the disease better, Beecher's opera would foster empathy for Alzheimer's victims' families. "They're essentially losing someone, only they don't die." Her work on Dangerous Liaisons in 1994 sparked what turned out to be the most consequential of all her professional relationships. The man whom San Francisco Opera assigned to chauffeur her to promotional interviews was its then head of publicity, Jake Heggie, a 33-year-old aspiring composer. When he introduced her to his settings of three Irish folk-songs"Barb'ry Allen", "He's gone away" and "The leather-winged bat"they struck her as marvellously accomplished, and she immediately set about doing all that she could to advance his career. Eighteen months later, San Francisco Opera commissioned him to work with the writer Terrence McNally on an operatic version of Sister Helen Prejean's then recent Dead Man Walking (1993), a bookalso the basis of a film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon (1995)written in the hope of dissuading its readers from supporting capital punishment. Heggie wanted von Stade to play his opera's central role, Sister Helen, but she declined it in favour of his second choice, the mezzo-soprano Susan Graham. She was, however, eager to create the role of Mrs Patrick de Rocher, the mother of a man awaiting execution, which Heggie and McNally expanded into "a kind of fulcrum" of the work to take advantage of von Stade's assumption of it. The opera is especially dear to her: she says that there is none that she more enjoys listening to, and she cites McNally as her favourite writer. The piece's implicit condemnation of the United States' retention of the death penalty is a reproof that she wholeheartedly endorses, basing her critique of capital punishment on behaviourism. "If you know nothing but brutality your whole life, it becomes your life. And that is where the mistake is. You can't just remove people, you have to remove what is making them that way, and that's what we're not doing." "Capital punishment is an extreme form of state-sponsored vengeance that only demeans and dehumanizes everyone, and does nothing for the victims' survivors, nothing for society. We're all losers when someone is executed." She was Mrs de Rocher at the world premiere of Dead Man Walking in San Francisco (2000), at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna (2007) and in Houston (2010). (The San Francisco production was the subject of a KQED behind-the-scenes documentary, And then one night: