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An Additional Cause for Celebration Chicago
Lyric Opera
10/10/2026 - & October 13, 15, 18, 21, 24*, 30, November 1, 2026
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni, K. 527
Christian Van Horn*/Kyle Ketelsen (Don Giovanni), Tommaso Barea (Leporello), Mané Galoyan (Donna Anna), Lawrence Brownlee (Don Ottavio), Nina Solodovnikova (Donna Elvira), Anna El‑Khashem (Zerlina), Christopher Humbert, Jr. (Masetto), David Leigh (Commendatore)
Lyric Opera of Chicago Chorus, Michael Black (Chorus Master), Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra, Enrique Mazzola (Conductor)
Robert Falls (Stage Director), Katrina Bachus (Assistant Director), Walt Spangler (Set Designer), Ana Kuzmanic (Costume Designer), Duane Schuler (Lighting Designer), August Tye (Choreographer), John Metzner (Wigs and Makeup), Andrew Rathgeber (Fight Director), Colin Ure (Supertitles)
C. Van Horn, N. Solodovnikova, A. El-Khashem (© Cory Weaver)
Since the mid-19th century, there has been opera in Chicago.
Some of it was provided by various touring companies, while repeated attempts at establishing permanency came and went, usually as a result of fiscal insolvency; even more than a century ago, opera was a costly endeavor, requiring, as it does today, generous donors with deep pockets.
In 1921, the famous Scottish soprano Mary Garden (1874‑1967) was the familiar visage of several prominent Windy City arts organizations, using them, perhaps unintentionally, as a sort of personal vanity project, allowing her to sing—among other things—some of her most famous roles, including Massenet’s Manon and Thaïs, along with Debussy’s Mélisande. Even with Garden’s undeniable cachet, her various ventures, too, ultimately failed.
1n 1954, three visionaries—Carol Fox, Lawrence Kelly, and Nicola Rescigno—banded together, along with local civic and business leaders, in an attempt to provide opera a ‘forever home’ in the city. Their experiment, which they named the Lyric Theatre of Chicago, opened to rave reviews in an art‑deco office building on downtown Wacker Drive—known since the 1920s as the Civic Opera building—in which the company still performs.
That first season saw, among other starry evenings, the American debut of soprano Maria Callas as Bellini’s Norma, performances which have been long credited with putting the company on the musical map. Callas returned the following season to perform three roles, chief among them her only staged performances anywhere of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. These were the golden days of Lyric Opera of Chicago—as the fledgling company was rebranded in 1956—and even better‑known in those days by the sobriquet “La Scala West,” as a bevy of superb Italian artists headed by the inimitable Tito Gobbi (and invited to Chicago by Lyric’s Artistic Advisor Pino Donati), flocked to the Midwest, making Chicago their U.S. base. Many brilliant evenings ensued, most of which have by now passed into operatic legend. Lyric Opera was, in short order, firmly established, joining New York and San Francisco as a destination point for dedicated opera lovers everywhere.
Having succeeded in their Chicago mission, Kelly and Rescigno soon departed for Texas to co‑found Dallas Opera, leaving Fox, now Lyric Opera’s General Manager, in place to rule over the company’s fortunes with a firm hand until her death in 1981.
That first Opening Night, February 5, 1954, as the Lyric Theatre parted its doors for the first time, it inaugurated the new venture with what is acknowledged the world’s most perfect opera, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, starring Nicola Rossi‑Lemeni as the titular anti‑hero, Eleanor Steber as the vengeful Donna Anna, and Bidú Sayão as Zerlina. This ‘calling‑card’ performance, as that initial star‑studded Don Giovanni has long been called, suggests the considerable risk the Fox-Kelly-Rescigno trio undertook, simultaneously announcing their company’s presence as the newest player in the American opera sweepstakes, a game the three were determined to win. Win, they most certainly did, and it was immediate.
