Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 6 Don Giovanni

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 80 Nicholas Ivor Martin: hail and farewell Nicholas Ivor Martin, vice president, artistic operations and labor strategy, is concluding his 27-year tenure at Lyric in November. Recently he took some time to reflect on various aspects of his time with the company. WHEN DID YOU BEGIN WORKING AT LYRIC, AND WHAT WAS YOUR TITLE? I started as an assistant in the rehearsal department in August of 1992. My first day on the job, the crew was onstage assembling a production of Rossini’s Otello from the Pesaro festival. The documentation was all in Italian, so I ended up translating. Fortunately, this was a familiar challenge to the Lyric carpenters: I provided the vocabulary and they did the real work. HOW DID THE JOB DEVELOP OVER THE YEARS, IN TERMS OF YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES? I started out working on the daily schedule and graduated to managing the operations department, which meant dealing with performance and rehearsal scheduling, budgets, casting, contracts, and labor relations. These are all things that have to happen, but the audience does not see. My greatest surprise was the passion I developed for labor relations. I grew up in Washington, D.C., so when I came to Chicago, I was sure of only two things: I loved opera and I didn’t want to be a lawyer. In my first season, I got involved in negotiations with the American Guild of Musical Artists. I’m now in my third decade working with AGMA and the American Federation of Musicians. I’m sure my love of labor relations is a reflection of the passion and dedication that our labor groups bring to their jobs, and I will miss working with them. HOW HAS THE OPERA BUSINESS ITSELF CHANGED, FROM EVERYTHING YOU’VE OBSERVED HERE, NATIONALLY, AND INTERNATIONALLY? Opera has seldom, in its 400-year history, been static – and when it was, it got pushed aside by something newer. Those 400 years represent a lot of sleepless nights for opera producers. I actually wish there had been more change – that I had been in the business when a world premiere was not, in itself, something special. WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE GREATEST CHALLENGE YOU ENCOUNTERED DURING YOUR TENURE? My biggest challenge was when we began producing musicals in 2013, because it was unlike anything we had done before. Suddenly we had to negotiate all new labor agreements and establish a brand-new framework for producing. It was a new line of business and a new job. WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE LYRIC PRODUCTIONS, AND WHY DID YOU FIND THEM SO MEMORABLE? This is like asking, “Which child do you love best?” I always attend more than one performance of any run, but I think there were three times I attended every performance: The Rake’s Progress directed by Graham Vick and sung by Ruth Ann Swenson, Jerry Hadley, and Sam Ramey; Peter Grimes directed by John Copley and sung by Ben Heppner and Emily Magee; and Wozzeck directed by David Alden, with Franz Grundheber and Kathryn Harries. Everything came together in those performances. I still get chills thinking about Ramey’s Nick Shadow, Grundheber’s Wozzeck, Harries’s Marie – and the Lyric Chorus in Peter Grimes . DO YOU HAVE A WISH LIST OF CERTAIN OPERAS YOU’D LOVE TO SEE IN THEIR LYRIC PREMIERES? It wouldn’t be a premiere, because Lyric did it a decade before I arrived, but one opera I wish we had presented during my tenure is Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk . The first time I heard a Lyric performance was a rebroadcast of the 1983 production of Lady Macbeth . I was driving home at two in the morning from technical rehearsals at Wolf Trap Opera and I just about drove off the road from the power and emotion of that performance. YOU’RE THE SON OF “MISS MANNERS,” JUDITH MARTIN, WITH WHOM YOU’VE COLLABORATED ON THE BOOK MISS MANNERS MINDS YOUR BUSINESS . WHAT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON FROM THE BOOK THAT YOU’D LIKE TO SEE IMPLEMENTED MORE THOROUGHLY IN THE OPERA BUSINESS? The U.S. Navy puts a premium on good manners because they found that without them, a submarine full of young sailors, deployed for months at a time, does not need an enemy to get into trouble. There is a parallel in opera. We know that our jobs require us to be hip deep in emotion with alarming frequency. So while there are always exceptions, I think people would be surprised at how polite the business is. DURING YOUR YEARS IN CHICAGO, WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF YOUR GREATEST JOYS IN YOUR NON-LYRIC HOURS? Watching my daughter become an opera lover – and more than that, a Wagnerian – at the ripe age of six (she’s eight now). In my office I have a set of drawings she did of all the principal characters while watching a performance of Das Rheingold on the closed-circuit monitor in my office. The Ring is one of my favorites, but she made me realize that it probably makes sense at her age.