Opera Cues Winter 2023 - Figaro

A MESSAGE FROM THE GENERAL DIRECTOR AND CEO

When I first met Patrick Summers, HGO’s Artistic and Music Director, we bonded over something we share: our desert island opera. That opera, as it happens, is the same singularly sublime work of art opening our winter repertoire.

“If opera is defined as the illumination of humanity through music, then there can be no greater opera than The Marriage of Figaro,” Summers says. “Were I to be told today that I could conduct only one more opera before the world was to come to an end, I would unquestionably choose Figaro.”

What a special thing, then, to witness Maestro Summers at the podium conducting Mozart’s stunning masterpiece, with a cast that includes bass-baritone Adam Plachetka as the Count; soprano/HGO Studio alumna Nicole Heaston as his wife; bass Nahuel Di Pierro in his HGO debut as Figaro; and soprano Elena Villalón as Susanna in her first return to the company after graduating from the HGO Studio last spring. Welcome back, Elena! And a warm welcome back to Ian Rutherford, who is directing our revival of Michael Grandage's production.

Massenet’s Werther, our other winter offering, is itself a strong contender for desert island favorite. Although achingly beautiful, it is a relatively rare opera, performed only a handful of times across the country over the past decade—and last presented by HGO 40 years ago.

We never could have selected Werther as part of this season, and then set out to find the right artists to lead it. One must start with the artists themselves. Upon securing international superstars mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and tenor Matthew Polenzani as Charlotte and Werther—two of the most sought-after artists in opera, both making their HGO debuts—only then was our decision made. Add in two more important debuts, soprano Jasmine Habersham as Sophie and baritone Sean Michael Plumb as Albert, and you have a dream cast to go with acclaimed director Benoît Jacquot’s production.

I will never tire of Massenet’s score. It dazzles from beginning to end, capturing all the poetry—all the moonlit longing and moody, lovelorn desire—present in the Goethe novel the story is based on, The Sorrows of Young Werther. In the hands of this impeccable cast, joined by the HGO Orchestra conducted by Robert Spano, an unforgettable and profoundly enriching evening of theater awaits us all.

This is what opera’s all about. I am thrilled you have joined us, and grateful we live not on a desert island, but here in Houston, with the entire operatic canon available for us to enjoy and explore, together.

Khori Dastoor General Director & CEO Margaret Alkek Williams Chair

Opera Cues is published by Houston Grand Opera Association; all rights reserved. Opera Cues is produced under the direction of Chief Marketing and Experiences Officer Jennifer Davenport and Associate Director of Marketing and Communications Natalie Barron, by Houston Grand Opera’s Audiences Department.

Associate Director of Communications / Editor-in-Chief

Catherine Matusow

Designers

Chelsea Crouse

Christopher Robinson

Contributors

Matthew Aucoin

Khori Dastoor

Stephanie Fleischmann

Sonia Hamer

Jeremy Johnson

Chelsea Lerner

Alisa Magallón

Brian Speck

Patrick Summers

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Matt Ross/Ventures Marketing 713-417-6857

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Keeping ELITE PERFORMERS IN THE SPOTLIGHT

At Houston Methodist, we’re proud partners in helping artists achieve peak performance, week in and week out. We treat artists and their unique needs, while bringing the same level of specialized care to every patient we serve.

Photo Credit: Lynn Lane Photography

Photo credit: Lynn Lane

HGO BOARD OF DIRECTORS 2022-23

OFFICERS

Claire Liu, Chair of the Board

Allyn Risley, Senior Chair of the Board

Janet Langford Carrig, Chair Emeritus of the Board; Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc. Chair Emeritus

Lynn Wyatt, Vice Chair of the Board

MEMBERS AT LARGE

Richard E. Agee, Finance Committee Vice Chair

Thomas R. Ajamie

Robin Angly, Community and Learning Committee Vice Chair

John S. Arnoldy *

Christopher V. Bacon, Secretary; General Counsel

Michelle Beale, Governance Committee Chair

Astley Blair, Audit Committee Chair

Albert Chao

Louise Chapman Mathilda Cochran, Community and Learning Committee Chair

Albert O. Cornelison Jr. * James W. Crownover Khori Dastoor

Joshua Davidson David B. Duthu *

Warren A. Ellsworth IV, M.D., Studio Committee Vice Chair

Benjamin Fink, Finance Committee Chair

Joseph Geagea

Michaela Greenan, Audit Committee Vice Chair

Dr. Ellen R. Gritz

Selda Gunsel Richard Husseini

José M. Ivo, Philanthropy Committee Vice Chair

Myrtle Jones

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA ASSOCIATION CHAIRS

1955–58 Elva Lobit 1958–60 Stanley W. Shipnes 1960–62 William W. Bland 1962–64

Thomas D. Anderson 1964–66 Marshall F. Wells 1966–68

John H. Heinzerling 1968–70

Lloyd P. Fadrique 1970–71

Ben F. Love 1971–73 Joe H. Foy 1973–74 Gray C. Wakefield

1974–75 Charles T. Bauer 1975–77

Maurice J. Aresty 1977–79

Searcy Bracewell 1979–81

Robert Cizik 1981–83

Terrylin G. Neale 1983–84

Barry Munitz 1984–85

Jenard M. Gross 1985–87

Dr. Thomas D. Barrow 1987–89

John M. Seidl 1989–91

James L. Ketelsen

Marianne Kah, Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc. Vice Chair

Yolanda Knull, Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc. Chair

David LePori, Governance Committee Vice Chair

Gabriel Loperena, Philanthropy Committee Chair Richard A. Lydecker Jr. Beth Madison *

Paul Marsden Sid Moorhead

Sara Morgan

Terrylin G. Neale, Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc. Secretary; Treasurer

Ward Pennebaker, Audiences Committee Chair

Cynthia Petrello Gloria M. Portela Allyson Pritchett

Matthew L. Ringel, Audiences Committee

Kelly Brunetti Rose Glen A. Rosenbaum

Jack A. Roth, M.D., Studio Committee Chair Harlan C. Stai

John G. Turner * Alfredo Vilas Margaret Alkek Williams * Senior Director

1991–93

Constantine S. Nicandros 1993–95 J. Landis Martin 1995–97 Robert C. McNair 1997–99

Dennis R. Carlyle, M.D. Susan H. Carlyle, M.D. 1999–2001 Archie W. Dunham 2001–03 Harry C. Pinson 2003–04 James T. Hackett 2004–07

John S. Arnoldy 2007–09 Robert L. Cavnar

2009 Gloria M. Portela 2009–11 Glen A. Rosenbaum 2011–13 Beth Madison 2013–16

John Mendelsohn, M.D. 2016–18

James W. Crownover 2018–20 Janet Langford Carrig 2020–22

Allyn Risley 2022–present Claire Liu

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IMPRESARIOS CIRCLE

IMPRESARIOS CIRCLE

$100,000 OR MORE

Judy and Richard Agee

Robin Angly and Miles Smith

Janice Barrow

The Brown Foundation, Inc. Sarah and Ernest Butler

Anne and Albert Chao

Louise Chapman

The Robert and Jane Mathilda Cochran ConocoPhillips

Mr. and Mrs. James W.

The Cullen Foundation

The Cullen Trust for

City of Houston

Connie Dyer

Nancy Haywood H-E-B

Houston Methodist Humphreys Foundation

Donna Kaplan and

Beth Madison

Mr. Paul Marsden and

The Robert and Janice Mr. and Mrs. D. Bradley

M.D. Anderson Foundation Sara and Bill Morgan National Endowment Allyson Pritchett Jill and Allyn Risley

Susan D. Sarofim

Shell USA, Inc.

Dian and Harlan Stai

Texas Commission on the Arts

The Wortham Foundation, Inc. Lynn Wyatt 2 Anonymous

Timeless

Australia is home to the world’s oldest indigenous culture. Today, the ancient Aboriginal spirit survives, with both its traditions and aspirations reflected in contemporary paintings unlike any other.

Cultures evolve. So has Booker-Lowe! Our gallery on Feagan is closed, and we now show Aboriginal art by appointment only, and provide personalized searches for artworks, as well as other art services.

Booker

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Lowe Gallery

Aboriginal fine art of Australia since 2002

For infomation or to schedule a visit: www.bookerlowegallery.com info@bookerlowegallery.com

Theo (Faye) Nangala Hudson, Fire Country Dreaming, 18” x 36” Image the artist and Booker-Lowe

FOUNDERS COUNCIL FOR ARTISTIC EXCELLENCE

Ajamie LLP

Robin Angly and Miles Smith Baker Botts L.L.P.

Dr. Saúl and Ursula Balagura Michelle Beale and

Albert and Anne Chao Jane Cizik ConocoPhillips

Mr. and Mrs. James W. Connie Dyer Drs. Rachel and

Frost Bank Marianne and Joe Geagea

Drs. Liz Grimm and Jack Roth

Houston Methodist Myrtle Jones

Marianne Kah

Donna Kaplan and Claire Liu and Gabriel Loperena Beth Madison

Mr. Paul Marsden and

Dian and Harlan Stai

Dr. and Mrs. Miguel

Kathleen Moore and Allyson Pritchett

Jill and Allyn Risley

Glen A. Rosenbaum John Serpe and Tracy Maddox

Mr. and Mrs. Donald G. Mr. John G. Turner and Helen Wils and

R. Alan and Frank York Anonymous

$50,000 OR MORE

Michelle Beale and Janet and John Carrig Drs. Rachel and Warren A. Marianne and Joe Geagea Dr. Ellen R. Gritz and Stephanie Larsen Will L. McLendon Mr. and Mrs. D. Bradley Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. Nickson Veer Vasishta 2 Anonymous

$25,000 OR MORE

Mr. William J. Altenloh and Dr. Saúl and Ursula Balagura

THE LEADERSHIP COUNCIL

Dr. Gudrun H. Becker Meg Boulware and

Bill and Melinda Brunger Ms. Kiana K. Caleb and Shelly Cyprus

Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Davidson Lynn Des Prez Joanne and David Dorenfeld C.C. and Duke Ensell

Amanda and Morris Gelb Lynn Gissel Leonard A. Goldstein and Michaela Greenan and Janet Gurwitch and Ron Franklin Matthew Healey Gary Hollingsworth and

Marianne Kah

Mr. and Mrs. Richard J.

Stephanie Larsen David and Lori LePori Carolyn J. Levy Sharon Ley Lietzow and M. David Lowe and Nana Booker

Mrs. Marilyn Lummis Mrs. Rosemary Malbin Dr. Laura Marsh Muffy and Mike McLanahan Amy and Mark Melton Dr. and Mrs. Miguel

Kathleen Moore and Sid Moorhead Diane K. Morales

Cynthia and Anthony Petrello Gloria M. Portela

Mrs. Gerald Rauch

Matthew L. Ringel Kelly and David Rose James and Nathanael

Mr. and Mrs. David Rowan

Jeff Stocks and Juan Lopez Dr. Laura E. Sulak and

Sheila Swartzman

Mr. and Mrs. Donald G. Sweeney Mr. Scott B. Ulrich and

Georgios and Laura Varsamis Marietta Voglis Alan and Frank York

Rini and Edward Ziegler 2 Anonymous

Mr. and Mrs. Frank N. Barnes Dr. Michael and Susan Bloome Mr. and Mrs. Lester P. Burgess Mr. and Mrs. Richard Burleson Dr. Peter Chang and Hon.

Mr. Anthony Chapman Ms. Anna M. Dean Elisabeth DeWitts Anna and Brad Eastman Michelle Klinger and Gerard and Christine Gaynor

Ann and Stephen Kaufman Ann Koster

Elizabeth and Bill Kroger Jan and Nathan Meehan

Mr. and Mrs. Michael J. Pancherz Dr. Angela Rechichi-Apollo Ed and Janet Rinehart Michelle and Chuck Ritter Adel and Jason Sander Mrs. Helen P. Shaffer

Mr. and Mrs. John Untereker Georgios and Laura Varsamis Mary Lee and Jim Wallace

THE PRODUCTION FUNDERS

Baker Botts L.L.P. Bank of America

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Brown Foundation, Inc.

