With its gaudy costuming, grandiloquent language and uniquely powerful voices, grand opera is an art form that flourishes in the world’s greatest cultural centers: the Lyric in Chicago, the Met in New York, La Scala in Rome.
Much further down that list falls the DuPage Opera Theatre, which holds forth at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn as what many consider one of the finest regional companies in the Midwest.
DuPage Opera is entering its 18th season this month–it typically performs in mid-summer and mid-winter each year–with a revival of Johann Strauss Jr.’s comic operetta “Die Fledermaus” (The Bat) at the college’s Arts Center Mainstage.
A record of nearly two decades of performing is particularly impressive considering the challenges facing any opera company. Opera is expensive to produce, trained voices are hard to find, and audiences in the western suburbs are mostly unfamiliar with the medium. By comparison, ballet, theater and symphonic music all seem far easier to sell to the public.
Credit for DuPage Opera’s success is largely owed to its founder and music director, Harold Bauer, a teacher at the college since 1977 who has single-handedly kept the torch blazing with close attention to every detail within the company. Of course, the college’s unflagging support for the arts has been important, too. By donating performing space and subsidizing directors’ salaries, the College of DuPage assists in sponsoring not only DuPage Opera but also four other professional companies. They are the New Philharmonic (also directed by Bauer), the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, the Arts Center Jazz Ensemble and the New Classic Singers.
It helps that DuPage Opera performs all its works in English, thus making the singing more accessible to its audiences, and to keep expenses down eschews imported stars from New York and elsewhere.
Moreover, the 800-seat Mainstage theater at the Arts Center is nearly ideal for opera.
“The acoustics are very good for opera,” said Jack Weiseman, director of the Arts Center and associate dean for performing arts. “We have just enough reverberation in the hall to allow all the singing to be clearly understood.”
The Lyric Opera seems an imposing challenge for local residents, with ticket prices ranging up to $100, most of its productions sung in either Italian, French or German, and balcony seats at nosebleed altitudes in the Civic Opera House.
“The Lyric can be very intimidating,” said Nan Smith, a Glen Ellyn resident who is co-president of the Friends of New Philharmonic, a group that also funnels donations to DuPage Opera. “The College of DuPage is a lot less expensive, and it’s easier for people here to get to. It’s a wonderful place to get your initial exposure to opera. The performers are so good that it’s also a very satisfying experience for people with more sophisticated tastes.”
In fact, there are fewer alternatives to the Lyric available all the time. Smaller Chicago companies like the Germania Opera, Apollo Opera and Theatre International have all run aground and disappeared. The Chicago Opera Theatre, most often mentioned as No. 2 to the Lyric in Chicago, nearly expired a year ago amid a budgetary crisis, though it is back performing again this year with reorganized management. In June the group performed Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Aaron Copland’s “The Tender Land.”
There is a growing consensus that DuPage Opera is nearly the match of the larger Chicago Opera Theatre.
“I think the companies are on a par,” said Robert Smith, a River Forest-based baritone who is singing the role of Falke in “Fledermaus.” Smith sang regularly with the Lyric for 17 seasons beginning in 1954 while teaching music in the Chicago public schools. He has been performing for DuPage Opera for the last 14 seasons.
“DuPage is one of the finest regional groups around,” he asserted.
Smith and others universally laud the work of Bauer, 61, of Hinsdale, whose love of opera dates to his childhood. Born in Nashville, the country music capital, Bauer studied piano, viola and clarinet as a youngster at the behest of his parents, immigrants from Germany and Austria. An aunt, the opera singer Franzi Michel, lived with the family for a while.
“She would tell us bedtime stories at night, and they were always opera plots,” recalled Bauer, whose burgeoning interest in opera was further spurred by Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera and touring productions that came through Nashville.
Two years of service in the army during the mid-1950s found Bauer stationed in Stuttgart and Munich, home to great opera companies. “I spent many nights at the opera. It wasn’t long before I knew that conducting was what I wanted to do with my life,” Bauer said.
