Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 8 Madama Butterfly

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 13 Todd Rosenberg Cory Weaver Todd Rosenberg Ken Howard Unforgettably powerful drama has been evident in opera throughout its history, in works as varied as (clockwise from top left) Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice , Strauss’s Elektra , Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, and Verdi’s La traviata . ˇ can have a much harder time processing art that moves us when its creator holds radically different views from our own. Studying Wagner’s monumental, illuminating scores while grappling with his bigoted writings compelled me to start making my own choices about how to interact with these kinds of complications in art and in life. Opera also taught me about the glory of multiple interpretations. Each time we view Don Giovanni or La bohème or Elektra , these masterworks offer us new lessons. In productions as high-caliber as the ones Lyric presents, innovative directors are allowed the latitude to explore afresh what a work has to say. These artists and their explorations of these pieces teach us radical flexibility and openness, truly essential human skills. When we attend the opera, we’re asked to practice mindfulness, presence, patience, and trust as listener-viewers. Master composers are expert at manipulating time, and an hour of music can feel short, long, blissful, harrowing – whatever the drama demands. The permission to release the anxieties and pressures of daily life and disappear into the realms of mystery and fantasy is a tremendous gift that opera gives us whenever we choose to accept it. Opera also offers us a powerful mirror to see ourselves and the world in which we live. From La traviata and Carmen to this season’s Dead Man Walking , opera concerns itself with the most pressing human matters like love, death, violence, hope, faith, courage, and redemption. While opera’s stories do include monarchy and deities, they also offer so many beautiful portraits of regular humans living and dying with admirable dignity, grace, humor, and wit. There are so many moments in my life, both of joy and of adversity, when I’ve thought, “What would Fidelio ’s Leonore do? How would the title character of The Marriage of Figaro handle this?” The first time I saw Mozart’s opera, I was obsessed not with the valet Figaro, but with the page Cherubino – not just because the character was around my age, but because (this being a trouser role) he was a he and he was also a she. Watching Susanne Mentzer, a female-bodied singer, explore the psychology of a male-bodied character who is sometimes dressed in traditionally male clothes and sometimes dressed in traditionally female clothes, was fascinating, thrilling, and incredibly sexy. Unfortunately for Cherubino, most of his sexual feelings are unconsummated. However, I soon saw my first performances of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen , both of which feature long romantic encounters between two sopranos (human in the