Opera in America has come a long, long way from full-figured Wagnerian heroines, horned helmets, breastplates and all those other tiresome cliches people associate with this most “exotic and irrational” of art forms, as Samuel Johnson famously described it.
In these early years of the 21st Century, the leading opera houses have been doing their utmost to make performances exciting and culturally relevant for a shifting audience base, while delivering the great voices that were always fundamental to the art.
It’s a daunting task, because opera is the most hazardous of the performing arts: It demands that many elements-solo and choral singing, conducting, acting, orchestral playing, stage direction and design-come together at once.
Broadway musicals try to do that too, but there’s a big difference between singing opera and singing “Phantom of the Opera.” Opera singers spend years training their voices to project what the composer wrote in the most technically correct and musically faithful manner possible, to the farthest reaches of huge opera houses without electronic amplification.
For half a century, Lyric Opera of Chicago has been walking this high wire as well as any American or European opera company, sustaining an international presence while igniting spectator passions to match those of the zealous sports fans the town is known for.
Along the way, the Lyric has weathered a bitter family feud (1956); a labor contract impasse that resulted in a dark season (1967); a severe financial crisis that nearly killed the company (1980); and a consequent palace coup that resulted in the firing of co-founder Carol Fox (1981). It survived the loss of Fox’s successor, Ardis Krainik, to cancer (1997).
That Lyric has survived its ups and downs and come out on top in these perilous economic times is what the company, and its devoted public, will be celebrating when the curtain rises Sept. 18 on the 50th-anniversary season at the Civic Opera House.
Lyric is launching its golden jubilee schedule with the same Mozart opera-“Don Giovanni”-that announced what was initially called the Lyric Theatre of Chicago to the world in February 1954. The new season, with its 91 performances, will run through April 16 and feature seven operas, one gala concert and three post-season cycles of Wagner’s monumental “Ring of the Nibelung.” (see accompanying schedule).
Perhaps the most eagerly anticipated event this year is the world premiere of “A Wedding,” based on director Robert Altman’s film comedy about the mishaps that befall the marriage ceremony of a groom from old-money Lake Forest and a bride from a nouveau- riche family.
The production, which begins Dec. 11, is a prime example of how the Lyric tries to keep in step with contemporary culture and create synergies with other artistic disciplines.
No Chicago company in the history of resident opera has lasted longer, imported so many artists, raised so much money, been better administered, done more for the city’s economic base, made more converts to the art form and brought Chicago greater outside attention. It’s an admirable track record-but a tough one for Lyric to match in its next 50 years.
William Mason isn’t worried. “I’m quite sure that in the immediate future you will not see any deterioriation in what we present on the stage of Lyric Opera,” says the company’s general director for the last seven years.
Launching a big opera company in America’s heartland during the early 1950s was a crapshoot, and the history of opera in Chicago was not encouraging.
Beginning with the Chicago Grand Opera in 1910 and its six successor companies, resident opera came and went in the city through 1946, with the same company often adopting a different name. None lasted long enough to make much impact on the opera world, and few folks would have laid money on Lyric’s eventually rivaling the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the San Francisco Opera.
When it opened its doors in 1954, the Lyric had an administrative staff of 13, seven conductors and musical staff and a backstage crew of six. Today its full-time administrative staff numbers 100, plus 20 to 30 part-timers in the ticket department. The seasonal full-time and part-time roster-including orchestra, chorus, music staff, stagehands, wig and makeup artists, dressers, ushers, concessions, elevator operators, box office, house staff and security-totals 881. No wonder a top ticket to a Lyric performance runs $170, and why the company must raise tens of thousands of dollars in contributions every season.
Even so, at a time when many opera companies and symphony orchestras are hemorrhaging money as a result of a weak economy and 9/11, Lyric stands as an example of fiscal responsibility and audience appeal. The four-week seasons it presented when it began in the early ’50s have grown to 5 months. Its programs are attended by some 35,000 subscribers and the company is loyally supported by volunteer boards and chapters. Early indications are that the 2004-05 season will again sell nearly 100 percent of capacity in the 3,500-seat Opera House.
What keeps audiences coming back to Lyric over five decades is setting consistently high levels for conducting, orchestral playing, stage direction, sets, lighting, costumes, choral singing and, above all, solo singing.
That tradition was established early under founders Fox, businessman Lawrence Kelly and conductor Nicola Rescigno. Lyric was the first American company to provide a haven for the superstars from World War II-ravaged Italy such as Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Giuseppe di Stefano, Ettore Bastianini and Tito Gobbi. They were looking for an American base, and record companies were keen to promote their albums in the U.S. market. For a time, the Lyric’s nickname was “La Scala West.”