Mathilda Cochran

This six-year multidisciplinary initiative, concluding in 2023, is designed to highlight the universal spiritual themes raised in opera and to expand and deepen Houstonians’ connections to opera and to art. The theme for 2022-23 is Spirit and includes the operas The Wreckers, El Milagro del Recuerdo, Werther, and Salome, as well as the fourth Giving Voice concert. On May 18, 2023, a culminating performance featuring six new works, composed to highlight each season’s theme, will take place at the Rothko Chapel and the Menil Collection.

LEAD FUNDERS

Claire Liu and Joe Greenberg Elizabeth Phillips

Mr. and Mrs. Donald G. Sweeney

The Wortham Foundation, Inc. Albert and Anne Chao/Tin Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation

Mr. John G. Turner and Mr. Jerry G. Fischer Louisa Stude Sarofim Foundation

For information on providing leadership support for Seeking the Human Spirit, please contact Greg Robertson at 713-546-0274 or grobertson@hgo.org or visit HGO.org/STHS.

Dr. Dennis Berthold and

Harlan and Dian Stai Lynn Wyatt

Connie Dyer

A FESTIVE EVENING

Celebrating the holidays, Houston style, at Carols on the Green.

A WELCOME RETURN

HGO Studio alumnus Joshua Winograde to join Shepherd School leadership

Joshua Winograde, a bass who trained with the HGO Studio program, is returning to Houston as the new Director of Opera Studies at the Rice Shepherd School of Music.

“It is an honor to join the Shepherd School’s esteemed faculty in shaping the careers of the brightest young vocalists,” says Winograde. “Houston feels like my artistic home, having started my career as a member of the HGO Studio.”

Winograde trained with the Studio from 2000-03, appearing in productions including The Tender Land, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and The Little Prince. He went on to perform at opera houses across the country before pursuing a prominent career in arts administration for companies such as LA Opera, The Metropolitan Opera, and Wolf Trap Opera.

“Josh possesses a unique set of skills which are paramount in leading the current and future generations of opera singers,” shares HGO Artistic Advisor Ana María Martínez, a professor of voice at the Shepherd School. “Having enjoyed a career as an opera singer himself, his abundant experience in helping to develop and promote singers is evident in his successes.”

We’re so proud to welcome him home to Houston!

On December 3, 2022, about 1,000 Houstonians gathered at Discovery Green for our annual holiday sing-along, Carols on the Green.

This year’s program was inspired by the HGO holiday opera El Milagro del Recuerdo and featured a selection of holiday music from Latin America, performed in both English and Spanish, as well as an arrangement of “Three Spanish Carols” by local composer Mark Buller.

The mood was celebratory as HGO performers got into the spirit of the season, joined by special guests Segundo Barrio Children’s Chorus, principal artists from HGO’s production of El Milagro del Recuerdo, and the opera’s mariachi ensemble, Trio Chapultepec.

Photo credit: Rice University

Segundo Barrio Children's Chorus, getting in the holiday spirit.

Photo credit: Latroya Brooks

Cocktail Attire

Dear Opera Patron:

It’s with great joy I welcome you to Houston Grand Opera and tonight’s hilarious and heartwarming production of Mozart’s classic, The Marriage of Figaro, set in vivid 1960s Spain. Combining some of the most inspired music ever written with a commentary on class disparity that is as poignant as it is humorous, it is no wonder why The Marriage of Figaro remains one of the world’s favorite operas. You’re in for a treat!

As Official Health Care Provider for HGO, all of us at Houston Methodist are dedicated to keeping HGO’s artists, staff, and audiences healthy and well all year round. In particular, Houston Methodist’s innovative Center for Performing Arts Medicine (CPAM) offers a comprehensive program tailored to meet the specific needs of artists, like the singers, musicians, and other performers onstage tonight. CPAM also partners closely with HGO on music therapy workshops for patients and caregivers, concerts at our hospital locations, and other key intersections of wellness and the arts.

As part of Leading Medicine, we value the vital role the arts play in mental, physical, and spiritual wellness. It is our absolute pleasure to partner with HGO and the other world-class artistic institutions that make Houston such a wonderful place to work, live, and play.

Marc L. Boom, MD President and CEO Houston Methodist

Dear Opera Patron:

We are excited to welcome you to tonight’s performance of The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart’s beloved comedic opera. Figaro was performed for the first time in 1786 and has endured as one of the greatest and most popular operas ever written.

Like Figaro, Baker Botts has a long-standing history. Founded in Houston in 1840, Baker Botts is the oldest law firm in Texas. Over the past 182 years, Baker Botts has grown to be one of the most successful and respected law firms in the world, with 12 offices worldwide. Baker Botts has supported Houston Grand Opera for decades and is pleased to support this wonderful production of The Marriage of Figaro

We hope you enjoy tonight’s performance!

Sincerely,

Josh Davidson Partner

Baker Botts L.L.P.

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

A conversation with game-changing conductor Eun

Sun Kim

By Khori Dastoor General Director & CEO

The extraordinary Eun Sun Kim and I meet up one recent evening over Zoom to talk about opera—specifically, Richard Strauss’s Salome, which she’ll conduct in Houston this spring. During our conversation, she shares that she’s always been curious about Strauss.

“You know how Strauss used to conduct,” she says. “He would be standing there, just like this”—she pauses, gives me a blank stare, raises her own baton, and begins to almost mechanically conduct an invisible orchestra—“and if you see his face while he’s conducting in his old films, there’s nothing. It feels like an empty face. So I always wonder what’s going on in his brain.”

Although we’ll never know, we agree that the emotion is already there in his music—“so many colors and so many harmonies and meter changes,” as she puts it, that Strauss didn’t need to add a thing.

Eun Sun’s own conducting style doesn’t resemble Strauss’s. On the contrary, she radiates passion. But there is an irony to her desire to know what he is thinking. Like the composer, Eun Sun has an inscrutable quality—one that makes her all the more intriguing.

Eun Sun made her American debut in a most unexpected place: the Bayou City’s George R. Brown Convention Center. It was 2017, right after Hurricane Harvey. The Wortham was underwater, but the determined team at HGO had found a place where the show, Verdi’s La traviata, could go on.

Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers had offered her an out. He’d called her up and said, “We’d understand if you’d prefer to make your American debut under other circumstances.” But, in a telling display of her spirit, Eun Sun said, “If you’re doing it, I’m doing it.”

GRB or no, her stunning artistry at the podium was plain to see, and the New York Times called her a “major star.” Soon afterward, Eun Sun was named HGO’s Principal Guest Conductor, then Music Director of San Francisco Opera, the first woman to hold that position. She is now one of the leading conductors in all of opera, regularly taking on important engagements at the great houses across the world.

Eun Sun’s musical journey started when she was a young pianist in Korea, supporting singers and focusing on playing for voice lessons, with no intention of pursuing conducting. But along the way, she developed a deep spiritual connection to Puccini. He became her gateway into the entire operatic repertoire and, ultimately, her huge career.

HGO’s spring production will be Eun Sun’s first time conducting Salome. Based on the play by Oscar Wilde, the intermission-free opera is explosively compact. As Eun Sun

says, “you just breathe in and then when you breathe out, it’s already the end.” I tell her that the last, dissonant chord of the opera leaves me unsettled, in need of recovery. She nods. “Feeling all of that is our job as artists, but you have to let the audience feel that. So, we might not get to feel that. That’s the most difficult thing.”

Eun Sun marvels at the magical alchemy of the conductor’s relationship with the orchestra—the complexity and the emotion of what the musicians can convey, beyond notes on paper. “The mixed meters tell how complex Salome’s mind is,” she says. “But the transformative power in music is…it’s not just the note or the tune on the score. If the orchestra thinks with that intention, when they play it, people will get it.”

Eun Sun would never tell anyone what to think, which is why, when asked to speak about Salome’s shocking themes, she demurs. “Khori, it’s my personal thing,” she says. “I always have difficulties explaining it verbally. I tell the story with the music.”

What will she be thinking about when she takes the podium to conduct Salome in Houston? Her answer stays with me. She’ll be thinking of HGO’s administrative team, the people in the development office, the box office team, the creatives and the crew, everyone at the company working behind the scenes to make the moment come together. Beyond them, she’ll think of the audience, the community, the big, wide world. She’ll imagine them all behind her as she faces the musicians in the pit, the artists on the stage.

And finally, she’ll think of herself standing between those two worlds, the conduit connecting what’s behind her to the transcendent art in front of her. “What fascinates me about my job,” she says, “is that I want to tell a story to someone, but I’m not saying anything. I’m not producing any sound.”

Eun Sun Kim made her American debut with HGO.

MUSIC AS FORGIVENESS

On W.A. Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro

By Matthew Aucoin

Houston audiences are in for one of opera’s most profound pleasures when Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers leads a youthful cast in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). Though my own contribution to this HGO season involved a different love story, and a much sadder one—that is, Verdi’s La traviata—I want to share a few thoughts about Figaro, since it’s the opera that has had a more powerful impact on my musical life than any other.

In this three-hour transfiguration of Pierre Beaumarchais’s politically charged comedy, Mozart and the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte achieve an aerial view of the human soul, a portrait both of everything that’s irresistible and brilliant and sexy about human beings, and of the things that make us so infuriating to one another. The opera’s secret ingredient is love. Mozart loves his characters, even when they’re at their lowest, and so we end up loving them too.

Figaro has the unique ability to make me forget, whether I experience it as a conductor or a listener, that I’m hearing an opera at all. This is abnormal. In opera, artifice typically reigns supreme; usually this is part of its fun. When I perform or listen to Verdi or Wagner, I never forget that I’m experiencing a capital-O Opera, nor am I supposed to. The

same is true, I think, of Mozart’s other operas: as I experience Don Giovanni or Die Zauberflöte, I never quite forget that I’ve been transported to a fantastical imaginary world.

But Figaro is a different beast. It is so close to reality that, in its uncannier moments, its artifice can’t be perceived. Its music seems somehow to bypass my ears and enter my heart and psyche unmediated. The sensation of being immersed in Figaro is no different, for me, from the feeling of gratitude for being alive.

I’m hardly alone in my baffled amazement. “It is totally beyond me how anyone could create anything so perfect,” no less an authority than Johannes Brahms once said of Figaro. “Nothing like it was ever done again, not even by Beethoven.” The pianist Mitsuko Uchida chose Figaro as the work she would want as the soundtrack to her life. And Figaro is the only opera I’ve ever conducted that, over the course of a given production, daily provokes some cast member to pause, shake their head, and say, “This is just the greatest freaking thing ever, isn’t it?”

This

All photos: Lynn Lane.

In some ways, Figaro is responsible for my being a musician, and it’s certainly responsible for my work in opera. When I

page and opposite: Heidi Stober as Susanna and Adam Plachetka as Figaro at HGO in 2016.

was eight years old or so, I loved classical music but couldn’t stand opera, which I’d heard only bits of on Saturdayafternoon radio broadcasts. Operatic singing struck me as jarring and unpleasant. I was even a little embarrassed on the singers’ behalf: They seemed to have no idea how silly they sounded.

For whatever reason, maybe because I was enthusiastic about Mozart and was playing some of his easier piano music at the time, my parents bought me a VHS tape of Figaro—Peter Hall’s production, recorded at Glyndebourne in 1973. I realize now that this production had a dream cast of leading ladies, including a young Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess and an even younger Frederica von Stade as Cherubino.

This video had a huge impact on me. It gave me the sense of suddenly having direct access to formerly unknown adult emotions. I felt a visceral connection to Mozart’s characters, a sympathy for them in my gut and my throat, in spite of their confusing grown-up problems. I didn’t grasp the nuances of Figaro’s plot, but something communicated itself to me nonetheless. In the opera’s ensemble scenes, Mozart has a way of layering his characters’ psychic states so that we experience the sum total of the spiritual energy in the room. In these scenes, no emotion or intention can be hidden; every secret feeling is brought to light. All the guilt and desire and insecurities and loathing and love accumulate and cause the musical air molecules to vibrate furiously.

I think what moved me, in these ensembles, was the sheer self-contradictory mass of them, the sense that I was in the presence of a complex, tightly wound ball of emotions whose strands I could never untangle. Precisely because Mozart leaves nothing out and shows each person in all their messy contradictoriness, it’s impossible to condemn his characters, no matter how awful they are to one another. The music is itself an act of forgiveness.

Figaro affected me in less lofty ways, too. One thing I love about Mozart is the inextricability, in his music, of the spiritual and the sensual, and Figaro, in addition to constituting a thorough spiritual education, is also very sexy.

The dangerous, painfully prolonged erotic games in the opera’s second act made me feel queasy when I returned to the piece a couple of years later, on the verge of adolescence. What on earth was I looking at? The androgynous Cherubino—the character is a teenage boy, but he’s sung by an adult mezzo-soprano—is stripped of his page-boy outfit by two women, Susanna and the Countess, so that they can dress him up as a woman. (Cherubino is in big trouble, and they’re trying to disguise him as a woman so he can avoid being sent to the army.)

I reasoned that the extreme erotic tension between these women was okay because Cherubino was “really” a boy— but then, I also tried to reason away my crush on von Stade’s Cherubino by insisting to myself that Cherubino was “really” a girl. What was reality here, anyway?

Whatever I was looking at, it was mighty queer. I had no idea music could embody such transcendently transgressive sensations, these fleeting surges of warmth, of uncontainable desire for … something. I’d just begun to experience such sensations myself, and they made me feel very guilty. What did it mean that Mozart, that most angelic-sounding of composers, also evidently felt such things?

Figaro’s score consists of miracle after miracle, but its final scene might be the most astonishing of all. I’ve turned to these few minutes of music many times in my life, in times of both difficulty and joy. Many before me have highlighted this sequence as one of the wonders of the operatic world: For the philosopher Theodor Adorno, Figaro’s finale was among those moments “for whose sake the entire … form might have been invented.” I wouldn’t dare to claim that I can explain what makes these few minutes so magical. But maybe I can offer some clues.

Figaro is riddled with numerous interleaving subplots, but to appreciate its finale, you need to understand only the

Pureum Jo and Lauren Snouffer as Barbarina and Cherubino, 2016.

Opposite: Ailyn Pérez as the Countess, with director Ian Rutherford as the Count, during a 2016 dress rehearsal.

main thrust of the narrative. Count Almaviva, a Spanish nobleman, has been lusting after Susanna, his wife’s chambermaid, who is about to be married to the Count’s manservant, Figaro. The Count has recently abolished the feudal droit du seigneur, the legendary right of the master of an estate to sleep with his female servants on their wedding night. He knows that this enlightened gesture has earned him significant social capital among his servants, but he wants to sleep with Susanna anyway. He figures he just has to be a little sneakier about it than prior generations were.

But the Count underestimates the strength of Susanna’s friendship with his wife: Susanna tells the Countess everything, and they join forces with Figaro to expose the Count’s hypocrisy. At her wedding dinner, Susanna slips the Count a note inviting him to a nighttime rendezvous in the garden. But when night falls, Susanna and the Countess trade outfits; unbeknownst to him, the Count ends up wooing his own wife. Across the garden, Figaro and Susanna, who is dressed as the Countess, pretend to be overcome by passion for each other. The Count overhears them—just as they intended—and believes

that Figaro has seduced his wife. Enraged, he yells bloody murder; the whole population of the estate comes running. But just as the Count prepares to punish his wife’s wrongdoing, his actual wife steps out from behind him. He realizes that he has been tricked. Everyone stands dumbstruck, waiting to see how he’ll react.

It’s worth noting how fraught this moment would have seemed to a European audience in 1786. A nobleman has been outsmarted and publicly humiliated by his servants and his wife. Surely the Count’s father or grandfather would have fired Figaro and Susanna on the spot, or sent them off to prison, or worse. But the question of how a man was to respond to such a situation was a borderline issue at the time, not so different from the question of how certain companies were supposed to react when their CEOs were accused of sexual harassment in the fall of 2017. We all know what used to happen, and we all know what the right thing to do is—so what’ll it be?

The whole cast waits, breathless. All eyes are on the Count. He falls to his knees. “Contessa, perdono,” he sings. “Countess, forgive me.” Mozart sets these words to an ascending major sixth, starting from the dominant, D natural. It is a gesture of supplication, an aspiring upward from a point of abasement. The Count’s first Contessa, perdono concludes by relaxing a half step downward from the tonic, G, to F-sharp.

He pauses. He realizes that he doesn’t sound quite sorry enough. He repeats himself: Perdono, perdono. This time, he stretches his first syllable upward across the interval of a seventh, a slightly wider reach, the sense of entreaty intensified. His last perdono finishes with a drawn-out ascending slide from A-sharp to B-natural. It is a pleading, childlike gesture, one that barely dares to hope. The Count sounds anything but authoritative. His “Forgive me” is not a command, as it easily could have been. This final perdono is almost a prayer.

The Countess pauses. When she begins to sing, her phrasing is almost identical to the Count’s; they are married, after all, and they speak in the same aristocratic cadences. But compare the placement of each of the Count’s pitches with each of the Countess’s. Whereas the Count starts on the dominant and yearns upward with a plaintive major sixth, the Countess begins on G, the tonic, and reaches beneficently up a perfect fifth. This gesture bespeaks a profound serenity and poise; she is entirely in control. “Più docile io sono,” she sings, “e dico di sì.” “I am gentler”—a moment before, when the Count thought he’d caught his wife in the act, he had loudly refused to forgive her—“and I will say yes.”

The first time the Countess sings the words e dico di sì, she doesn’t sound especially convincing. Mozart places the word sì on a gentle slide from D down to C, a gesture that might be taken as a weary sigh of resignation. She knows it doesn’t sound quite right. It’s not easy to forgive. Just as the

“

IS THIS MOMENT SO HEARTBREAKING? WHAT ARE THEY REALLY SAYING?

Count realized, after his first perdono, that he needed to try again, the Countess realizes that her first “yes” wasn’t quite generous enough.

She repeats herself—e dico di sì—this time coming gently to rest on the tonic. No more hesitations, no drawn-out dissonances, just: yes.

The violins songfully outline a G-major chord with a descending motion that—how to put it?—is a blessing, light breaking through clouds. Each member of the cast gives voice to their hushed wonder at the reconciliation they have just witnessed. Now, they say, we will all be happy.

So why, the listener might wonder, are they singing the saddest music ever written? The double gesture of the Count’s humility and the Countess’s forgiveness causes an overwhelming release of energy: The cast is transformed into a huge pipe organ. But what is this energy that’s suddenly unleashed? Why is this moment so heartbreaking? What are they really saying?

Look closely at the words they sing. Ah, tutti contenti / Saremo così. An idiomatic English translation would be “Ah, we will all / Be happy like this.” But an awkward, word-forword translation reveals something else: “Ah, all happy / We will be like this.” The separability of that last line—“We will be like this”—makes all the difference. Mozart sets this text as a slow, inexorable chorale, and he repeats the words again and again until repetition uncovers a meaning that’s in direct opposition to the literal one. Saremo, saremo così “We will be, will be like this.”

They know. The whole cast knows that what they’ve witnessed is a beautiful illusion. They know the Count won’t change, and neither will the Countess, and nor will any of them. Life will stay complicated. They’ll still marry one person and fall in love with another; they’ll still get jealous, and misunderstand one another, and hurt one another without meaning to. And maybe, once or twice in a lifetime, they’ll be granted a moment of utter clarity. A sense that it’s all beautiful, even if it’s not beautiful for them. An aerial view of their own souls. For whatever that’s worth.

What could be left to say or do? Once this heart-scouring chorale has floated home to G major, the strings trace a descending line that gradually outlines a dominant seventh chord: G–E–C-sharp–A. I can’t describe this passage any other way than to say that, in the afterglow of the chorale, it feels like someone is choked up, and when the strings descend from G to a fleeting E minor, a tear finally breaks free and runs down their cheek. (In some productions, the Count and Countess embrace at this point.)

But this naked emotion lasts only an instant. That C-sharp has a gleam in its eye, a welcome hint of Mozartian mischief: It contains the possibility of modulation out of G major into

D major, the key of the opera’s famously frenetic overture. Together with the high E that the flute plays above it, the C-sharp seems to be asking, “Are we finally ready to have some fun?”

Yes indeed. The music bursts open into a jubilant, hard-won allegro. After all these exhausting excavations of the human heart, everyone is ready to party. This moment is challenging for conductors, and the reason has everything to do with the characters’ psychological state. In fast quarter notes, the whole cast sings the words Corriam tutti: “Let’s all run” (that is, run to get drunk and forget themselves as soon as possible). Beneath them, the strings and bassoons play a giddy, light-speed line of running eighth notes that practically recapitulates their part from the overture.

The singers inevitably rush here. It’s a law of nature. In no performance, ever, have the singers not felt the urge to push forward at this moment. After all, their part is much easier than the orchestra’s, and both the music and the words (“let’s run let’s run let’s run!”) egg them on. The poor orchestra, meanwhile, is down in the pit breaking a sweat just trying to stay together. Even on some rather well-known studio recordings of the opera, singers and orchestra come egregiously unstuck here.

You know what? I think the singers are right. These characters are trying to outrun reality itself. Damn right that they should speed up. It’s the conductor’s job, and the orchestra’s, to keep up with them. The end of Figaro should go up in smoke. Having examined the heart’s every crevice, having exposed every weakness, every selfish or shameful desire, and still insisting that love conquers all, there’s nothing left for Mozart to do but light the fireworks.

This essay is adapted from Aucoin’s book The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, available now from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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It has been more than 40 years since HGO last presented Werther

ENJOYING THE SEARCH

How to find your way into less familiar operas, starting with Massenet’s Werther.

By Patrick Summers, Artistic and Music Director

The cynic, it is said, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The opposite is true of arts lovers, especially opera fans: what we love is so valuable to us that it makes the price worthwhile. This isn’t rational, of course, but that is one of art’s great privileges: it invites us to set aside the rational for a small portion of any day, and that time can soften harder realities. We so often seek comfort in familiar art, but the joy we take in our beloved favorites can make us less likely to approach something less familiar, and new things hold great value if we open ourselves to them.

One of the barriers to unknown it” or won’t “know it don’t ha

One of the barriers to unknown operas for many people is a fear that they won’t “get it” or won’t “know it,” but just as you don’t have to know everything in life, you also don’t have to enjoy everything in art to get something important from it. You may like elements of one opera and not of another. It is a very big art with hundreds of years of history and aspiration, so there is a lot to discover and enjoy.

One thing about opera is certain: at its best, when its many elements come together, it is potentially transformative and dazzling—but it is highly unlikely to be this every time. Operas are quite like sunsets: sometimes they are of unbelievable beauty, with the atmosphere just right, and sometimes they’re enjoyable but not transformative. It is all about the feeling. And if one opera doesn’t speak to you, try another.

I vividly remember meeting a couple at the stage door in Houston after a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre in 2015. They had both effusively enjoyed the performance, even to the point of tears in talking about it. The wife of the couple explained to me that they’d had a mutually bad experience with opera in the 1970s and had always regretted that they didn’t give it another try. Forty years had transpired during which they could have enjoyed many more operas, but they’d let one experience define an enormous art. I found it sad, as did they, but at least they found their way back to something they love.

So, what is the best way to expand one’s appreciation of operas from across the vast operatic canon? This is an art that spans the global village, so start with resisting too narrow a definition of opera. Your favorite opera may be Puccini’s La bohème, which would mean you have great taste, so you might naturally gravitate toward works that are similar to it, like other operas by Puccini or those of his era. Then again, something that is the stylistic opposite of Puccini, like a Baroque opera, Russian opera, or one of Mozart’s glories might hold some surprises for you. You may like one of the hundreds of smaller-scale operas that have been written in the 21st century, and some of them are fabulous, or you may be drawn to the grandeur and scale of older operas with hundreds of people in them. The grand German Romantics Wagner and Strauss may be more your thing, or you may need to build up to them.

