Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 2 - Fidelio

15 | Lyric Opera of Chicago And your scholarly work had an earlier focus. I love Handel operas. My specific area of academic interest was 18th-century opera seri a. I wrote about a very narrow topic, which was opera seria in Berlin from 1740 to 1806, and the way that it was used to reflect and idealize political and social messages—and also then how that shifted over time as you move from a model of absolutist, enlightened monarchy to Napoleon. Handel is an example of that, par excellence . You’re especially expert in this period, clearly. In my scholarly work, the paramount composer was Carl Heinrich Graun. He was the court composer to Frederick the Great in Berlin, and his operas were predominant there from 1740 to the mid 1780s. The other one was Johann Adolf Hasse—actually the court composer in Dresden, though his operas were also done in Berlin. His wife was one of the most famous sopranos of the day, Faustina Bordoni. She was one of the “rival queens” in Handel’s opera company in London in the 1720s. When you hear some of those Handel operas, she was who he was writing for. So can we expect a Graun festival at Lyric? That would be about me, and the work that we need to do needs to be about Chicago and about our audience and our community. I will continue to enjoy my handful of Graun recordings. For the curious among us, where should we start? Montezuma —that was the second to last opera he composed. Frederick the Great wrote the libretto for it. Musically, it was really interesting because Frederick thought that da capo arias, with all the repetition and the decoration, interrupted and impeded the dramatic flow. He insisted that Graun write a lot of cavatinas, short AB pieces or even just A pieces that get cut off, to keep things moving. Mozart had no awareness of these works, but in a way, they point toward the more economic and dramatic flow of a Mozart opera. So no Graun festival? No Graun festival. Richard Bonynge conducted a disc of Montezuma highlights, with Joan Sutherland at her absolute peak. To get the full experience, done in an historically informed way, there’s a recording of his Cleopatra e Cesare led by the wonderful René Jacobs. On a more serious note, what do you see on the horizon for Lyric and for opera? I’m incredibly optimistic about our art form. Why so? Well, it’s been at the aspirational peak of artistic and human expression in Western culture for more than 400 years. Incredibly creative people have turned to this art form to say fundamental things about the human condition and our shared experience. That tells me we’ve got nothing to worry about because we still have this fundamental need to tell these stories that we all share. Opera is an incredible vehicle for that— to express these fundamental truths and tell these shared stories. The challenges are real, though. There are challenges. The work gets more expensive, and audiences change their patterns of consuming what we do. It’s our job to stay on top of all that. Our job as one of the world’s leading opera companies is to make sure that we do everything to continue to bring this art form to people. If you look back at the history of the opera, and you read about particular composers or particular premieres, it seems like there’s always been a drum beat of, Oh, we don’t have enough resources . It’s a through-line. But somehow the art form always perseveres and thrives. We seem to have a need for it. In a moment where technology is increasingly and exponentially more intrusive, and it becomes harder and harder to find quiet spaces where we can have communal experiences, that’s something that opera provides. It brings us together. We’re all sharing the same moments. We’re bringing our own frame of reference to it, but in a sense, we’re together, we’re communing. I think that’s really at the root of opera’s power. That’s something that humans will fundamentally need into the future. As long as we keep our eye on the ball and continue to provide that, and continue to tell stories that resonate—whether those are stories that come from the timeless repertoire or new stories—opera’s future is bright. “First and foremost, artistic excellence has to be the goal.”