I hope you can write music where we can come out humming a tune. He laughed and said, 'Sister Helen, I do music that is accessible.' "

"What is so extraordinary," says Mauceri, "is that Jake Heggie managed in his first opera to capture a world of meaning. In spite of some critics who thought the music is 'too accessible,' his orchestration is quite wonderful and moving. It is superbly human music, full of compassion."

"Dead Man Walking" is "tonally based and very much influenced by musical theater, my first love," says Heggie with uncommon candor for a composer. "I hated opera until my mid-20s. I grew up in the '60s watching 'The Carol Burnett Show,' 'Sonny and Cher' and musicals." He actually wrote the radio songs that appear in "Dead Man Walking" that many have assumed were inserted original radio tunes.

Opera certainly doesn't hate Heggie. "Dead Man Walking" has now traveled to six U.S. cities and Australia. It will go to several cities in Germany in the near future. He has gone on to compose the opera "The End of the Affair" for Houston Grand Opera and has many other commissions.

Mauceri, who has himself conducted several operatic premieres in his career, is impressed by Heggie's accomplishment.

"Think about how many composers' first operas we really admire and value years later. There are actually very few. No one goes to Mozart's first opera, Puccini's, Wagner's."

Opera revival

While it's a bit early to be grouping Heggie in those circles, he has certainly benefited from a penchant for lyricism, a relevant subject and, perhaps most crucial, a renewed public interest in new opera.

It's a good time to be an opera composer, and Heggie is in the thick of it.

"There was a period where you had to shy away from the big picture and try miniature things," says Hahn. "It is now no longer passe to consider big emotional topics. 'Dead Man's' subject matter is passionately held; 'Streetcar Named Desire' has passionate and erotic underpinnings. There's been a change in acceptance."

Even with the success of "Dead Man Walking" elsewhere, Pittsburgh Opera takes risks by staging it. Not only is it the company's first contemporary opera, but it was rescheduled to coincide with the National Performing Arts Convention in Pittsburgh.

"Opera companies who present a new opera are up against a big challenge of losing the traditional audience, your firm strong performers," says Hahn. "But opera companies will often program new operas to reach out to new audiences. There is lots of data to support that people who normally wouldn't go to an older opera will have an easier entry point [with a newer one]."

Add a contemporary and polarizing subject to the mix and you have the juggernaut that is "Dead Man Walking."

"An opera company has an opportunity to bring opera to people it doesn't typically reach and show that opera still does matter -- that it isn't something to be endured but enjoyed," says Heggie.