All of that is okay. You have to taste quite a few before you can get a sense of what your taste actually is, and being open to surprise and discovery is a healthy way to approach art. Try to keep from deciding how you feel about all operas based on only a few, because it is an art with a very wide range of styles.

Stepping into the unknown is hard, so think of a story that is probably familiar to you, like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. However you encounter this story, be it the play, a ballet, an opera, or a film, you probably don’t attend simply to see how it ends. In fact, Shakespeare tells us the entire story in only the sixth line of his play: “a pair of starcrossed lovers take their life”, so the experience of the play is not about what happens, but about how we feel and relate as it happens. How the story is told is as important as the story itself, and this is true especially in opera, where music deepens the surface of a story.

Many people will tell you that it is important to get to know the music of an opera before attending, and that is certainly easy to do now with YouTube containing every piece of recorded music ever written.

as it may seem t think the most impor getting to

But, sacrilegious as it may seem to the operatic faithful, I think the most important thing before attending an opera is story as intimately as you can. You will be considerably more available to absorb what is unique about opera, the vocalism and music-making, if you aren’t trying to take in everything at once. So, let’s start with Massenet’s Werther (pronounced in French as vair-tair, while the yummy candy spelled the same way in English is pronounced worthers.)

Start with a helicopter view, which for Werther is this: a man falls in love with a woman who doesn’t return his love, causing him to commit suicide. Now, go a bit beyond that: find a more detailed synopsis and read it several times. Read it aloud. Read it again. If you want to go deeply into preparations for Werther, read the novel on which the opera is based, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, or listen to one of its many audiobook versions. The more you know of the inner workings of the ardent characters of this drama, the more you can enjoy Massenet’s opera. If you come prepared to listen, you will get to the heart of opera more quickly.

Werther is a man who takes his first feelings for a woman as forever feelings, never imagining that one’s affections can change or that life’s circumstances can keep people apart. His heartache, which can look to our post-Freudian, post-sexual-revolution era as mere obsession, is nevertheless very real for him, extraordinarily painful, and we hear all of this in Massenet’s music. Anyone who has experienced heartbreak—which is likely just about everyone—can relate to this opera. All of that familiar pain is in Massenet’s big romantic score, but so is comfort. The supertitles are always there if you get lost, but if you come to an opera open to wonder, you’ll be less likely to wander.

The relevance of Werther for an audience in the 2020s is not necessarily that we understand emotions more now, if indeed we do. Viewing it from a modern lens, we realize again that too many young people are still dying for love exactly as Werther did. We recognize advances in our lives through the sad reality that we sometimes haven’t advanced very far. In such a tragic story, there is catharsis, because we are likely to know someone who has experienced it. And because the story and characters of Werther are older than the United States (the novel was first published in 1774, so it was already an old story when Massenet wrote his opera in 1892), there is humanizing comfort in knowing that people from other centuries and cultures feel the same emotions as we. Timelessness is one of the hallmarks of greatness. nt

far, you’ve alrea e dy d operattic terri r toory. Enjooy y

THE WERTHER EFFECT

The enduring captivating power of Goethe’s novel and Massenet’s opera

By Jeremy Johnson Dramaturg & Associate Director of New Works and Sonia Hamer

The year was 1774, and a specter was haunting Europe—a rash of disturbing, elaborate suicides. The culprit?

Authorities blamed a popular new novel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the title character commits suicide out of despair over his impossible love for a married woman. The accusation held water: young men dressed in Werther’s distinctive yellow waistcoat and then, in a darker imitation of the title character, shot themselves in the head. Some even died with the book in hand. The trend sparked widespread panic: Denmark, Italy, and the city of Leipzig banned the novel altogether. To this day, the idea that a piece of art or highly publicized news story can lead to socially motivated “copycat” suicides is still called “the Werther effect.”

Goethe, for his part, was horrified by the suicides of readers. “My friends,” he said, “thought that they must turn poetry into reality, imitate a novel like this in real life and, in any case, shoot themselves.” But the distinction between poetry and reality, between art and life, is crucial to understanding Goethe’s novel and its operatic adaptation. Both works are products of Romanticism: where Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Hobbes, and Descartes prioritized rationality, the Romantics reacted against Enlightenment thought by embracing intuition, emotion, and individuality. Romantic artists and philosophers protested what they saw as the Enlightenment’s demystification and exploitation of the natural world. Nature, for the Romantics, held the power to connect man to the sublime. If the Enlightenment

Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (pictured in a Swedish translation) is the basis for Massenet's opera.

fostered social reform and political revolution—as we see (on page 29) in Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro—the vocation of a Romantic-era artist and thinker was to seek transcendence through the embrace of nature, emotion, and art.

This is an important aspect of the cultural context surrounding the perhaps confusing and unsettling actions of the title character. For most of European history, the common individual held little importance in art, philosophy, or politics, while cultural art focused instead on the upper rungs of society—royals and aristocrats—or represented literary archetypes instead of psychologically complex individuals. Medieval mysteries and morality plays personified abstract concepts such as Love, Death, Good Deeds, or Fellowship. Pre-Romantic literature tended to represent internal psychology only in allegoric ways, such as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Dante’s Divine Comedy, not in realistic explorations of an individual’s mind. During the 18th century, however, a shift took place: the novel emerged as a distinctive literary form containing nuanced depictions of characters’ internal lives. Psychological realism had arrived.

MASSENET’S WERTHER TURNS THE EMOTIONAL URGENCY OF GOETHE’S NOVEL

INTO A MUSICAL AND DRAMATIC TOUR-DE-FORCE.

Published in 1774, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was, in many ways, a work ahead of its time. Part of the German literary movement Sturm und Drang (Storm and Angst), Goethe’s novel reacted to the rationalism of the Enlightenment well before later Romantics. It delved

into—even reveled in—the extremes of human emotion at a time when detailed depictions of characters’ internal lives were still relatively new, and readers couldn’t get enough. Goethe’s star quickly rose following the novel’s publication. But then the copycat suicides attributed to “Werther fever” began. As music’s movements always tend to follow literature’s, opera experienced its own Romantic movement in the century following. Orchestras swelled, composers chafed against formalities, and passions ran high. Completed in 1887 and premiered in 1892, Massenet’s Werther turns the emotional urgency of Goethe’s novel into a musical and dramatic tour-de-force.

Two and a half centuries later, Werther’s story still holds power; the extremes of Werther’s obsession, depression, and final action still captivate. But those same extremes, in the context of a more lighthearted and detached 21st-century culture, can also frustrate and confuse: why does he take it that far? What’s the point? It’s easy to be flippant when presented with a character who acts in ways we would not. Should we think of Werther’s suicide as realistic, or is it an artistic expression of the tormented Romantic individual? His passions are represented in exquisite, extreme detail, and he drives himself to suffer because his tortured emotions are paths to Romantic transcendence. But what should the tormented Romantic individual mean to us today? Like the best in art, Werther resists easy assessments of right and wrong, should or shouldn’t; we can walk away with any number of emotional responses to his actions. But perhaps we can look to Goethe, as he wrote in the novel’s opening lines: “thou, good soul, who sufferest the same distress… draw comfort from his sorrows; and let this little book be thy friend.”

Federica Von Stade and Neil Shicoff in Werther at HGO in 1979.

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SAME STORY,

DIFFERENT CENTURY

ON POWER STRUCTURES, SEXUAL DYNAMICS, AND THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO.

By Jeremy Johnson, Dramaturg & Associate Director of New Works

When one thinks of Mozart, powdered wigs and formal minuets might first come to mind—probably not bright red convertibles or disco

balls. Yet the latter appear in Michael Grandage’s production of The Marriage of Figaro. While the opera was originally set in 18th-century Seville, in this version, we’re still in southern Spain, but it’s the late 1960s. The stately set by Christopher Oram references the country’s Moroccan-Muslim influence and its grand Alhambra-inspired architecture, and within this beautiful and intricate setting, Oram’s vivid costumes, full of bright swirls and velvet suits, keep us firmly anchored in the free-love counterculture.

The eye-popping visuals in this production are wonderful to look at, but it is still fair to ask: what does that have to do with Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera, or Pierre Beaumarchais’s play—the story’s basis, and a political and social satire of the 1700s aristocracy? The answer is, quite a bit. The political and social dynamics of the mid-1700s and 1960s Spain were remarkably similar.

Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro, the source material for Da Ponte’s libretto, was first performed in 1784, two years before the opera made its premiere. The play took Europe by storm from the moment it opened at the Théâtre Français, earning the highest ticket sales of any

was “the Revolution put into action.” In short, Beaumarchais was an Enlightenment-era revolutionary.

When Mozart and Da Ponte were adapting the play, it had already been banned from public performance in Austria. Once written, Emperor Joseph II had to personally approve Da Ponte’s libretto. The most famous and controversial monologue in the work, in which Figaro denounces the aristocracy—“What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born, nothing more.”—had to be removed from the opera, though Da Ponte still found a way to criticize class dynamics. These were the sentiments, of course, that spurred the revolutionary spirit in the late 18th century. This revolutionary spirit was also strong in 1960s Spain.

After the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, General Francisco Franco centralized power in an authoritarian regime known as Francoist Spain. Throughout his dictatorship, which lasted until his death in 1975, Franco propped up nationalism and traditionalism, repressing and censoring political or social movements that sought democracy. In the first 20 years of his regime, political prisoners accounted for the majority of the country’s imprisoned population. There were an estimated 200,000 politically motivated killings over the same period. During the late 1960s, student revolts emerged at universities all over Spain, which were then violently repressed by the government police.

HGO also presented Michael Grandage’s eyepopping production of The Marriage of Figaro in 2016.

All photos: Lynn Lane.

18th-century French play—after two rounds of censors moved the story from France to Spain, various diatribes against the aristocracy were cut or altered, and King Louis XVI himself signed off on its production.

Beaumarchais started writing the play at about the same time that the French government officially entered the American Revolution; not coincidentally, he played an integral role in persuading the French government to help the American revolutionaries, personally overseeing delivery of French arms and assistance, and lobbying officials to aid the Americans. Adding to that, five years after the play’s premiere, the French Revolution caught fire, and later critics wrote that Le mariage de Figaro had inspired the country’s revolutionary spirit. Napoleon Bonaparte said that the play

The revolutionary spirit is not the only parallel between the late 1700s and the 1960s. In both time periods, the social dynamics of sexual politics were in crucial transition: think Woodstock or the Summer of Love. The plot of The Marriage of Figaro hinges on a medieval feudal right, the droit du seigneur, or the “right of the lord.” This refers to the supposed right that feudal lords had to bed their servants on their wedding nights, before their husbands. Modern scholars debate whether this was ever a true legal right or if it was only accepted common practice, and just how common it was. In any case, it was the understood practice that upper-class men openly wielded their tyrannical power to exert sexual influence over lower-class women.

By the time the French feudal system was ending with the onset of the Revolution, the droit du seigneur was an oftdiscussed but out-of-date characteristic of a social hierarchy that represented the fading power of the revolutionary-era aristocracy. In play and opera, the Count wishes to exercise this antiquated right and wield his power for sexual gain, bedding Susanna himself before her new husband Figaro. The fact that the couple outwit him is, in itself, an illustration

RESETTING THE OPERA IN THE 1960S ALLOWS US TO EXAMINE ITS POLITICS THROUGH A MODERN LENS.

of the plot’s revolutionary commentary on both social hierarchy and sexual politics, made even more powerful by the participation of the Countess as their accomplice. Similarly, the free-love counterculture of the 1960s served as a revolutionary challenge to long-held attitudes.

