Lyric Opera 2023-2024 Issue 1 - The Flying Dutchman

17 | Lyric Opera of Chicago ENRIQUE MAZZOLA WAS IN AN UPBEAT MOOD when we spoke this past summer via a Zoom call between Chicago and Bregenz, Austria, where the Spanish-born, Italian-trained maestro serves as conductor in residence of the Bregenz Festival. Fresh off back-to-back performances of Verdi’s Ernani and Puccini’s Madama Butter y at the lakeside opera festival, Mazzola said he was eagerly anticipating his return to Chicago, where he will celebrate his third season as music director with a host of career rsts. The 2023/24 Lyric season opens with the rst Wagner opera you will have conducted here— The Flying Dutchman —as well as the rst 21st century opera of your Chicago repertoire,Terence Blanchard’s Champion .The Requiem will be your rst Mozart here.And then you will close the season with your rst complete Aida in any opera house. It’s not that I had planned to do a season of rsts. When Anthony Freud and I create an opera season, we try for variety in terms of languages, what’s known or unfamiliar, and to include contemporary opera. We try to achieve a continuity with the season that came before and the seasons that follow. Dutchman will be my rst German opera at Lyric. Champion will be my rst contemporary opera, as COVID prevented us from presenting Missy Mazzoli’s Proving Up [in 2020/21]. Although I have conducted many Verdi operas, I have only done concert excerpts from Aida , never a full production. I am pleased to say it will be the 100th opera in my repertoire! Speaking of The Flying Dutchman , what considerations impacted the choice of this early Wagner masterpiece for the current season? Dutchman was written in 1843; Ernani , which opened our season last year, premiered one year later. The proximity of those premieres excited my imagination. Here we have the youthful Verdi, practically the same age as Wagner. Just as you hear all the energetic, Italianate power of the young Verdi in Ernani , with Dutchman you nd the foundation of Wagner’s mature musical language. Given that my conducting path has been very structured in terms of periods and chronology, Dutchman is a logical starting point for my journey into German Romantic opera. My journey will continue next season with Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz , in Bregenz. Who knows? In the not-too- distant future I hope to conduct Beethoven’s Fidelio and Wagner’s Lohengrin —and I want to be ready for that. What factors make the orchestral sound-world of Dutchman different from the orchestral palette of his later operas? The orchestration of Dutchman is very rich, compared to, say, Verdi’s orchestral accompaniments for Ernani . In fact, it’s a score where Wagner gets “super-forte.” Orchestral musicians of the mid-19th century did not yet have very powerful instruments at their disposal, and, because Wagner was very precise about the kind of sound he wanted, you see many fortes, fortissimos, and fortississimos in the scores. His is not only a rich orchestration but also a powerful orchestration. Lyric audiences were introduced to the operatic Terence Blanchard in 2022 with his second opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones . In 2024, they will hear the Chicago premiere of his rst, Champion .What appeals to you about these works? Blanchard subtitles his piece “an opera in jazz,” rather than a “jazz opera.” His way of writing opera, drawing on his deep knowledge of jazz to create a unique musical language that swings between classical and contemporary, in a truly cinematic ow, makes his language at once very interesting and very accessible. It seems that there’s great potential for Lyric to expand its audience with Champion . That is so important for me. From the very beginning of my appointment as music director, I said that while it is the duty of a major international company to explore the classics of the repertoire, it is no less important to put on stage what we see all about us right now— contemporary opera that tells contemporary stories. New operas can not only be very beautiful and deeply moving, but also can hold up a mirror to 21st century society, in a very powerful way. I rmly believe opera is the most complete, most complex, most challenging art form we have today. If we don’t use that art form to re ect on what’s going on in the world, what better means is there? What is your approach to the perennial audience favorite that is Verdi’s tuneful spectacle, Aida ? Since this will be my rst complete Aida anywhere, I won’t be approaching our production as a “repertoire” opera. I’m delving deeply into the score with the “purest eyes,” to absorb all the musical and dramatic information Verdi gives us. I hope to conduct this work with the sacro fuoco —the sacred re—of a rst-timer! As with Don Carlos , which I conducted here last season, Verdi conceived the opera on a grand scale.