When Lyric Opera celebrated its 50th Anniversary in 2004, for nostalgic reasons, Mozart’s Don Giovanni was selected to open the jubilee season as it had those many years before, this time showcasing the enigmatic Welsh bass‑baritone Bryn Terfel’s first Don Giovanni on this side of the Atlantic. In the intervening years, the opera has been a mainstay of Lyric Opera, attracting the very greatest soloists in productions that were always thought‑provoking and artistically satisfying.
Mozart’s allegorical opera of good-over-evil is now once again on the Lyric Opera stage, seen October 24, and brought into the 21e century in Robert Falls’ 2013 Lyric Opera production, one that emphasizes the work’s original title‑page designation, dramma giocoso, which, roughly translated, refers to a “drama with comic elements.” Falls’ charming production was also seen in 2019, and has now returned for another viewing, opening the season earlier this month and becoming the hottest ticket around thus far on this year’s Lyric Opera calendar.
One of the greatest ironies surrounding the cult and myth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is that his Austrian hometown, Salzburg, where he was born in 1756, is today a pilgrimage site for anything at all to do with him—from tours of his birthplace to the streets he walked to high‑priced venues performing his music—yet in point of fact, it was a place towards which he held the greatest antipathy. In the many descriptive letters he wrote to his father Leopold, he deplored Salzburg’s “provincial” attitudes and “bigoted” populace. Unhappy in his employment, the young man wanted desperately to leave, to be among people who recognized his worth.
He found them in Vienna, the most cultured central European capital of the day, where a position at the court of the enlightened Habsburg Emperor Joseph II (he of the “too many notes” verdict in Peter Shaffer’s play and film) improved the young man’s fortunes greatly. Freed at last from the confines of Salzburg’s repressed social structure and allowed some measure of autonomy at the Kaiser’s court, his genius was given full reign to bloom.
As something of a freelance employee, he swiftly forged an artistic alliance to the north, in the Bohemian city of Prague, and after the successful premiere there of Don Giovanni, his imperial service in Vienna was established. For the first time, he could write Leopold that he felt “understood” and that his handful of trips to Bohemia’s capital city were among the happiest and most fulfilling times of his short, eventful life. His sojourns there resulted in works either composed there in part or germinated elsewhere but finished and premiered in Prague. His Symphony No. 38 (known by its nickname, the ‘Prague’), is one that dates from this period; most pertinently is Don Giovanni, which Mozart conducted at its October 29, 1787 world premiere in Prague’s Estates Theatre, and which, in a nod to its storied past, still plays back‑to‑back performances of Mozart’s opera during peak tourist season.
A word should be shared concerning Mozart’s Italian librettist, the fascinating bon vivant poet and priest Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749‑1838). A friend of that infamous Giovanni‑like rascal Giacomo Casanova, whose antics may have provided Da Ponte with additional fodder, he based the libretto of Don Giovanni on 17th century Spanish source material detailing the life of Don Juan, along with ideas found in a now‑forgotten opera on this same subject, which preceded Mozart’s by mere months. The Da Ponte partnership would prove rewarding for both men, the two also collaborating on Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte. The colorful Da Ponte later taught Italian literature at Columbia College in New York—having settled there in 1805—and, in 1826, produced the first performances in the United States of Don Giovanni.
Today’s trend of ‘revisionist’ opera productions, which began in Europe years ago and has now become the norm everywhere, was somewhat slow to gain currency in the U.S. but is now often encountered in the major theatres.
The reason for it is, one assumes, the expectations of an aging, traditionally-raised opera audience versus the ever-increasing need to attract younger patrons weaned on contemporaneous media to fill the void. The world has changed greatly since 1954, and opera must follow suit. In order for it to remain current and also in order for it to survive, producers have increasingly embraced an old playbook: commenting, as the arts always do, on society’s pluses and minuses, but with a more up‑to‑date twist for social relevancy.
Whether these efforts eventually succeed in developing new, younger audiences for Verdi, Wagner, and Mozart (who were the “new” musical voices in their day, after all), this remains to be seen, though enlarging the core repertoire with newly‑commissioned scores, as Lyric Opera has been doing, is a very positive and arguably necessary move, while company managements continue all the while to mindfully honor their established patrons, as well.
