Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 11 - safronia

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 26 Lillie Mae Booker,the inspiration for Magnolia and what would you do, if some uncontrollable force stole your birthright and inheritance? In The Difference Between White People and Whiteness , a recent essay on the Radical Roundtable website, Keryl McCord challenges readers to identify “whiteness” as a system versus a group of people, suggesting that people may opt in and out of white identity as they evolve over their life spans. The distinction proves useful in understanding the motivations of safronia ’s two non-Black characters, bossman and cholly. safronia differentiates European Americans from people who have been tricked into believing that they are white for the nefarious means that President Lyndon B. Johnson articulated in a conversation with Bill Moyers. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” Johnson said. “Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” As singing characters, young positions bossman (countertenor) and cholly (bass-baritone) on opposite ends of the vocal spectrum so that audiences view them differently, at least on the surface. cholly’s betrayal of his alleged friend baar proves heartbreaking, revealing how sometimes interracial friendships struggle under the weight of whiteness. It’s a potent circumstance that makes for epic operatic storytelling. The journalist D. Scot Miller, an expert in the subject matter, defined Afro-Surrealism in part as both “interested in the present and visiting the past with fresh eyes” — aptly describing the style of safronia , in which young deploys and upends language, time, space, and sound to tell the Booker’s story in nonlinear fashion. Foregrounding the musical descendants of Negro Spirituals, young fuses blues, funk, gospel, and hip-hop to conjure safronia ’s Black sonicity. He aims for audiences to listen intently to sounds of Blackness and also to position Black Americans’ music as “America’s classical music.” Indeed, many musical idioms birthed in the U.S. can trace their roots back to Negro Spirituals. Still, listen carefully for the transformations that blues, funk, and gospel undergo in safronia as a result of the Great Migration. “The music is about what is birthed from musicians going North,” young says. “Blues gets electric once it goes up North. But the conditions don’t switch, especially when you’re talking the Blues, or Gospel, or any of it.” Both leddem in and norf , among other movements, will likely inspire audiences to tap their feet and move to the music in their seats, as young intends. But Afro- Surrealism also enables the music to create a dream-like state. “How do I start at Curtis Mayfield and push it further, in this story about time travel and how music has, or Black music has, traveled time?” young muses. “It’s magic to propel us forward and it’s magic to make us remember. So, we have hymns and blues that make us remember — and we have hip hop and funk to prove it.” Similar to the Booker family, between 1910 and 1970 some six million Black Americans (descendants of Freedmen) moved from the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states, including Alaska. The transatlantic slave trade, U.S. Civil War, and Reconstruction preceded the Great Migration, a period of such cultural, economic, historical, political, psychological, and social import that safronia immediately enters into dialogues with iconic works such as The Warmth of Other Suns , The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism , The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence , Sky Full of Elephants , and, most recently, Sinners , among others. So why did Black Americans flee the South? Although the U.S. promised Black Americans a new social contract replete with citizenship, freedom, and equal protection under the law after the Civil War, Black Americans fled the South to escape the Jim Crow system, which governed peoples’ actions and interactions while masterfully dispensing state- sanctioned brutality, cruelty, fear, and treachery. For far too many Black Americans, the “American” dream felt and continues to feel like an “American” horror story. photo courtesy of avery r.young