Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 7 - Carmen

13 | Lyric Opera of Chicago YOU WERE ALSO THE FIRST DESIGNATED CHAIR— A NEW POSITION FOR LYRIC. My year as designated chair turned out to be a critical time in the history of Lyric, indeed in the history of the world—it was when COVID hit. Indeed there were many functional and nancial questions—major business decisions that had to be made right away. My rst public act was to join David and our General Director, President & CEO Anthony Freud on stage when we cancelled Lyric’s new production of Wagner’s Ring cycle while in rehearsal. It was heartbreaking, especially for our beloved Sir Andrew Davis, whose tenure with Lyric was to culminate with this marvelous achievement. THAT SOUNDS LIKE A PROFOUNDLY DIFFICULT TIME TO START. It was! There was no learning curve. You might say I has thrown head rst into the deep end of the pool. But as the saying goes, never let a crisis go to waste. And we at Lyric took that advice to heart. As an immediate intervention, my husband Dan Fischel and I created the Heroes Fund. We became sponsors of the Ring after it was cancelled and we asked for others to follow suit. Folks really stepped up, from donating their tickets to making brand new major gifts. Each and every sponsor of our cancelled productions contributed their donations to sustain the future of our company. That effort has grown into our current COVID recovery campaign which, due to our donors’ extraordinary generosity, has allowed Lyric to not just survive, but to thrive. IT’S REMARKABLE IN PART BECAUSE THERE WAS REALLY NO PLAYBOOK. We made a decision: Rather than close our doors and go dark, we embarked on what became an extraordinary alternative season. It turned out to be a time of much experimentation and great creativity due to the brilliance of both our inimitable General Director Anthony Freud and our dynamic new Maestro Enrique Mazzola, together with the extraordinary dedication of our committed staff and artistic partners. We implemented a lot of things we’d always wanted to do online, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers from around the world. To mention just a couple of our achievements: Our cancelled Pagliacci was transformed into a cinematic version of the opera, set and lmed in our opera house (and it won a Midwest Emmy, by the way); Twilight: Gods , the total reimagining of Gotterdämmerung , the nal Ring opera, was unbelievably staged as a drive- through experience in the Millennium Park parking garage. I don’t think anybody who experienced that production will ever forget it, with the audience in cars snaking through spooky candlelit aisles to performance pods, culminating with Christine Goerke as Brünnhilde riding away in a red Mustang convertible. As opposed to just saying, it’s too bad we can’t perform, we gured out a way to be Lyric in new and exciting ways—all the while with strict safety protocols protecting our artists, staff, and audiences. NOW THAT WE HAVE A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE, WHAT WAS THE RESULT OF ALL THAT? The reach we achieved with people in other parts of the country and all over the world, and also in this city, is remarkable. A sort of transformation took place in that we reached hipper, newer audiences. This was actually an acceleration of trends that were already happening in opera, by the way. The reality is that opera is no longer like a closed club. People are much more open to new kinds of productions. And we reached a younger audience. And that all came about because we made a very conscious decision to say we’re going to throw ourselves at it as opposed to just withdrawing. I HAVE TO ASK: WILL WE EVER SEE THAT WAGNER? It’s ours. It is our own, brand new production, not something that we were renting from Europe or from someplace else in the United States. So yes, but it’ll be a bit of a long arc. We’re still very much in COVID recovery, like every performing arts group, and opera gets planned out years in advance. HOW ARE THINGS TRENDING FOR LYRIC? Lyric is trending positive in an extraordinary way. It still is a bumpy road, but we have con dence in a bright future. Opera in general, but Lyric in particular, has been experiencing a renewal. We’ve done much better than expected with our ticket sales, and the purchasers are often folks who are new to us, often just plain new to opera! We are lucky to have the talents of a new marketing guru, Paul Gunning, who brings new strategies and metrics from the private sector to opera. But I think it is mostly because we’ve stayed ahead on programming new productions. We see folks coming in great numbers to innovative new productions like Fire Shut Up in My Bones . This year we have two new world premieres produced by Lyric— The Factotum and Proximity . Both have been attracting national attention. Also, thanks to Anthony and Enrique, our traditional operas are done with creative distinction, from our own production of Macbeth to our creatively tweaked traditional productions such as Tosca and