A comparison of Beaumarchais’s and Da Ponte’s texts yields another layer to the discussion: female culpability for male infidelity, and social dynamics between women of different classes. In the Beaumarchais, the Count bloviates about his theories of marriage, in which the husband is responsible for “obtaining” the wife, and the wife is responsible for “keeping” the man—in practice, a woman has the duty to bring “variety” to the marriage and, if unsuccessful, is to blame for her husband’s infidelity. This is seemingly also the viewpoint of Beaumarchais, as Richard Andrews argues in his 2001 article for the journal Music & Letters: it is structurally presented as the “lesson which all those characters accept they have to learn.”

Da Ponte, on the other hand, does not lay the blame at the Countess’s feet: he removes the Count’s diatribe from the text and structures the Countess’s arias to illustrate a wife abandoned. Add to this the dynamic between the Countess

and Susanna: in the Beaumarchais, the Countess sometimes distrusts her lower-class counterpart; Da Ponte and Mozart give the two women a sublime moment of equality in the letter duet, “Sull’aria.”

Even within the late 18th-century, from Beaumarchais to Da Ponte, we see the influence sexual politics had on social thought regarding class structure, and revolutionary thought toward that class structure. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that Andrews’s ar ticle, subtitled “A New View of the Sexual Politics of Figaro”—about the Beaumarchais and Da Ponte, and not at all about the 1960s—mentions “the changes in sexual ideology and behavior which have taken place in Western industrial society during the last 30 years or so.” Since he was writing in 2001, he was referencing the very era when this production of Figaro is set.

The political and social parallels between the late 1700s and the 1960s offer fertile ground to cultivate when examining power structures and sexual dynamics—two of the primary character motivations in The Marriage of Figaro. Resetting the opera in the 1960s allows us to examine its politics through a modern lens. Not only that, we get to enjoy the red convertible and disco ball.

SUNG IN ITALIAN WITH PROJECTED ENGLISH TRANSLATION

MUSIC BY WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART LIBRETTO BY LORENZO DA PONTE

An Opera in Four Acts

The performance lasts approximately 3 hours and 24 minutes, including one intermission.

A co-production with the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

The activities of Houston Grand Opera are supported in part by funds provided by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Quick Start Guide

THE OPERA IN ONE SENTENCE

Eight different characters participate in a messy love octagon, hiding from one another, dressing up as one another, and tricking one another, until Figaro and Susanna finally have their marriage, and the Count unwittingly seduces his own wife.

BACKGROUND

The creation of The Marriage of Figaro, one of the most sublime operatic masterpieces, was due to important and fortuitous circumstances. In 1780, upon the death of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, her son Joseph II became Emperor of Austria. A true figure of the Enlightenment period, he introduced many new and radical reforms, including a more relaxed attitude toward art and lighter hand with artistic censorship. This was crucial to the composition of The Marriage of Figaro, which is based on Beaumarchais’s play La Folle Journée ou Le Mariage de Figaro (The Mad Day or The Marriage of Figaro), which had been banned in Vienna for its political insubordination and licentious plot.

aristocracy and those in positions of power for their hypocrisy surrounding the treatment of the common man. These views were regarded as dangerous and subversive, and Da Ponte had promised the Emperor that the play’s inflammatory content would be omitted from the opera. Mozart and Da Ponte, however, empathetic to the common man’s cause, found ways to illustrate the dichotomous class system in the music itself.

The opera can be heard in The Shawshank Redemption

In the two short duets for Figaro and Susanna at the beginning of the opera, Mozart uses dance music to establish them as members of the servant class. In the first, Susanna responds to Figaro’s martial style of music with music written in the style of a gavotte, and in the second, the two adopt the rhythm of a bourrée, both dances associated with the lower classes. The use of dance music is also heard in Figaro’s first aria, “Se vuol ballare,” in which Figaro informs us that he will make the Count dance to his tune. As the aria is about the Count, a character from the aristocracy, Mozart adopts the style of a minuet, a dance associated with the higher echelons of society.

In 1782 the writer Lorenzo Da Ponte arrived in Vienna. With a letter of introduction to Vienna court composer Antonio Salieri, Da Ponte soon became poet in residence to the Italian theater in Vienna.

When Mozart decided to write an opera based on Beaumarchais’s play, Da Ponte was able to use his influence to convince the Emperor that the opera would omit all inflammatory references. As a result, permission was granted, and the opera premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on May 1, 1786.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

In the final act of Beaumarchais’s play, Figaro is given a lengthy section of prose in which he attacks the

Contrast that with the opening of the second act, when we meet Countess Almaviva alone in her bedchamber. The scene opens with an orchestral introduction, the slowest tempo heard so far in the opera, her noble character portrayed through the dignity and beauty of her music. Her aria, “Porgi amor,” is her prayer to the god of love, establishing her as the epitome of an 18th century romantic heroine.

FUN FACT

The Marriage of Figaro has hours of memorable music, but two numbers have made their mark on the silver screen as well. The duet between the Countess and Susanna, “Sull’aria,” appeared in The Shawshank Redemption, when inmate Andy Dufresne receives a recording of the opera and plays that number over the prison’s speaker system. The opera’s overture has also been featured in the soundtracks of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Zombieland!, Trading Places, and The King’s Speech

CAST & CREATIVE

CAST (in order of vocal appearance)

Figaro Nahuel Di Pierro *

Susanna Elena Villalón ‡ Dr. Bartolo Patrick Carfizzi Marcellina Marie Lenormand ‡ Cherubino Lauren Snouffer ‡

Count Almaviva Adam Plachetka Don Basilio Steven Cole

Countess Almaviva Nicole Heaston ‡ Antonio

Navasard Hakobyan † Melinda and Bill Brunger/ Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. Nickson/ Gloria M. Portela Fellow

Don CurzioEric Taylor † Drs. Rachel and Warren A. Ellsworth IV/ Sharon Ley Lietzow and Robert Lietzow/ Jill and Allyn Risley Fellow

Barbarina Erin Wagner † Amy and Mark Melton/ Drs. Liz Grimm and Jack Roth Fellow

First BridesmaidKaitlyn Stavinoha

Second Bridesmaid Megan Berti

CREATIVE TEAM

Conductor / Fortepiano Patrick Summers Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

Original Director Michael Grandage Revival Director Ian Rutherford

Set and Costume Designer Christopher Oram

Original Lighting Designer Paule Constable Associate Lighting Designer Michael James Clark Choreographer Ben Wright Intimacy and Fight Director Adam Noble Chorus Director

Richard Bado ‡ Sarah and Ernest Butler Chorus Director Chair

Music Preparation

Alex Amsel

Kirill Kuzmin ‡ Michelle Papenfuss † Dr. Saúl and Ursula Balagura/ Dr. Laura E. Sulak and Dr. Richard W. Brown Fellow  Bin Yu Sanford †

Lynn Des Prez/ Stephanie Larsen/ Dr. and Mrs. Miguel Miro-Quesada Fellow Continuo Ensemble Patrick Summers, fortepiano Barrett Sills, cello

Stage Manager Brian August Assistant Director Colter Schoenfish

English Supertitles

Scott F. Heumann, adapted by Jeremy Johnson

* Company debut † Houston Grand Opera Studio artist ‡ Former Houston Grand Opera Studio artist

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Supertitles called by Matthew Neumann. Performing artists, stage directors, and choreographers are represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists, AFL-CIO, the union for opera professionals in the United States.

Scenic, costume, and lighting designers and assistant designers are represented by United Scenic Artists, IATSE Local USA-829. Orchestral musicians are represented by the Houston Professional Musicians Association, Local #65-699, American Federation of Musicians. Stage crew personnel provided by IATSE, Local #51.

Wardrobe personnel provided by Theatrical Wardrobe Union, Local #896. This production is being recorded for archival purposes.

SYNOPSIS

OVERTURE

It is the late 1960s. Three years have passed since the events of The Barber of Seville, and Rosina is now the Countess Almaviva. Figaro has joined the household as Count Almaviva’s valet, and Don Basilio has been awarded the post of music teacher. New acquaintances are Cherubino, the teenage son of a friend; Antonio, the gardener; his daughter, Barbarina; and Susanna, the Countess’s maid, whom Figaro intends to marry. However, Figaro has borrowed money from Marcellina (the ex-housekeeper of the house) and has promised to either repay the loan within a certain time or marry her. The Count, in the meantime, has promised Susanna a handsome dowry, hoping she will give him the droit du seigneur, the feudal lord’s right to the first night with the bride (an antiquated privilege he had vowed to renounce after marrying Rosina). He arrives with his wife at their country palace.

ACT I

In a palace room next to the quarters of the Count and Countess, Figaro happily surveys the room and bed the Count has given him as a wedding present. Susanna, however, refuses to move in, revealing the Count’s lecherous motives to her unsuspecting bridegroom. Figaro, seeing his master in a new light, begins to map out his revenge. Marcellina has brought Bartolo to the palace to enlist his aid in preventing the marriage. He promises his support, realizing it is his chance to get revenge on Figaro, who thwarted Bartolo’s marriage to Rosina. The Count arrives and tries to bribe Susanna into agreeing to a “rendezvous” in the garden on her wedding night, but she refuses him. Figaro collects the servants to proceed with the wedding. He leads them in praising the Count for abolishing the droit du seigneur and asks the Count to place the white veil, a symbol of virtue, on Susanna’s head. The Count refuses! The struggle has begun. The Count, jealous of Cherubino’s overtures to the Countess, sends the boy off to war in his regiment. However, Figaro has a bright idea: he slyly asks Cherubino to stay at the palace until evening.

ACT II

In the Countess’s boudoir, Susanna has just told the Countess about the preceding events. The Countess is unhappy and longs to regain her husband’s love. Figaro devises a fresh plot against the Count: Susanna is to agree to the rendezvous in the garden, but Cherubino will put on her clothes and go in her stead. As Cherubino is trying on the Countess’s clothes, the jealous Count unexpectedly returns. Cherubino jumps from the balcony to escape, but Antonio notices him. Figaro convinces the Count that it was he who jumped out the window. Marcellina, Bartolo, and Basilio enter and accuse Figaro of lying. Figaro’s wedding is seriously threatened.

INTERMISSION

ACT III

To make sure that the wedding occurs, the Countess urges Susanna to invite the Count to meet in the garden. The Countess will keep the assignation, wearing Susanna’s dress, and surprise her unfaithful husband. The Count plans to put an end to Figaro’s impudence and avenge himself by backing Marcellina’s claim, forcing his servant to either marry her or repay the loan. Once again, the Count’s plans are frustrated: Marcellina and Bartolo’s romantic past is revealed, and the Countess has given Susanna money to pay Figaro’s debt. The Countess resolves to trick her husband, dictating a love letter from Susanna sealed with a pin, which is to be returned as an answer. Cherubino turns up among a group of girls led by Barbarina, and the Count is forced to hold a double wedding: Figaro and Susanna, Bartolo and Marcellina. When Susanna slips the Count the letter, he regains his good humor and leads the celebrations.

ACT IV

Barbarina lost the pin that the Count asked her to return to Susanna. Figaro overhears and thinks Susanna is being unfaithful. In his jealousy, Figaro brings Bartolo and Basilio to the rendezvous to expose the Count and Susanna, but Susanna catches on and punishes Figaro for his suspicions by letting him “overhear” her as she joyfully awaits her “tryst” with the Count. Cherubino enters and nearly ruins the Countess’s plot. Figaro soon stumbles onto what is happening. Everyone now participates in the game of putting the Count in his place, after he has tried to seduce his own wife disguised as Susanna. Before the “day of madness” is over, all is resolved, and love is in the air.

HGO PERFORMANCE HISTORY

HGO has previously presented The Marriage of Figaro during the 1973-74, 1988-89, 1990-91, 1997-98, 2005-06, 2010-11, and 201516 seasons.

HGO ORCHESTRA

Director

VIOLIN

Denise Tarrant*, Concertmaster

Sarah and Ernest Butler Concertmaster Chair

Chloe Kim*, Assistant Concertmaster

Natalie Gaynor*, Principal Second Violin

Carrie Kauk*, Assistant Principal Second Violin Miriam Belyatsky* Anabel Detrick* Rasa Kalesnykaite* Hae-a Lee-Barnes* Chavdar Parashkevov* Mary Reed* Erica Robinson* Linda Sanders*

Oleg Sulyga* Sylvia VerMeulen* Melissa Williams*

VIOLA

Eliseo Rene Salazar*, Principal Lorento Golofeev*, Assistant Principal Gayle Garcia-Shepard* Erika C. Lawson* Suzanne LeFevre† Dawson White† Elizabeth Golofeev Sergein Yap

CELLO

Barrett Sills*, Principal Erika Johnson*, Assistant Principal Ariana Nelson† Wendy Smith-Butler* Steven Wiggs* Shino Hayashi

DOUBLE BASS

Dennis Whittaker*, Principal Erik Gronfor*, Assistant Principal Carla Clark*

FLUTE

Henry Williford*, Principal Tyler Martin*

OBOE

Elizabeth Priestly Siffert*, Principal Mayu Isom*

CLARINET

Sean Krissman†, Principal Ilya Shterenberg, Acting Principal Eric Chi*

BASSOON

Amanda Swain*, Principal Michael Allard*

HORN

Sarah Cranston*, Principal Kimberly Penrod Minson* Spencer Park†

TRUMPET

Tetsuya Lawson*, Principal Randal Adams*

TROMBONE

Thomas Hultén†, Principal Mark Holley† Justin Bain†

TUBA

Mark Barton†, Principal

TIMPANI

Alison Chang*, Principal

PERCUSSION

Richard Brown†, Principal HARP

Joan Eidman†, Principal

ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL MANAGER

Richard Brown*

* HGO Orchestra core musician

† HGO Orchestra core musician on leave this production

HGO CHORUS

Richard Bado, Chorus Director Sarah and Ernest Butler Chorus Director Chair

Dennis Arrowsmith

Zachary Barba

Megan Berti

Frankie Hickman

Julie Hoeltzel

Katherine Jones Melissa Krueger Wesley Landry Alejandro Magallón Patrick Perez Saïd Henry Pressley

Francis Rivera

Hannah Roberts Johnny Salvesen Kaitlyn Stavinoha Chloe Zimmermann

Patrick Summers, Artistic and Music

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

WHO'S WHO

PATRICK SUMMERS (UNITED STATES) CONDUCTOR

Patrick Summers was named artistic and music director of HGO in 2011 after having served as the company’s music director since 1998. Some highlights of his work at HGO include conducting the company’s first-ever complete cycle of Wagner’s Ring and its first performances of the Verdi Requiem; collaborating on the world premieres of Tarik O’Regan’s The Phoenix, André Previn’s Brief Encounter, Christopher Theofanidis’s The Refuge, Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life, The End of the Affair, and Three Decembers, Carlisle Floyd’s Cold Sassy Tree and Prince of Players, Tod Machover’s Resurrection, and Joel Thompson’s The Snowy Day; leading the American premiere of Weinberg’s Holocaust opera The Passenger, both at HGO and on tour to the Lincoln Center Festival; and nurturing the careers of such artists as Christine Goerke, Ailyn Perez, Joyce DiDonato, Ana María Martínez, Ryan McKinny, Tamara Wilson, Albina Shagimuratova, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Norman Reinhardt, Jamie Barton, and Dimitri Pittas. Maestro Summers has enjoyed a long association with San Francisco Opera (SFO) and was honored in 2015 with the San Francisco Opera Medal. His work with SFO includes conducting Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, which was recorded and telecast on PBS’s Great Performances. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree by Indiana University. He was recently named Co-Artistic Director of the Aspen Music Festival’s Opera Theater and VocalARTS alongside Renée Fleming. This season at HGO, he also conducted The Wreckers; in 2021-22 he conducted The Snowy Day, Dialogues of the Carmelites, and Romeo and Juliet; and in 2019-20 he conducted Saul and Aida. Other recent engagements include Dead Man Walking at the Israeli Opera.

MICHAEL GRANDAGE (UNITED KINGDOM) ORIGINAL DIRECTOR

Michael Grandage directed Madame Butterfly for HGO in 2010, in a production that the company revived in 2015 and was also performed by Lyric Opera of Chicago. HGO also staged his production of The Marriage of Figaro in 2016. Other opera work includes Don Giovanni for the Metropolitan Opera and the San Francisco Opera production of Billy Budd, which also has been seen at Glyndebourne and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Grandage is Artistic Director of the Michael Grandage Company, where he has directed numerous productions in the West End and on Broadway including The Lieutenant of Inishmore with Aidan Turner, Photograph 51 with Nicole Kidman, Henry V with Jude Law, The Cripple of Inishmaan with Daniel Radcliffe, and Peter and Alice with Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw. He was Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse in London (2002-12) and Sheffield Theatres (2000-05), where his work included directing Chiwetel Ejiofor in Othello, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen in Frost/Nixon, Derek Jacobi

in King Lear, Eddie Redmayne and Alfred Molina in Red (Tony Award for Best Director), Jude Law in Hamlet, and Kenneth Branagh in Ivanov. He won three Olivier Awards for his musical productions of Guys and Dolls, Merrily We Roll Along, and Grand Hotel. His film work includes Genius starring Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Laura Linney, and most recently My Policeman starring Harry Styles and Emma Corrin. He is President of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He was appointed CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honors 2011.

IAN RUTHERFORD (UNITED KINGDOM) REVIVAL DIRECTOR

Ian Rutherford previously served as revival director for HGO’s The Marriage of Figaro (2016), The Magic Flute (2015), and Ariodante (2002). He studied at Guildhall School of Music, Sheffield University, and London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before joining English National Opera as staff director, where he directed critically acclaimed revivals of The Barber of Seville, Falstaff, Madame Butterfly, The Magic Flute, and La bohème. With Diva Opera (Britain’s premier chamber opera company) he directed Tosca, La traviata, Gianni Schicchi, Lucia di Lammermoor, and La belle Hélène in productions that have toured throughout Europe. He also directed new productions of Madame Butterfly for Opera Holland Park, Cendrillon for Royal Academy of Music, La bohème for Blackheath Concert Halls, and the world premiere of Christopher Bowers-Broadbent’s The Face at Gray’s Inn, London. Rutherford directed a new production of Il matrimonio segreto for Festival les Azuriales. He has directed revivals of many David Alden productions, including Ariodante, Lucia di Lammermoor, Peter Grimes, and Otello. Rutherford has worked for Glyndebourne Opera directing the revivals of Grandage’s Billy Budd and The Marriage of Figaro; Brooklyn Academy of Music and San Francisco Opera for Billy Budd; Opera Slovenia for Melly Still’s Rusalka; Lyric Opera Chicago and San Francisco Opera for David MacVicar’s Die Meistersinger; and The Rape of Lucretia at Deutsche Oper Berlin. Future plans include reviving Mariame Cement’s production of Don Pasquale at Glyndebourne and a new production for the Brighton Pavilion.

CHRISTOPHER ORAM (UNITED KINGDOM)

SET AND COSTUME DESIGNER

Christopher Oram has collaborated with Michael Grandage on numerous productions since 1996, including the production of Madame Butterfly seen at HGO in 2010 and 2015 and The Marriage of Figaro in 2016. This season for HGO, he also designed sets and costumes for the company’s new production of Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers. Other opera credits include Billy Budd (Glyndebourne, Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Don Giovanni (Metropolitan Opera). His theater credits include Red (Donmar Warehouse and NYC); Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Cripple of Inishmaan (NYC);

Peter and Alice and Privates on Parade (Michael Grandage Company and West End); Macbeth Frozen Company (Sheffield Crucible); Othello, King Lear, Passion, Parade, and Frost/Nixon (Donmar); Hamlet, Madame de Sade, Twelfth Night, and Ivanov (Donmar and Wyndham’s); Summerfolk, Danton’s Death, Stuff Happens, and Power Backbeat (Glasgow Citizen’s); Evita Guys and Dolls King Lear and The Seagull (Royal Shakespeare Company and world tour); Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, and The Mirror & The Light A Winter’s Tale, Romeo and Juliet, and The Entertainer (Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company and Garrick). Oram is a recipient of the Tony, Drama Desk, Olivier, Evening Standard, Critic’s Circle, Garland, Falstaff, and Ovation Awards for his work in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

PAULE CONSTABLE (UNITED KINGDOM) ORIGINAL LIGHTING DESIGNER

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ously at HGO in Manon (2003), Rusalka (2016), and The Marriage of Figaro (2016). Constable has won Olivier Awards for Best Lighting, for The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2020), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (2013), The Chalk Garden (2009), Don Carlos (2006), and His Dark Materials (2005), and Tony Awards for Best Lighting for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (2015) and War Horse (2011). She was the recipient of the Hospital Award for Contribution to Theatre, won the L.A. Drama Desk Award for Les Misérables, War Horse, and Sleeping Beauty, and received both the War Horse on Broadway. Her opera productions include many designs for the Royal designed lighting for productions including Satyagraha, Anna Bolena, Don Giovanni, and Giulio Cesare.

(2017), After the Storm (2016), and O Columbia (2015); Otello (2014); Die Fledermaus, Aida, and Il trovatore (2013); La bohème, La traviata, and The Rape of Lucretia (2012); The Marriage of Figaro (2011); the world premiere of Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (2010); and numerous outdoor productions. Clark also has designed lighting for Teatro La Fenice, San Francisco Opera, the Canadian Opera Company, Stages Repertory Theatre, Theatre Under the Stars, and Rice University.

BEN WRIGHT (UNITED KINGDOM) CHOREOGRAPHER

Ben Wright works in dance, theater, and opera and trained at The Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. He made his debut at HGO with The Marriage of Figaro in 2016. Wright is artistic director of his own company in the United Kingdom, bgroup, and previously served as artistic co-director at Candoco Dance Company (2017-20) and associate artistic director/choreographer of Skånes Dansteater, Sweden (2014-17). In 2022 he worked as intimacy coordinator on the Amazon film My Policeman and SKY Atlantic’s Funny Girl. Wright’s most recent choreographic work includes The Lost Thing for Candoco/The Royal Opera House and A space in the dark for Black Box Dance Theatre, Denmark. Other dance works include To find a way with one another, The Feeling of Going (digital release on Arthaus Musik); To see the world while the light lasts and Spectrum (Skånes Dansteater); and Point of Echoes Just As We Are The Lessening of Difference, About Around, and The Diminishing Present La bohème The

The Marriage of Figaro La

Fanciulla del West Faust Dead Man Walking Tobias and the Angel Twelfth Night A Midsummer Night’s Dream Privates on Parade

The Walk from the Garden

MICHAEL JAMES CLARK (UNITED STATES) ASSOCIATE LIGHTING DESIGNER

Michael James Clark is the Head of Lighting and company, he also serves as Associate Lighting Designer for Werther and Tosca. Last season for the company, he created the lighting design for the world premiere production of The Snowy Day, and he served as the Assistant Lighting Designer for The Magic Flute and Associate Lighting Designer for Carmen He served as revival lighting designer for HGO’s production of Aida (2020) and designed lighting for mainstage and Miller Outdoor Theatre productions of La bohème (2018-19) and the world premiere of The Phoenix (2019). He lit the HGO world premieres of Some Light Emerges

ADAM NOBLE (UNITED STATES) INTIMACY AND FIGHT DIRECTOR

25 years of experience in theater, opera, and film. He is the Movement Instructor for the HGO Studio, and this season serves as Intimacy and Fight Director for all HGO Brown Theater productions. He previously served as the company’s Fight Director for Julius Caesar (2018) and Rigoletto (2019), and as the Fight and Intimacy Director for Romeo and Juliet (2022), Carmen (2021), and Don Giovanni

Arts, The Alley Theatre, Opera Carolina, Lincoln Center Director’s Lab,

focused on the revitalization and proliferation of movement theater and embodied physical storytelling. He teaches movement both nationally and internationally, and has choreographed the physicality, violence, and intimacy for well over 200 productions. As the Associate Professor of Acting & Movement at the University of Houston, he serves both the MFA and the BFA acting programs. He is also the resident Fight Director & Intimacy Coordinator for The Alley Theatre.