It was definitely a coup for a newbie opera company to hitch its star to such luminaries. Of course, it helped that opera seasons back then were shorter, great singers were more abundant, and competition was less fierce, as Mason points out.
“By the time Lyric was starting its first season, San Francisco’s was already over and the Met was just beginning its own season. There was no Houston, Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Philadelphia-all those companies didn’t exist,” he says.
It also helped that the fledgling Lyric’s prize catches felt they were treated right in Chicago. Soprano Renata Scotto recalls her 1960 house debut (as Mimi in Puccini’s “La Boheme”) in the forthcoming history, “Lyric Opera-50 Years of Grand Opera in Chicago”: “I spoke no English, but Lyric felt like an Italian theater. There was a warm feeling from the public, backstage and with colleagues. Carol Fox, of course, spoke perfect Italian, and Maestro Pino Donati [artistic director] really protected singers.”
If Lyric audiences warmed to Scotto, they were absolutely passionate about Callas during her residence with the company in 1954-55. Everyone adored the Greek-American with the great, smoldering eyes and what Tribune critic Claudia Cassidy called “that marvelous, haunting voice piercing the very center of the phrase, as a great dancer does in flight.”
Callas made her U.S. debut in her signature role of Norma in the eponymous Bellini opera that opened Lyric’s first full season on Nov. 1, 1954.
During Lyric’s first two seasons, Chicagoans heard six of the diva’s most indelible portrayals-Norma, Violetta, Lucia, Elvira in Bellini’s “I Puritani,” Leonora in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and her only stage performances as Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” Her haunting, melancholy voice and imperious star presence seemed to reach back to the early decades of the century, when Mary Garden, Rosa Raisa and other legendary prima donnas ruled Chicago opera.
Callas’ final Lyric season, in 1955, overlapped with Tebaldi’s first. But Lyric was not fated to have both La Divina and La Superba on the same roster for long. A process server surprised Callas backstage with a summons connected with a former agent, after her hara-kiri death scene in the Puccini tearjerker. Poor Butterfly quickly turned into a raging Medea. Bitterly blaming Lyric management for not protecting her, Callas vowed, “Chicago will be sorry for this!” She went off to the Met the following season and never again sang opera in Chicago.
World-famous singers are by no means the only ones who have shaped Lyric’s history. Backstage staff and crew, choristers, dancers, supernumeraries (the spear carriers and other non-singing extras), board members and other volunteers have played crucial roles in sustaining the organization.
Kip Kelley of Glenview, a retired vice president of Dun & Bradstreet, is a prime example of how casual operagoers have been converted into passionate operaphiles.
Kelley, 75, says he cared far more about the theater than he did about opera when someone took him to see Lyric’s “Otello” in 1957 with Tebaldi, Mario del Monaco and Gobbi heading the cast. He was hooked. “While I can’t even sing in the shower,” he says, “I was just so intrigued by the art form . . . the singing, staging, costumes, music-the totality of opera.”
Besides being a loyal Lyric subscriber for the last 42 years, he has served as president of the Lyric Guild and Lyric Opera Center boards, and has given lectures on 32 different operas for the company. As a frequent “super” in various Lyric productions, he hopes to repeat his assignment as the Roman cardinal in “Tosca” this coming season. “Opera is in my blood,” he says.
The Lyric’s success also stems from its ability to build a strong orchestra over the years and enjoy productive relationships with many distinguished conductors, from Georg Solti, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Josef Krips, Eugen Jochum and Jean Fournet in the early years, to Christoph Eschenbach, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Mark Elder, Dennis Russell Davies and Andrew Davis today.
Of the many notable Italian maestri who have passed through Lyric’s portals, none has enjoyed a longer or more fruitful association with the company than Bruno Bartoletti, its artistic director emeritus. Since his U.S. conducting debut at Lyric in 1956, the genial Florentine, still active at 78, has led well over 400 performances of 52 operas here.
The quality of the orchestral playing and choral singing has steadily improved in recent decades, and much of the credit for that belongs to music director Andrew Davis and to Donald Palumbo, the Lyric’s chorus master.
“In the beginning, the Lyric orchestra was a collection of the best freelance musicians available,” says Everett Zlatoff-Mirsky, 66, its retired longtime concertmaster and personnel manager. “The ensemble took many years to develop until it was truly an orchestra and not just an aggregate of part-time players.”
Producing grand opera has always been a risky, absurdly expensive proposition. Even when playing to a sold-out house, roughly 35 percent of the cost of every performance has to be made up through sources other than ticket sales.
Yet while the Lyric’s closest American rivals, the Met and San Francisco, are battling major deficits-the Met is said to have run $10 million in the red the last two years, while San Francisco is saddled with $3.8 million worth of debt-the Lyric is singing all the way to the bank.
Why? “We aren’t spending money we don’t have,” Mason declares. The company keeps a tight rein on expenses, which means that nary a wig or settee is unaccounted for, and holds its production schedule to a manageable level. The company still produces only eight operas per season, the same number it mounted in its first year.
All that fiscal discipline shows up on the bottom line: At the Lyric’s annual board meeting in May, Mason reported a surplus of $700,000 for the season that ended March 21, a figure that marked a return to the black after a brief dip into red ink in 2002-03 when the deficit ran to $1.1 million, and a return to the balanced books Lyric had maintained for the previous 16 seasons. The 2003-04 season had 98.2 percent attendance for 83 performances of eight operas.
The solid box-office returns give the general director and the other members of Lyric’s administrative team-music director Davis and artistic director Matthew A. Epstein-a comfortable financial backstop for a $58.2 million golden-jubilee season.
Righting the company’s financial ship didn’t come without controversy. When Lyric dumped previously announced productions of two adventurous rarities from last season’s lineup-Italo Montemezzi’s “L’Amore dei Tre Re” and Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini”-and replaced them with two popular, easier-to-sell works-Gounod’s “Faust” and Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance”-the marketing department may have been pleased, but subscribers complained. Mason defended the change as an act of prudence at a time of financial peril in the arts.
The program switch was also consistent with the formula that has kept Lyric healthy for almost five decades: a carefully balanced schedule that mixes the warhorses of opera-perennial favorites like “Tosca,” “Aida” and “Traviata”-with a smaller number of unusual works and occasional contemporary operas like this season’s “A Wedding,” the company’s third commission from American composer William Bolcom.
The need for a regular infusion of new works was recognized by Ardis Krainik in 1990 when she launched Lyric’s “Toward the 21st Century” initiative, which under Mason continues to present both old and new American operas under the theme of “American Horizons.”
What works for opera companies varies from city to city, but it doesn’t hurt that in major metropolitan centers like Chicago, opera has taken on an air of renewed glamour and social cachet among young people, in contrast to the aging and erosion of symphony orchestra audiences.
Mason says recent surveys show that the average age of Lyric subscribers in recent years has dropped from the 50s, where it had remained fairly steady since the company’s beginning, to the mid-40s. “Look around the audience in the less expensive seats and you’ll see a lot of people in their 30s and even 20s,” he says. He credits the demographic shift to the use of English surtitles over the past two decades and the increased emphasis on visual/theatrical elements.
Mason also points out that ticket prices, which start at $29 for the cheapest seats, have not kept budget-conscious younger members away. “Some of them pay at least $50 to hear a rock concert,” he says.
The Lyric has benefited from a general growth in opera attendance. Ticket sales rose by 35 percent nationally between 1982 and 1992 and increased another 8 percent since then, according to Opera America, which represents 197 opera companies worldwide. The National Endowment for the Arts, in its most recent survey of national opera-going habits, reports that 6.6 million adults, or 3.2 percent of the adult population of the U.S., attended at least one opera performance in 2002.
Mason believes that a feminine sensibility has been vital to Lyric’s success. “The company was very fortunate to have had two women general directors,” he observes. “Both Carol [Fox] and Ardis [Krainik] set a tone of gentility, caring, taking care of people, the kind of thoughtful little things that certainly a male general manager of the 1950s wouldn’t have thought of.
“Carol set the standard of vocal excellence from which the company has never wavered. She could be enormously charming, but she also had a remarkable sense of power and how to use it.”
For all of Fox’s accomplishments, her regime came to a bad end, with soaring deficits and managerial problems that led the board to dismiss her in January 1981 and replace her with Krainik, who had risen from being a chorus member and supporting singer to office manager and Fox’s assistant.
A strikingly different kind of manager than Fox, Krainik was a person of enormous charm and deep moral convictions. More importantly, she was a canny businesswoman who, by the end of her first year, had helped Lyric close out its season more than $500,000 under budget. By the end of her first decade, the house had set new records for subscribership, box-office receipts, seats sold, contributions and number of donors.
“Ardis took great care to run the company in a businesslike manner-to keep the balance intact between the art form and the bottom line,” Mason says.
