Sneak Peek: Ethan Heard Podcast

Jo Reed: You mentioned "Fidelio," which Beethoven wrote as an opera about a woman who tries to free her husband who's falsely imprisoned. And you reframed this into a story about Black Lives Matter. Tell me about this.

Ethan Heard: Yeah, absolutely. We decided to produce "Fidelio" back in 2017. And I knew I wanted Florestan on to be a Black Lives Matter activist who was wrongfully incarcerated by a white supremacist prison warden and we wanted to feature a primarily black cast. And we also wondered could we reach out to prison choirs and invite them to collaborate with us. And over the course of weeks and months we gradually put together a really beautiful network of six prison choirs across the Midwest and four states, men's choirs and women's choirs who agreed to learn the iconic prisoners' chorus that comes right at the center of "Fidelio." And I would say the production changed my life and it changed really the course of Heartbeat.