Semele and Zurich Opera; the title role in Ercole Amante at the Opera Comique; Gottardo-Podesta in La Gazza Ladra for Theater an der Wien; and Seneca in The Coronation of Poppea for Opera du Rhin in Strasbourg. Di Pierro studied at Artistic Institute of the Teatro Colón and is a former member of the Paris Opera Studio and the Salzburg Festival’s Young Singer Project.

RICHARD

BADO

(UNITED STATES)   CHORUS

DIRECTOR

Boat has conducted for Houston Ballet, La Scala, Opéra national de Paris, New York City Opera, the Aspen Music Festival, Tulsa Opera, the Russian National Orchestra, the Florida Philharmonic, the Montreal Symphony,

The Nutcracker Bado has appeared regularly with Renée Fleming in recital. He has also played for Cecilia Bartoli, Frederica von Stade, Susan Graham, Denyce Graves, Marcello Giordani, Ramón Vargas, Samuel Ramey, Jamie Barton, Ryan McKinny, and Michael Spyres. Bado holds music degrees from

Achievement Award, and West Virginia University; he also studied advanced choral conducting with Robert Shaw. For 12 years, he was the director of the opera studies program at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He has also worked for the Metropolitan Opera, Seattle Opera, the Bolshoi Opera Young Artist Program, Opera Australia, Santa Fe Opera, and Opera Theater of St. Louis. He received HGO’s Silver Rose Award in 2013 in celebration of his 25th year as chorus master.

NAHUEL DI PIERRO (ARGENTINA) BASS—FIGARO

Nahuel Di Pierro is making his HGO debut. An accomplished Mozartian, he has performed roles including Figaro; Masetto and Leporello in Don Giovanni; Sarastro in The Magic Flute La Betulia Liberata; La Idomeneo Cosí fan tutte; and Osmin in The Abduction from the Seraglio. Recent and upcoming engagements include Selim in Il turco in Italia at Glyndebourne and Zurich Opera; his house debut at the Bolshoi as Leporello; Cithaeron in Platée at Paris Opera; Le Gouverneur in Le Comte Ory in Monte Carlo; Claudio in Agrippina in Drottningholm; Mozart’s Requiem at the Palau, La Damnation de Faust with the French National Orchestra and Vienna Symphony; Osmin with Zurich Opera Semiramide for the Rossini

ELENA VILLALÓN (UNITED STATES)  SOPRANO—SUSANNA

graduating from the HGO Studio program last season. She is a recipient of a 2022 Sara Tucker Study Grant, was a Grand Finals Winner of the 2019 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, Second Prize winner in the 2021 Hans Gabor Belvedere International Singing Competition, and the Audience Choice Award -

ate of the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM). For HGO’s 2021-22 season, Villalón’s roles included Amy in The Snowy Day and Juliet in alternate cast performances of Romeo and Juliet. Previous HGO credits include the Woman in performances of the world premiere of El Milagro del Recuerdo/The Miracle of Remembering; and Inez in La favorite. In 2021-22, she made debuts with Austin Opera (Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro), The Dallas Opera (Tina in Flight), and Santa Fe Opera (Nannetta in Falstaff ). Also this season, she performs Carmina Burana with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, returns to The Dallas Opera (Gretel in Hansel and Gretel) Concert on an international tour (the Queen of Sheba in Solomon), and joins the Frankfurt Opera ensemble, as Iole in Hercules, a new production by Barrie Kosky, and Atalanta in Serse.

NICOLE HEASTON (UNITED STATES) SOPRANO—COUNTESS ALMAVIVA

HGO Studio alumna and celebrated soprano Nicole Heaston has performed with HGO many times, as Liù in Turandot (2022), Mimì in La bohème (2018), Adina in The Elixir of Love (2016), Pamina in The Magic Flute (2015, 1997); Gilda in performances of Rigoletto (2001); Zerlina in Don Giovanni (1999); Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro (1998); the title role in the world premiere of Jackie O (1997); Mrs. Hayes in Susannah and St. Settlement in Four Saints in Three Acts (1996); and performances of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1995). During the 2020-21 season, she performed in four HGO Digital productions. In March 2022 she returned to HGO as host and vocal soloist for Giving Voice. Heaston has appeared with opera companies throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Dallas Opera, Washington National Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Semperoper Dresden, Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf,

included returns to San Francisco Opera, making a role debut as Despina

HGO Studio alumnus Richard Bado is director of made his professional conducting debut in 1989 Show

in a new production of Così fan tutte, and a debut with Maryland Lyric Opera, singing the role of Liù in Turandot. She also joined the Houston Ballet, singing songs by Joseph Canteloube on their Jubilee of Dance program. During the 2022-23 season, she creates the role of Claire Devon in the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s The Listeners at Den Norske Opera (Oslo), returns to San Francisco Opera as Amor in a new production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and debuts with Philharmonia Baroque, appearing as Melissa in Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula. Future seasons include her debuts with Lyric Opera of Chicago and Opera Philadelphia in leading roles.

ADAM PLACHETKA (CZECH REPUBLIC) BASS-BARITONE—COUNT ALMAVIVA

Adam Plachetka performed as Figaro in HGO’s 2016 production of The Marriage of Figaro. He performs regularly with the Vienna State Opera, Salzburg Festival, and the Metropolitan Opera, and has also appeared with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Glyndebourne Festival, Seoul Arts Center, National Theatre in Prague, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. In the 2022-23 season Plachetka’s appearances include Balstrode in Peter Grimes and Leporello in Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera. He will also make a return to London’s Wigmore Hall. In concert Plachetka has appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, L`Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra of the Czech Radio, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, with conductors including Marco Armiliato, Daniel Barenboim, Mariss Jansons, Fabio Luisi, Riccardo Muti, Andris Nelsons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Christian Thielemann, and Franz Welser-Möst. Plachetka also appears regularly in recital and has performed in Vienna, Prague, Graz, and London. He graduated from the Prague Conservatory and is recipient of numerous prizes and awards.

LAUREN SNOUFFER (UNITED STATES) SOPRANO—CHERUBINO

With a repertoire spanning the music of Claudio Monteverdi and Johann Adolph Hasse through to Missy Mazzoli and John Adams, HGO Studio alumna Lauren Snouffer is celebrated as one of the most versatile and respected sopranos on the international stage. She has given acclaimed performances with HGO as Sister Constance in Dialogues of the Carmelites (2022), Giulietta in the world premiere of Tarik O’Regan’s The Phoenix (2019), Addie in the world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon’s The House Without a Christmas Tree (2017), Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel (2016), and Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro (2016), among many other roles. During the 2021-22 season, she made her debut at the Opéra national du Rhin in the lead

role of Hans Abrahamsen’s The Snow Queen and in two productions with the Zurich Opera: the title role in the world premiere of Girl with a Pearl Earring by composer Stefan Wirth and as Argene in Pergolesi’s L’Olimpiade. Other recent operatic appearances include Handel’s Arminio and Serse at the Internationale Händel-Festspiele Karlsruhe, the title role of Berg’s Lulu with the Teatro Municipal de Santiago, and Benjamin’s Written on Skin with Opera Philadelphia, Théâtre du Capitole de Toulouse, and at the Tanglewood Festival. Beyond appearing with HGO, Snouffer’s plans for the 2022-23 season include The Magic Flute at the Zurich Opera, Handel’s Serse at Detroit Opera, and concerts with Alan Gilbert and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Dame Jane Glover and Music of the Baroque, and with Bernard Labadie and Handel & Haydn Society.

PATRICK CARFIZZI (UNITED STATES) BASS-BARITONE—DOCTOR BARTOLO

Patrick Carfizzi has performed with HGO many times, including as Henry Kissinger in Nixon in China (2017), Dr. Dulcamara in The Elixir of Love (2016), Speaker in The Magic Flute (2015), Mustafà in The Italian Girl in Algiers (2012), Doctor Bartolo in The Barber of Seville (2011), and Don Magnifico in La Cenerentola (2007). This season with HGO, he also performs as the Bailiff in Werther. In the 2021-22 season, he returned to the Metropolitan Opera as the Sacristan in Tosca, Speaker in The Magic Flute, and the Lackey in Ariadne auf Naxos. Other recent performances include a return to Santa Fe Opera as both Bartolo in The Marriage of FIgaro and Starveling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a return to San Diego Opera as Doctor Bartolo in The Barber of Seville, and Dr. Dulcamara in The Elixir of Love in a recording made with Seattle Opera. Carfizzi has appeared with opera companies and symphony orchestras across the country and performed with the Metropolitan Opera more than 300 times. He is a graduate of the Yale University School of Music and the winner of several prestigious awards including the Richard Tucker Career Grant Award, the George London Award, the Sullivan Foundation Award, The Richard F. Gold Career Grant from The Shoshana Foundation, and the Sergio Franchi Memorial Scholarship from the National Italian American Foundation.

MARIE LENORMAND (FRANCE) MEZZO-SOPRANO—MARCELLINA

HGO Studio alumna Marie Lenormand has performed with HGO many times, including as Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro (2011), Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2009), Siebel in Faust (2007), Fox in The Little Prince (2003), Poppea in The Coronation of Poppea (2001), Mercedes in Carmen (2000), and Thelma Predmore in Cold Sassy Tree (2000). During the 2021-22 season her roles included Marcellina in The Marriage of Figaro at Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, Gertrude in Romeo and Juliet at

Opéra-Comique, and Popotte in Le Voyage dans la lune with Opéra de Nice and Opera de Vichy. During the 2020-21 season she performed as Jacinthe in Auber’s Le Domino Noir with Opéra de Lausanne, Marguerite in Boieldieu’s La Dame Blanche with Opéra de Limoges, and Bachis in Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène with Paris’s Théâtre des Champs Elysées and with the Orchestre National de Lille. Some of Lenormand’s notable recent engagements include the title role in Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges with Oper Köln and the Seiji Ozawa Matsumoto Festival, Suzanne in with OnSite Opera in New York, Ottone in Boston Baroque’s with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Marguerite in Le pré aux clercs with the Opéra-Comique, Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été with Festival de Laon, France, Meg in Falstaff with Opera de Massy, Le Prince in Cendrillon with New Orleans Opera, her New York Philharmonic debut as the Fox in The Cunning Little Vixen, Carmen (role debut) with Theatre Imperial de Compiegne, a series of concerts with Les Violons du Roy in Quebec, and a return to New York City Opera as the title role in La Périchole.

STEVEN COLE (UNITED STATES) TENOR—DON BASILIO

Previously with HGO, Steven Cole has performed as Flute in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2009), Remendado in Carmen (2006), Monostatos in The Magic Flute (1985), Pong in Turandot (1982), Nelson/Crab Man in Porgy and Bess (1976), Goro in Madame Butterfly (1978), and Dr. Caius in Falstaff (1978). Specializing in character tenor roles, Cole has a varied repertoire that includes more than 80 roles from Monteverdi to Ligeti. In the 2021-22 season Cole reprised his signature roles Don Basilio/Don Curzio with Austin Opera and Monsiuer Triquet with Opera Omaha. In recent seasons he has performed as Don Buscone in Veremonda with the Spoleto Festival USA, the narrator in the world premiere of Chris Theofanidis’s Creation/Creator with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Goro in Madame Butterfly and the Abbé de Chazeuil in Adriana Lecouvreur with Opéra de Nice, Nick in La Fanciulla del West with the San Francisco Opera, the four valets in The Tales of Hoffman with Edmonton Opera and the Canadian Opera Company, the three tenor roles in L'enfant et les Sortilèges with Théâtre de Caen, Sportin' Life in Porgy and Bess with the Cincinnati Opera, and Monostatos in The Magic Flute at the Théatre Champs Elysées in Paris. Cole made his Metropolitan Opera debut as the Tanzmeister in Ariadne auf Naxos under James Levine. He has sung with the Cleveland Orchestra and the Chicago

From the House of the Dead with Rafael Kubelik conducting the New York Philharmonic. He has performed with Washington National Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Seattle Opera, Gran Teatre del Liceu, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Victoria State Opera in Melbourne, Opéra de Monte-Carlo, Paris National Opera, the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, the Opéra-Comique, and many other houses.