Bauer returned from the military to enroll at Peabody College in Nashville, where he studied under Guy Taylor, conductor of the Nashville Symphony. Then came four years in a master’s program at Northwestern University in Evanston, where he studied conducting under Thor Johnson, formerly conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony. Fresh out of school in 1962, Bauer was hired as music director of the Lake Forest Symphony, where he spent five years as conductor.
After that came six years conducting the Peoria Symphony, where Bauer helped start the Peoria Civic Opera Company (it still exists). He left Peoria then to serve three years as conductor of the Erie (Pa.) Philharmonic, before quitting to try the life of free-lance conducting from a new home base in Evanston. Then came word in 1977 that COD was looking for someone to start a professional orchestra.
“Somebody mentioned a community college in the west suburbs,” Bauer recalled. “For somebody like me from the North Shore, that seemed like a cultural wasteland. But I came out, bought a house on Lake Ellyn in Glen Ellyn with my wife, Sally, and two kids and discovered that the west suburbs are a very lovely place to live and raise a family.”
Bauer settled into his new job, and, while getting the New Philharmonic started, he mentioned to the college’s administration his love for opera. The next year a grant helped him launch two one-act operas, Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Trial By Jury” and Martinu’s “What Men Live By.” Most of the singers were students and adults from the community, but attendance was encouraging enough to warrant a second summer season the next year, when Nicolai’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” was presented. After that came a mid-winter production, and a tradition was launched.
Big-time opera stars often aren’t discovered until they’re well past 30 and their voices are fully mature. DuPage Opera through the years has caught some future headliners in their 20s, before they were ready for prime-time performing. A Naperville resident, soprano Amanda Halgrimson, sang in “Merry Wives,” for instance, while she was a mere student of 21. Today she is an international superstar performing in the greatest houses of Europe. A few years after Halgrimson, Bauer found Cynthia Hayman, who has since gone on to perform in Covent Garden in London and other great opera centers.
In 1985 Bauer staged the American premiere of Lehar’s “Giuditta,” and last summer DuPage Opera tackled the rarely performed “Jenufa” by Janacek. Yet Bauer mostly stresses recognizable names such as Verdi’s “La Traviata” (1991), Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” (1982 and again in 1993) and Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” in his programming. He keeps the staging, assisted by the resources of COD, quite traditional in look.
“I realize that in this area opera is a relatively unknown art form. Probably 75 percent of our audience is seeing a `Boheme’ or `Carmen’ for the first time,” Bauer said. “My approach, therefore, is to do our productions fairly straight. Our audiences wouldn’t get it if we tried to do a radical version of a standard work.”
Bauer may be accused of overextending himself at times. In recent years he has run both DuPage Opera and the professional New Philharmonic, a 65-member ensemble that backs the opera company in performance, as well as the professional Fox Valley Symphony in Aurora and a COD student orchestra. Around all those duties he sandwiches the time to teach two classes each semester. Last year he finally relinquished his Fox Valley duties.
All the while, Bauer marvels at the wellspring of singing talent around Chicago. “Fledermaus” auditions in January attracted 75 performers vying for eight solo roles.
“This is one of the few companies in the entire country that gives young performers and stage designers a chance to work on major pieces in the repertory,” said Geoffrey Edwards, an Evanston resident who is stage director for DuPage Opera. “For whatever production you’re mounting, it’s become obvious that Chicago has the performers to man it.”
Audiences are responding. The 800-seat Mainstage, opened in 1986 along with the rest of the $14.4 million Arts Center on campus, regularly is filled to almost 85 percent capacity for DuPage Opera productions. More and more, DuPage operagoers are coming back for return visits. Weiseman, the Arts Center director, sees a trend developing.
“When you go to Europe, you see that all the small towns have their own opera companies,” he said. “It’s something that hasn’t yet established itself here, but with companies like DuPage Opera, a real tradition of opera outside the big city is being established. That will leave the entire community enriched in a cultural sense.”
Performances of “Die Fledermaus” are at 8 p.m. July 8, 12, 14 and 15 and at 3 p.m. July 9 at Arts Center Mainstage, College of DuPage, 22nd Street between Lambert Road and Park Boulevard, Glen Ellyn. Tickets are $19, $18 for senior citizens and $15 for students; call the box office at 708-942-4000.
