Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has often said, in interviews, that she would have loved to have been an opera singer.
She has certainly become a fixture at many opera houses around the country: She is often spotted in the audience; she sometimes presides as an emcee in evenings of arias and excerpts titled “Justice at the Opera”; and, occasionally, she’s even taken the stage herself — in a small role in “Daughter of the Regiment” at the Washington National Opera and by proxy as a character in the comic opera “Scalia/Ginsburg” by Derrick Wang, which has her making her final statement in roulades of notes.
Now, she has her own CD. “Notorious RBG in Song” (Cedille), released in June, is an album of songs written for and about Ginsburg. Its centerpiece is a nine-part song cycle called “The Long View,” which amounts to a biography in music, extending from Ginsburg’s childhood and a (fictitious) letter from her mother, Celia — who died just before Ginsburg graduated from high school — through marriage and children, to her reflections (given in a 2013 interview) about what, in the bigger picture, a Supreme Court justice needs to be, including an admission of her own shifting needs. (“I have to leave off every now and then and sleep for hours.”)
It’s a personal album, accompanied by two CD booklets packed with song texts, essays and family photos. But then, the album’s creators have privileged access to their subject. Cedille’s founder, who has run the Chicago-based label for 29 years, is James Ginsburg, the justice’s son. And Patrice Michaels, the soprano soloist on the album who also composed “The Long View,” is her daughter-in-law.