Derrick Wang was a law student when his mind started wandering during Supreme Court case readings. It wasn't boredom that pulled him away from the pages. It was music. Every time he hit the words "SCALIA, J., dissenting," he heard something — a rage aria about the Constitution, a furious, soaring solo built out of the justice's own combative prose.
Then he would read the counterpoint from Scalia's colleague and fellow opera lover, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the contrast struck him as something more than legal disagreement. It sounded like a duet. "I realized the unlikely friendship between these two justices could be the basis for its own opera," Wang recalled.
Wang was unusually equipped to hear it. He had earned music degrees from Harvard and Yale, and he was studying law while composing on the side. What he wrote between casebooks became "Scalia/Ginsburg," a comic one-act opera that Arizona Opera is bringing to the Leo Rich Theater in Tucson on October 3 and 4, 2026, with a Phoenix run at the Herberger Theater Center on September 26 and 27. Arizona Opera President and General Director Brian DeMaris, who has conducted the piece before, will be on the podium for the Tucson performances.
The opera's premise is as improbable as its origin. Scalia finds himself trapped in legal purgatory, sealed inside a courtroom by a supernatural figure called the Commentator, punished for his relentless and excessive dissents. His only escape is to pass three trials — an inquisition, a trial of silence, and a mystery — a structure Wang borrowed directly from Mozart's "The Magic Flute." Ginsburg arrives through a glass ceiling, satisfying the rule that "no man shall enter," and serves as his defender, taking the trials alongside him as the two spar over their legal differences. In the end, both they and the audience arrive at the line that gives the opera its heart: "We are different, we are one."
Wang drew his libretto from Supreme Court opinions and what he calls "other landmark legal documents," quoting cases including McCulloch v. Maryland, Morrison v. Olson, and Bush v. Gore. The music works the same way. Wang describes the technique as "operatic precedent" — the idea that just as a justice must cite and quote landmark earlier opinions to write a new decision that fits seamlessly into the tradition, an opera can do the same thing with music and text. So the score borrows stylistically from Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, with jazz rhythms and nods to Christmas carols and "The Star Spangled Banner" thrown in for comedy. "I did say this was a comedy, right?" Wang joked at a University of Arizona School of Music event in September, after a studio artist performed Scalia's rage aria.
The real friendship at the opera's center was genuine and well documented. Scalia and Ginsburg first served together on the federal circuit court in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s, and each was later nominated to the Supreme Court. They sat together on the high court for more than 22 years, from Ginsburg's arrival in August 1993 until Scalia's death in February 2016. They disagreed on nearly everything and were, in Ginsburg's words, "best buddies." She once admitted that Scalia made her a better justice: he showed her a dissenting opinion before she had finished her majority, and she recalled that "this very spicy dissent absolutely ruined my weekend," prompting her to sharpen her own argument. They shared a love of opera, fine dining, and travel. NPR's Nina Totenberg, who moderated an onstage conversation between the two, remembered that "they liked to fight things out in good spirit — in fair spirit — not the way we see debates these days on television."
The opera's path to the stage was itself unusual. Wang first presented excerpts at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, an event his website credits with ushering in the era of Supreme Court-themed art. The world premiere came in July 2015 at the Castleton Festival, founded by conductor Lorin Maazel in Castleton, Virginia. Ginsburg attended and told MSNBC, "I had a wonderful time. I loved every minute of it." She later called the opera "a dream come true." Wang revised the work for a 2017 production at the Glimmerglass Festival in New York, and both justices wrote forewords to his published libretto.
Since then the little opera has traveled far beyond the chambers that inspired it. OperaDelaware's 2019 mainstage production became the best-selling show in the company's 80-year history and was broadcast on national radio and featured on "Live with Carnegie Hall." Orchestra Victoria gave the Australian premiere in 2021. Opera America listed "Scalia/Ginsburg" among the Top 5 most-produced operas in North America. The Los Angeles Times, reviewing the 2015 premiere, suggested it ought to be "a constitutional requirement that no one can be sworn into office in the White House or Congress without having first seen 'Scalia/Ginsburg.'"
For Tucson audiences, the October 3 performance at 7 p.m. comes with extras. DeMaris will give a free pre-show talk 30 minutes before curtain, and a post-show conversation with DeMaris and members of the production team follows the performance. The Leo Rich Theater, at 260 S Church Ave, is part of the Tucson Convention Center. The opera runs about an hour — short enough that its central argument lands like a punchline rather than a lecture.
That brevity is part of the point. Wang wrote the piece as a law student who kept hearing music in the margins of his casebooks, and what he produced is less a satire of two justices than a demonstration of something they practiced and the rest of us keep forgetting: that people can disagree profoundly, at the highest stakes, and still count each other as friends. The opera makes that case in sixty minutes, with arias.