Krainik continued modernizing the company into the next decade, bringing projected English titles to the stage in 1985, buying the Civic Opera House (the second-largest opera auditorium in North America) outright in 1993 and launching a three-year, $100 million renovation of the facility.
Krainik’s premature death was a profound loss for the Lyric and the larger opera world, but under Mason the company has rebounded from her passing in a way she would have admired.
A former voice student who graduated from the Lyric’s children’s chorus to supporting roles during its earliest seasons, Mason joined the administration in 1962 and learned important lessons from Fox and Krainik.
He credits the strong administrative team he has assembled for much of the Lyric’s success. Music director Davis, 60, has noticeably lifted the level of orchestral playing since taking over as principal conductor in 2000. Artistic director Epstein, 57, recognized as a shrewd judge of voices, has steered promising young singers into Lyric’s apprentice program, the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists.
The one area that remains problematic for Lyric is radio broadcasting.
The company began airing its programs over local radio as early as 1958, but it wasn’t until 1973 that WFMT-FM began live broadcasts of every opening-night performance. Four years later, the broadcasts were syndicated nationally through the WFMT Fine Arts Network.
The series continued each year from 1977 until 2002, when its two major corporate sponsors pulled out. Hopes are dim that the musicians union will agree on a fee structure that would allow the broadcasts to resume by the start of this season.
Despite the financial challenges that lie ahead, Mason expresses wary optimism for the future. The next few years, he predicts, will be a do-or-die time for nonprofit arts groups, as most opera companies and symphony orchestras attempt to keep costs down and erase deficits, while trying to bring in younger, engaged listeners. Many of these organizations, he suggests, will have to take drastic action to survive.
“We at Lyric are fortunate that we have not overextended ourselves,” he says. “We’re going to put on the very best opera we can. Lyric’s first 50 years have set a standard we want to build upon.”
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HIGHS AND LOWS
VON RHEIN’S TOP 5
Although the Lyric has presented many great productions since October 1977 when I began writing for the Tribune, these are shows from more recent seasons that have given me particular pleasure.
HANDEL: “ALCINA” John Nelson, conductor. Robert Carsen, production. 1999. An all-star cast headed by Renee Fleming brought this 1735 Baroque fantasy to life.
WAGNER: “TANNHAUSER” Ferdinand Leitner, conductor. Peter Sellars, production. 1988. Who can forget the audacious treatment of Wagner’s knight-minstrel as a fallen televangelist who resembled the disgraced Jimmy Swaggart?
STRAUSS: “CAPRICCIO” Andrew Davis, conductor. John Cox, production. 1994. The first Lyric performances of this exquisite “conversation piece for music” was performed by a nearly flawless ensemble as if it were Mozartean chamber music.
BRITTEN: “BILLY BUDD” Davis, conductor. David McVicar, production. 2001. A true team effort that brought out the very best in the performers and production ensemble.
JANACEK: “JENUFA” Davis, conductor. Richard Jones, production. 2000. This was 20th Century music theater at its most dramatically searing and deeply moving.
THE BOTTOM 5
Very few of the performances that I’ve found disappointing over the years could be termed flops, as Lyric rarely skimps on the quality of its music. Rather, most of the productions that didn’t work for me were conceptually flawed, which is to say that the stage director, in my view, ran roughshod over the text.
PENDERECKI: “PARADISE LOST” Bruno Bartoletti, conductor. Igal Perry, staging. 1978. Just about everything that could go wrong with this world premiere did go wrong; the cost overruns alone nearly killed the company and cost Carol Fox her job. The result was aural sludge, quickly forgotten.
VERDI: “UN BALLO IN MASCHERA” John Pritchard, conductor. Sonja Frisell, production. 1980. This great lyrical tragedy became an inadvertent sitcom when its stars, Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti (who were feuding in real life), sang their love scene from opposite sides of the stage without once looking at each other.
DAVIS: “AMISTAD” Dennis Russell Davies, conductor. George C. Wolfe, production. 1997. Anthony Davis is a talented composer, and everybody gave his commissioned opus their best shot, but it sunk without a trace.
VERDI: “MACBETH” Asher Fisch, conductor. David Alden, production. 1999. Campy, creepy, Americanized Eurotrash that shed more light on the director’s sensibility than it did on poor Verdi’s.
VERDI: “RIGOLETTO” Fabio Luisi, conductor. Christopher Alden, production. 2000. Director Alden’s screed on male-chauvinist oppression of women, set in a 19th Century Italian men’s club, certainly had dramatic ideas. Too bad they weren’t Verdi’s.
