Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 7 - A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 10 You’re speaking about popular music, as in the music of the people. It’s strophic songs. It’s dance music. The finale of Act I of Mozart’s Don Giovanni has a couple of popular dance tunes in it from Mozart’s time. The finale of Act II has Mozart quoting himself alongside some of his contemporaries, whose operatic tunes had become popular hits. Also, this direction brings world premieres to the stage of Lyric Opera of Chicago. Absolutely. We have a duty as one of the world’s leading opera companies to further the art form, to develop the art form, to create new work, and to, hopefully, every so often, create a new work that enters the canon. A work that, 50 years from now, is being performed all over the world. It’s very rare. For every Mozart opera, there are a hundred operas by Dittersdorff and Monsigny, and a bunch of other names that the public doesn’t really remember today, but that once were performed. That’s the real artistic duty of an opera company like ours, to continue to push the boundaries of the art form and be a place where new work can be created and premiered and brought before a public. Then the public decides if it wants to see that work again or not. The hope is that everything is a hit, that everything becomes something that people want to see come back. You’ve cultivated another new set of offerings here, the films with live orchestra. Is that part of expanding Lyric’s identity? These are the kinds of projects that broaden the audience that we bring here. Film has been an important genre of our time, especially in the past nearly 100 years, since the introduction of sound. My sense is that film became a parallel genre to opera. In the 19th century, if you wanted to create a big, sweeping epic, you went to Paris and you composed a grand opera, and it was on some massive historical theme and had seven soloists and a huge chorus and ballet and orchestra. Or you were Wagner and you wrote The Ring . Those are the epic movies of the 19th century. The 19th century’s lighter music, operettas and singspiels, developed into the music theater of the 20th century. And those are the films we are bringing to Lyric. Disney’s Coco is very much a music theater piece, a musical about creativity and making music and a young boy finding his voice and discovering the meaning of family. We have a history of doing musicals here, and the films feel very much like an outgrowth from that. These expansions — are they something you’ve done before? Something you’re seeing other organizations do? All performing arts organizations are constantly asking themselves those questions: How do we bring new people into the experience, and how do we make sure that what we’re doing has a broad appeal — and also preserves room for the widest range of artistic experiences? We need to make sure we can do a spectacular and rare opera like Medea , alongside these newer initiatives like A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness , or the Films in Concert, or Carmina Burana . You want to expand the bandwidth of the opera company. Lyric is about storytelling through music and the voice, the combination of the orchestra, the chorus, and the solo singers. Those are the boundaries within which we work. Within those, what are the pieces and experiences that we can put before the public that remain true to who we are? We’ll always want to find ways to welcome new audiences to experience the power of musical storytelling, the power of opera.