Among major U.S. theatres, Lyric Opera has managed to stride this precarious divide better than most. Whereas this Don Giovanni does, as expected, bring some contemporary touches to 18th century Spain, it never offends. For one thing, Falls has updated the action to the early 1920s, before Spain was swept away by General Francisco Franco’s fascist government. 18th century dueling practice remains, but traditional swords are replaced by more ‘gentlemanly’ 20th century pistols, except for Zerlina’s rifle (she is of the peasant class, after all). Act II, scene II, finds the famous Sextet performed, inexplicably, inside a church, a novel invention, while various bits of slapstick, including at times suggestive dancing, along with other isolated moments, proved extraneous, though a hit with the audience. Never before in memory, either, has an infuriated Donna Elvira actually shot and wounded Giovanni during the last‑act banquet scene, leaving him, bleeding, to face the Commendatore’s statue. Some of this can been seen as gentle audience pandering, some of it sensationalism, but it gave the audience member a new way to look at something he thought he already knew, without veering, for the most part, too far afield from anything the composer might recognize.
Elvira’s initial appearance aria, “Ah, che mi dice mai,” dressed in a sort of pantaloon with boots (having just descended from her motorcycle), was not how this noble lady of Burgos would traditionally present, either, though it provoked bemused audience response. Elsewhere, at the start to Act II, on her balcony, Elvira looked like a film noir heroine, albeit a sort of Jean Harlow type, which succeeded in engendering much‑needed sympathy for this troubled woman, who traditionally can come across—and usually does—as a hard-edged avenging Fury.
The supertitles, at times directly translated from the original Italian but more frequently re‑worded in order to evoke laughter from the audience, were an important tool in reaching across the footlights and, as such, perfectly acceptable. Mozart, whose sense of humor is legendary, would arguably have preferred audience comprehension and joyful participation over line‑by‑line linguistic exactitude.
In recent Lyric Opera Facebook postings, Christian Van Horn discusses his assignment, correctly pointing up the fact that Mozart’s predatory Giovanni, whose life is based on debauchery, is presented in the opera, his final day on earth, with not one successful amorous conquest to his credit. Possibly Da Ponte’s tongue‑in‑cheek poetic justice, but this fact, followed by the explosive epilogue in which the other characters proclaim of the Don’s descent to Hell, “This is the end of all evil‑doers,” makes its finger‑pointing understood, a moral not lost on God‑fearing, superstitious 18th century audiences.
Van Horn, who sang Masetto at Lyric Opera in 2004, is an imposing artist with excellent stage presence. His may not be the most luxurious bass‑baritone to murder, serenade, and cause mischief throughout Seville on Lyric Opera’s stage, but he is a fine actor, and must certainly be counted the most actively athletic Don within memory here or anywhere. This was never as true as at the opera’s dramatic conclusion, straddling a 20‑foot banquet table, which disappears, top to bottom into a hole in the stage—like the sinking of the Titanic—but here, taking Giovanni with it to the underworld where he is to pay for his earthly crimes, this unexpected image a remarkable coup de théâtre. Earlier, singing Giovanni’s Champagne aria, “Finch’han dal vino” at breakneck speed, Van Horn met this breathless, additionally athletic exercise head‑on, also, and only he could comment as to which of the two was the more taxing.
Unlike several of Mozart’s other lower-voiced male roles, Don Giovanni is not a supreme vocal test for an artist, but combined with his constant stage busyness, the role is a coveted one, all the same. After all, how could any man, singer or not, refuse the opportunity to play history’s greatest lover for a few hours?
The question of just who should sing this role is open to discussion, however. Historically, the most famous exponents of the lecherous Don have been basses, from Ezio Pinza and Cesare Siepi to, more recently, James Morris and now Van Horn. When master and servant both sing in the lowest male range (of bass and/or bass‑baritone), at times the voices can be difficult to distinguish, one from the other; a baritone Don solves this quandary. That said, however, with two low voices of similar range on stage, the amusing Act II change of costume sequence in which Leporello impersonates his master makes their duping of the conflicted Donna Elvira far easier to understand, even though Elvira, regardless of who is singing, invariably fails to recognize that the two men may not be (and often are not) the same physical type. In opera, suspension of disbelief is essential.