— John von Rhein
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MEMORABLE MOMENTS
Bernard Izzo, 80, a veteran of numerous supporting baritone roles from 1956 to 1978, recalls a rehearsal of “Faust” in 1963. “I was singing the role of the student, Wagner. In the first act the Devil offered me some wine from his goblet. The goblet they used was a big heavy thing. Another singer was supposed to knock it out of Ghiaurov’s hand. Well, he did that and the goblet hit me right in the forehead. It knocked me out cold! I lay there unconscious for what must have been five minutes. When I came to, they called a cab to take me to the doctor. Everything checked out fine, except for the fact that I had a black eye.”
Soprano Regine Crespin, who sang five roles at Lyric between 1962 and 1964, related this incident. “During two seasons–1962-63 and 1963-64–Tito Gobbi and Boris Christoff, who were married to sisters and always arguing, were both on the roster. One night at my hotel I heard shouting, and the next day [I found out] that Christoff had knocked at Gobbi’s door, and when Gobbi opened it, had punched him in the nose and left without saying a word. Who says all the drama is on stage?”
Roger Hull, Lyric’s technical director from 1968-86, says the most difficult show to put on was “Paradise Lost” in 1978. “Bill Mason and I went to Europe about 10 times just consulting about the show. I wrote a letter to [artistic director] Bruno Bartoletti telling him the show was much too grandiose for our stage, but it never got through to anybody [higher up]. We had to cut this out, cut that out. We were supposed to have boxes of dry ice and put water on them so the stage would be covered with smoke. But when I gave [suppliers] an estimate of how much we would need, they told me it would be too dangerous. ‘If anybody passed out or fell down, they’d be dead before you could find them in all that smoke,’ they said. So we canceled the dry ice!”
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LYRIC’S ANNIVERSARY SEASON
FEW NEW OPERAS PRESENTED IN THE LAST COUPLE OF DECADES have generated as much buzz as “A Wedding,” a comedy of manners that will have its world premiere here on Dec. 11. Iconoclastic film director Robert Altman will stage this adaptation of his 1978 film of the same name.
The company will open its season on Sept. 18 with Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” the same work that the Lyric mounted as its first production in 1954, prior to its official opening later that year. The new production will be staged by the German director Peter Stein and conducted by former Ravinia music director Christoph Eschenbach, in his Lyric debut.
The rest of 2004-05 promises many more big projects, several of which harken to milestones from Lyric’s golden years. There will be revivals of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” and “Gotterdammerung,” Verdi’s “Aida” and Puccini’s “Tosca”; a new production of Janacek’s fable, “The Cunning Little Vixen”; and the recent Met production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” staged by Jurgen Flimm.
Lyric also will revive its 1992 production of Wagner’s massive, 15-hour cycle, “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” with Davis conducting and Herbert Kellner re-creating August Everding’s original staging. Among the singers will be Jane Eaglen, Michelle DeYoung, John Treleaven, Placido Domingo and James Morris. Three full cycles will be given between March 28 and April 16, 2005.
Apart from the mainstage season. Lyric will look back fondly at some of its history at a gala concert on Oct. 30. Among the singers booked for the sold-out benefit are Renee Fleming, David Daniels, Ben Heppner, Thomas Hampson, Frederica von Stade, Mattila, Eaglen and Samuel Ramey.
— J.v.R.
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PITCHING HIGH CULTURE WITH A HARD SELL
He still shows up at his office most week-days and attends many opera performances at Lyric, even though he wound down his services as the company’s public relations counsel several years ago.
Danny Newman, in fact, remains as much a Chicago institution as the opera company he has promoted for most of his long career. “I am the only survivor of the original Lyric staff from 1954–a key jubilarian!” proclaims the 85-year-old pitchman.
Newman established a model for arts promotion and audience development that has been adopted worldwide. Scores of not-for-profit arts groups owe their success, indeed their very existence, to his landmark bible of subscription salesmanship, “Subscribe Now!”
He once told the Tribune that although some people in the arts equate selling their product to debasing it, “The wise ones know that their arts have been made possible through my subscriptions.”
His press releases and subscription brochures were legend-baroque in style, as instantly recognizable as his velvet borsalino. Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” was an opera packed with “hot-blooded romance, illicit love and violent vengeance, Sicilian style.” A subtle wordsmith he wasn’t. But, as Lyric’s box-office success has proved, Newman’s stock of showbiz hard sell is always in season.
–J.v.R.
