Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 3 Luisa Miller

Make your outing even more delicious with some of Lyric’s on-site dining and refreshment options. Cheers! Champagne bar Florian Opera Bistro Sarah and Peer Pedersen Room The William B. and Catherine Graham Room To learn more about enhancing your visit: lyricopera.org/dining . Drink and dine at Lyric Todd Rosenberg Lyric Opera of Chicago | 30 plumb the most agonizing emotional depths in music that turns increasingly weighty and dramatic as it proceeds. Then finally, in the concluding trio, when the dying Luisa asks for her father’s blessing, Verdi gives her a sequence of luminous, exquisitely sculpted phrases that could draw tears from a stone. Rodolfo, too, has his scena , featuring a cavatina that, when it comes to Verdi tenor solos, is second in popularity only to the Rigoletto Duke’s “La donna è mobile.” Once he’s sung that fervently nostalgic cavatina, Rodolfo must turn up the dramatic voltage in the barnstorming cabaletta: stunned by Luisa’s supposed betrayal and with a loveless marriage to Duchess Federica looming ahead, he gives way to reckless defiance in music that the eminent Verdi scholar Julian Budden aptly described as “almost demented.” Miller’s big solo scene in Act One gives the baritone opportunities for excitingly broad, surging phrases, but Verdi asks him for more soul-searching, more profoundly expressive singing in the Act Three duet with Luisa. Here is a baritone/soprano scene that, in terms of sheer eloquence, can absolutely stand comparison with the three father-daughter duets in Rigoletto as well as the Germont/Violetta scene in La traviata . Count Walter, a somewhat softer, less vicious figure than in Schiller’s play, is at his most imposing in his scene with the despicable Wurm. They give us a true rarity in opera – a duet for two basses. And then there is Federica, not a character with huge dramatic interest but one who can rejoice in warmly alluring contralto tone. This opera’s choral episodes aren’t as abundant or as lengthy as those of two better-known early Verdi works, Nabucco and Macbeth , but those scenes nonetheless contribute notably to the crackling theatrical atmosphere. If you want the thrill of large- scale Verdi, you need only listen to the Act-One finale: Miller’s violent opening phrases, the passionate responses of Rodolfo and his father, Luisa’s soaring line above the men, and then – at precisely the right dramatic moment – the magnificent choral intervention supporting Luisa’s despairing phrases. By comparison to what we hear from Verdi earlier in the 1840s, it’s Luisa Miller alone that shows him at a crossroads. About to reach his absolute zenith, he’s building on what he learned from Rossini, Donizetti, and the rest, but also pointing the way forward to his own glorious operatic future. Roger Pines, Lyric’s dramaturg, writes for major opera publications internationally and has appeared annually on the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts’ “Opera Quiz” for the past 13 seasons. Earlier this year he lectured at both DePaul University and the Merola Program at San Francisco Opera. During the 2019/20 academic year he will be an instructor in opera repertoire at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.