Van Horn’s various interchanges with Tommaso Barea’s excellent debut turn as Leporello worked beautifully on every conceivable level. Their contentious love/hate business relationship was expertly worked‑through and completely believable, both artists anchoring the proceedings perfectly in a winning partnership.
This is a rare revival of Don Giovanni—of any Mozart opera—in which every role was perfectly cast. In addition to Barea’s finely‑crafted Leporello, three other cast members were heard this month for the first time at Lyric Opera. Soprano Nina Solodovnikova, Russian by birth but headquartered in Italy, inhabited the all‑important and very central role of Donna Elvira with a voice of great quality and thrust, whose presence demanded attention at each appearance. She was joined onstage by her countrywoman, fellow soprano Anna El‑Khashem, whose peasant girl Zerlina sang her two famous arias with grace and with some line embellishments of rare refinement, which Mozart would have expected but which many artists are hesitant to attempt; Mozart’s music is approached with such reverence today that the period’s correct musical manners—including the use of sung appoggiaturas—are at times overlooked.
Bass David Leigh, also new to Lyric Opera, was the rare Commendatore for whom the role’s low, sustained, intoned range held no terrors. On the basis of his excellent showing, he will be an artist to follow in major roles.
The Armenian soprano Mané Galoyan, the evening’s Donna Anna, is a world‑class talent with the innate intelligence to know how to vocally bring character to life. Her singing was ideally suited to her assignment, which she imbued with an endless reserve of beautifully modulated tone.
Superstar tenor Lawrence Brownlee, as her patient betrothed, Don Ottavio, made his career singing the high‑flying bel canto repertoire. Mozart is an earlier exercise along the same path, though the demands placed on a tenor, especially, are different, though no less difficult. His singing was, in a word, superlative, whether in sung recitative (accompanied throughout by fortepianist William C. Billingham) or in his beautifully sustained arias. Act II’s “Il mio tesoro,” capped by tasteful, high embellishments and extraordinary breath control, confirmed to the enraptured audience that an artist at the height of his powers was at work. It seems churlish to register a complaint at this point, for only more attention to dynamics would have aided his blend with the other singers and played down what was at times an exceedingly bright tone. These are minor quibbles to note in what was, overall, exceptional music‑making.
Bass Christopher Humbert, Jr. provided a powerful, richly‑voiced Masetto, able to confront Giovanni without backing off and also strong enough to hurl Leporello across the stage. Besides Van Horn, many famous for Don Giovanni were first exposed to Mozart’s opera when starting out in the singing business, cast as Masetto, and it won’t come therefore as a surprise to find Humbert, too, promoted to the lead role one day.
Musical matters were in the capable hands of the company’s Music Director Enrique Mazzola, who clearly savors this masterwork. He set the evening’s tone with the enthusiastic overture, led with vitality and lovingly crafted definition of instrumentation. All of this Austrian italianità is in Mazzola’s blood and soul, his vision favoring brisk tempi throughout much of the evening, while always alert to the needs of his singers. He is without question a singer’s conductor, which will continue urging the very greatest artists to travel to Chicago in order to sing under his baton.
In 1914, the late American poet Carl Sandburg dubbed Chicago “the City of the Big Shoulders,” which, along with the later and more famous “Windy City” label, have described Chicago, at least in part, to the world at large. There is, of course, much, much more to commend it. And for the opera enthusiast seeking high‑powered entertainment, Chicago is home to Lyric Opera, and for them that alone is perhaps enough. The company performs against the backdrop of an architecturally breathtaking space that must be seen and experienced, and any time that Mozart’s Don Giovanni takes its ornate stage is an additional cause for celebration, as it has been for more than 70 years.
Carl J. Halperin
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