This past Tuesday night, Marshall and I settled into our seats in the top balcony of the Lyric Opera of Chicago for what turned out to be an impassioned and exciting performance of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin – which proved to be a great way to ring down the curtain on our 30th season as season ticket subscribers at the Lyric.
Unfortunately, there is some melancholy mixed into the mood of the occasion because we are about to lose the seats that have been our primary operatic home for all these years. It is in these seats that we have thrilled to Anna Netrebko’s Mimi, Bryn Terfel’s Sweeney Todd, Shirley Verrett’s Azucena, Placido Domingo’s Samson, Renee Fleming’s Countess, Samuel Ramey’s Boris Godunov, Natalie Dessay’s Manon, Marilyn Horne’s Tancredi, Deborah Voigt’s Sieglinde, James Morris’s Wotan, Luciano Pavarotti’s Riccardo, Catherine Malfitano’s Lulu, Jon Vickers’s Parsifal, Mirella Freni’s Fedora, Dimitri Hvorostovsky’s Germont …. and on and on the list could go. We’ve been privileged to experience the wonders of masterworks like Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, or Handel’s Rinaldo ….. and we have also sat through long nights of painful mediocrity with operas like Un Re Ascolta or Alceste or Bel Canto. But even those have been memorable nights at the opera, if only for all the wrong reasons.
So why are we being ‘unseated,’ if you will? Because the Lyric- like most major opera houses- is experiencing some erosion in attendance, they have been forced to reduce the number of performances presented in a given season – which in turn has necessitated the cancellation of one entire subscription series: ours, which is Tuesday nights. It means that for us to continue as season ticket subscribers, we need to shift over to an entirely different performance series- and this almost certainly means that we will not be sitting in the same seats where we have sat for nearly three decades. It is proving to be a surprisingly wrenching experience for us and one that leaves us feeling angry, frustrated, and even hurt. It doesn’t help that the Lyric did a less than stellar job of communicating these changes to its subscribers the moment this change had been decided; had they been quicker and clearer with an announcement, we might not feel quite as miffed as we do. But the other reality is that with this change, we are likely to lose touch with Irm and Zig, the couple that has sat right in front of us for more than two decades. We have never had any contact with them outside of the opera house, although we have sometimes chatted about the possibility of meeting for supper beforehand or for drinks afterward – and in some ways we feel like we really don’t know them all that well. And yet, we feel remarkably close to them – and are authentically sad at the thought of never seeing them again after Tuesday night’s Onegin performance.
Actually, when we first began subscribing to the Lyric nearly thirty years ago, it felt like we saw many of the same people there, opera after opera after opera. There was a rather smartly dressed middle-aged man with a goatee who sat across the aisle from us whom we privately nicknamed The Duke – and in the front row ahead of him was a very different looking opera fan, who looked as though he had just come from the commune. The first time we ever saw him at the Lyric was for a performance of Phillip Glass’s Satyagraha, an intriguing opera inspired by the life and work of Gandhi. (So we nicknamed him Satyagraha.) Thanks to our tendency for judging-a-book-by-its-cover, we assumed that he and his friends had just shown up for this particular opera and that we would never see them again for anything from the standard repertoire. How wrong we were! He was back many times after that- usually dressed in what looked like modern-day hippie wear, but clearly excited to be there. There were other people who were a familiar presence- but over the years, that has changed and it now feels like the audience that is there on a typical Tuesday night is much more of an a la carte assortment of opera fans who have chosen to be there that particular night rather than there because they are there throughout the entire season.
But right in front of us, year after year, has been Irm and Zig- and over the years we have had the loveliest chats with them… although typically about matters outside of opera. Truth be told, neither of them seem like diehard opera fans but rather more like well educated, well read, well-rounded people for whom opera is one of many cultural enrichments that they enjoy. And another pleasure for them is in getting to know the interesting people who cross their path. It’s the kind of social interaction that feels increasingly rare these days when people are either fearful to strike up conversations with strangers or too engrossed in their electronic devices to be bothered by such nonsense. Fortunately, we were already attending the Lyric long before there were iPhones. (In fact, at the time we began subscribing to the Lyric, no one had ever even heard of something called the internet- and nobody we knew yet owned a cell phone.) So one of us struck up a conversation one night, and we’ve been having lovely chats for more than twenty years since.
We did exchange email addresses, and it’s possible that the four of us will arrange some sort of rendezvous sometime in the future. But frankly, I don’t see that happening. I think our ‘friendship’ (if it even makes sense to call it that) has been very much rooted in this particular place (the front of the top balcony of the Lyric) and a particular sort of event (a night at the opera.) And as we migrate to another night of the week for our opera-going, I fear that this ‘friendship’ is about to disappear into the ether. We are still excited at what the future holds- or at least hopeful that many more exciting nights at the opera await us. But we’re saddened at the thought that our future nights at the Lyric will be spent in the company of complete strangers….. that is, unless we scrape up the courage to say hello to someone sitting beside us or in front us, who seems like they might be looking for unexpected friendship along with a night of great opera.
In preparing for a recent lecture I had to give about La Traviata, I read an interesting essay in the Lyric Opera Companion which postulated that a big reason why Verdi found himself shifting away from the grandeur of his earlier operas to set as intimate a story as La Traviata (based on Dumas’s novel The Lady of the Camelias) was …. gas! When Verdi began his career, opera houses were illuminated by candlelight- and it was way too much hassle to darken the theater once it had been lit – so it remained fully lit the entire performance. This tended to underscore the idea that opera was something you attended in order to be seen almost more than to see and hear the opera in question. With the advent of gaslights, the auditorium could be darkened for the performance- and they were, which dramatically altered the experience for those attending the opera. Those who were there tended to be more serious – and much more focused on what was unfolding on the stage. And in turn, that meant that composers could dare to write works with much more subtlety and nuance. It’s an interesting concept.
I think most really serious, authentic opera fans nowadays would never say that they are going to the opera to be seen; the thought might seem preposterous and even offensive. (One thinks of society matrons parading into the opera house with their tiaras sparkling in the moonlight.) But then I think about what it has felt like for nearly a quarter century for us to walk into the top balcony at the Lyric and to be greeted by the smiling faces of Irm and Zig- as glad to see us as we were to see them- and I realize that being seen by friendly, welcoming eyes has been one more pleasure of going to the Lyric all of these years… a pleasure we will miss.
(Below: a few highlights from the last 30 years: Patricia Racette bowing after Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. This was the same Hal Prince production in which I appeared as the Registrar back in 1986… a one-word role.)
(Curtain call after Showboat.)
(at the stage door after a marvelous performance of Massenet’s Manon: Natalie Dessay and Jonas Kaufmann.)
(A former voice student of mine, Scott Frost, was a doorman at the Lyric for a short time.)
(The beautiful lobby of the Lyric)