ERIN WAGNER (UNITED STATES)

MEZZO-SOPRANO—BARBARINA

Amy and Mark Melton/ Drs. Liz Grimm and Jack Roth Fellow

A first-year HGO Studio artist, Erin Wagner is originally from El Paso. During the 2022-23 season at HGO, she also performs as Page in Salome. She is a winner of the 2021 Naumburg Foundation International Vocal Competition and, with pianist and composer Shawn Chang, the 2021 Juilliard Vocal Arts Honors Recital. Wagner was a 2021 Renée Fleming Artist at Aspen Music Festival, where she performed the roles of Second Lady (The Magic Flute) and Unulfo (Rodelinda); sang in scenes from Così fan tutte, La clemenza di Tito, and Semele; and premiered David Clay Mettens’s The Sustaining Air. She worked with Fleming for Carnegie Hall’s 2021 SongStudio and received second prize in the 2021 Saengerbund Awards. She has performed with Steve Blier and Bénédicte Jourdois at Caramoor and with Brian Zeger at Juilliard Songfest. Wagner received her Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Darrell Babidge and was a Gluck Community Service Fellow. She completed her Bachelor of Music degree at the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with Joan Patenaude-Yarnell.

ERIC TAYLOR (UNITED STATES)

TENOR—DON CURZIO

Drs. Rachel and Warren A. Ellsworth IV/ Sharon Ley Lietzow and Robert Lietzow/ Jill and Allyn Risley Fellow

A second-year HGO Studio artist from Saint George, Utah, Eric Taylor completed his Master of Music degree at Rice University, where he performed the roles of Sam Polk in Susannah and Tito in La clemenza di Tito. He was named the second prize winner in HGO’s 2021 Eleanor McCollum Competition Concert of Arias. For HGO’s 2021-22 season, his roles included Chevalier in Dialogues of the Carmelites, First Armored Man in The Magic Flute, and Benvolio in mainstage and outdoor performances of Romeo and Juliet Other roles for HGO's 2022-23 season include Gastone in La traviata and Narraboth in Salome. While pursuing his undergraduate degree in music at Westminster College, he performed several leading roles, including Nemorino in The Elixir of Love and Rodolfo in La bohème, in addition to appearing in Carmina Burana with Salt Lake City’s Ballet West. Taylor has participated in Apprentice Artist programs with Santa Fe Opera, Central City Opera, and Utah Lyric Opera. He was named a semi-finalist at the Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions in 2017. He returned to the Santa Fe Opera in 2022 to perform the role of Melot in Tristan and Isolde and cover Don José in Carmen

NAVASARD HAKOBYAN (ARMENIA) BARITONE—ANTONIO

Melinda and Bill Brunger/ Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. Nickson/ Gloria M. Portela Fellow

A first-year HGO Studio artist, Armenian baritone Navasard Hakobyan won first place at HGO’s 2022 Eleanor McCollum Competition Concert of Arias. During the 2022-23 season at HGO, his other roles include Baron Douphol in La traviata and Second Nazarene in Salome. He was a member of the young artist program of the National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Yerevan, Armenia since 2018. His roles there in the 2020-21 season included Silvio in Pagliacci, Giorgio Germont in La traviata, and Belcore in a new production of The Elixir of Love. He has won numerous international competitions, including first prize in the Premiere Opera Foundation International Vocal Competition and third prize in the José Carreras Grand Prix in Moscow, Russia. Hakobyan received his master’s degree at Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan. He was named the 2019 winner of the President of the Republic of Armenia Youth Prize.

KAITLYN STAVINOHA (UNITED STATES) SOPRANO—1ST BRIDESMAID

Kaitlyn Stavinoha made her HGO mainstage debut in Carousel (2016) and went on to sing The Trainbearer in Elektra (2018) and Sister Catherine in Dialogues of the Carmelites (2022). She is an active performer with the HGO Chorus and in the Houston area, most recently returning to sing with The Houston Gilbert and Sullivan Society as Josephine in H.M.S. Pinafore. She has performed with Opera in the Heights, Operativo Houston, and in many capacities with HGO’s Community and Learning initiative, including three seasons with Opera to Go! and the Veteran’s Songbook Initiative. In 2019, she was a Studio Artist with Chautauqua Opera, where she sang Berta in The Barber of Seville and covered Rosina in The Ghosts of Versailles. Role highlights include Gretel in Hansel and Gretel, Oscar in A Masked Ball, Pamina in The Magic Flute, and Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro.

MEGAN BERTI (UNITED STATES) MEZZO-SOPRANO—2ND BRIDESMAID

Megan Berti returns to HGO, where she previously performed as a soloist in O’Regan’s The Phoenix and Female Emilia in Floyd’s Prince of Players. She is an active performer with the HGO Chorus. Recently Berti originated Schwendinger’s Cabaret of Shadows with MUSIQA after premiering Brandt’s Kassandra and Al-Zand’s The Leader, both released by Parma’s Navona Records. Berti has appeared with Opera in the Heights, Miami Lyric Opera, and Painted Sky Opera as Angelina (Cinderella), Dinah (Trouble in Tahiti), Prince Orlovsky (Die Fledermaus), Hansel (Hansel and

Gretel), and Flora (La traviata). Other roles include Rosina (The Barber of Seville), Isabella (The Italian Girl in Algiers), Concepción (L’heure espagnole), Nicklausse (The Tales of Hoffmann), Maddalena (Rigoletto), Amelia (Amelia), Magali (Salsipuedes), and Sesto (La clemenza di Tito). Berti has performed Handel’s Messiah, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, Verdi’s Requiem, Bach’s Mass in B minor and St. John Passion, Mendelssohn’s Elijah Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and 9th Symphony, Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle, and Vivaldi’s Gloria

AUDIENCE WARNING: THE OPERA WERTHER CONTAINS CONTENT ABOUT SUICIDE. IF YOU OR A LOVED ONE IS STRUGGLING WITH SUICIDAL THOUGHTS, DIAL THE 24-HOUR U.S. NATIONAL SUICIDE PREVENTION LIFELINE AT 988.

JAN FEB JAN

SUNG IN FRENCH WITH PROJECTED ENGLISH TRANSLATION

An Opera in Four Acts

The performance lasts approximately 3 hours, including two intermissions.

A co-production of Opéra national de Paris and Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

The activities of Houston Grand Opera are supported in part by funds provided by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance and by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

MUSIC BY JULES MASSENET LIBRETTO BY ÉDOUARD BLAU, PAUL MILLIET, AND GEORGES HARTMANN

Quick Start Guide

THE OPERA IN ONE SENTENCE

The despondent title character’s inevitable descent into depression and suicide is fueled not only by unrequited love, but by the social constructions that prevent Charlotte from returning his passion.

BACKGROUND

Massenet finished composing Werther in 1887, but it wasn’t premiered until 1892—in a German translation, at the Vienna State Opera. It received its proper French premiere later that year in Geneva. An adaptation of the great German Romantic novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the tragic love story is one of Massenet’s best: he later said of his opera, “Into Werther, I put all my soul and artistic conscience.”

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

The opening chords of the opera’s prelude present a stormy and dissonant look into the mind of a tortured poet. Those chords return frequently throughout the opera in the title character’s moments of desperation, often exhaling in a descent of chromatic withdrawal that illustrates the tragic destiny of Werther’s psyche. The rest of the prelude turns to a light, pastoral air of simple and beautiful counterpoint. This music, representing the poet’s youthful connection to nature, returns when Werther first approaches the house of Charlotte’s family.

The gorgeous tunes don’t end there. Upon Werther and Charlotte’s return from the ball in Act I, their “moonlight duet” captures the innocent trepidation of budding love—a love that is literally and musically interrupted when Charlotte’s father announces that her fiancé Albert has returned. The most famous melody of the opera comes in Werther’s third act aria, “Pourquoi me réveiller,” (“Why do you awaken me?”), when he passionately reads from a book of Ossian’s poetry that he and Charlotte used to read together.

COPYCATS

Goethe, the preeminent poet of early German Romanticism, first published his novel in 1774 at only 24 years old. It was an instant success, rocketing the young author to international fame. It also began a puzzling phenomenon that came to be known as “Werther Fever.” Young men would dress exactly as Werther was described, in yellow trousers, waistcoat, and blue jacket, and carry the novel around with them everywhere. A much darker side of this phenomenon came to pass with the first recorded wave of copycat suicides: many of these young men tragically identified with Werther’s final act of passion, and were found dead by suicide with a pistol, dressed as Werther, and holding their own copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther.

FUN FACT

After the opera premiered in 1892, the Italian baritone Mattia Battistini took a liking to Werther’s tragic figure. Called the “King of Baritones,” Battistini was one of the most acclaimed singers of his day, becoming a favorite of the Russian imperial family and performing frequently in Moscow and St. Petersburg. So strong was his international fame that, at his request, Massenet created a baritone version of the score for Battistini to perform the title character. Massenet changed nothing about the score’s architecture or orchestration, instead opting only to write alternate melodies for the lower male voice.

e character. d ration, y to elodies voice Mattia Battistini

CAST & CREATIVE

CAST (in order of vocal appearance)

The Bailiff

Patrick Carfizzi

Fritz Daniel Karash*

Max Benjamin Armstrong*

Hans Dante Petrozzi*

Karl Peter Theurer*

Clara Olivia Atanu*

Gretel Elizabeth Garcia*

Johann Cory McGee † Beth Madison Fellow

Schmidt Ricardo Garcia † Michelle Beale and Dick Anderson/ Dr. Ellen R. Gritz and Mr. Milton D. Rosenau Jr. Fellow

SophieJasmine Habersham*

Werther

Matthew Polenzani * Generously underwritten by Louise G. Chapman

CharlotteIsabel Leonard * Generously underwritten by Louise G. Chapman

BrühlmannLuke Sutliff † Lynn Gissel/ Brenda Harvey-Traylor/ Nancy Haywood Fellow

Käthchen Emily Treigle † Mr. and Mrs. James W. Crownover/ John Serpe and Tracy Maddox Fellow

AlbertSean Michael Plumb *

CREATIVE TEAM

Conductor

Robert Spano

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Supertitles called by Emily Kern.

Director

Benoît Jacquot * Associate Director

Set Designer

Geneviève Dufour *

Charles Edwards

Christian Gasc * Original Lighting Designer

Costume Designer

Charles Edwards Associate Lighting Designer Michael James Clark Intimacy and Fight Director Adam Noble Children's Chorus Director

Karen Reeves

Patricia Kristof Moy Music Preparation

Diction Coach

Alex Amsel

Peter Pasztor ‡

Kevin J. Miller

Madeline Slettedahl

Annie Wheeler Assistant Director

Stage Manager

Kaley Karis Smith English Supertitles Jeremy Johnson

* Company debut

† Houston Grand Opera Studio artist ‡ Former Houston Grand Opera Studio artist

Performing artists, stage directors, and choreographers are represented by the American Guild of Musical Artists, AFL-CIO, the union for opera professionals in the United States.

Scenic, costume, and lighting designers and assistant designers are represented by United Scenic Artists, IATSE Local USA-829. Orchestral musicians are represented by the Houston Professional Musicians Association, Local #65-699, American Federation of Musicians. Stage crew personnel provided by IATSE, Local #51.

Wardrobe personnel provided by Theatrical Wardrobe Union, Local #896. This production is being recorded for archival purposes.

A M 6 -6 AFM Local 65-699

ACT I

On the outskirts of Wetzlar, Germany, on a July afternoon, the Bailiff, a widower and father of a large family, is trying to teach his young children a Christmas song. Johann and Schmidt arrive on their way to the local inn for drinks, hoping to lure their friend along with them, but the Bailiff explains that first he must see his eldest daughter Charlotte off to a party. She is to be escorted by young Werther, a newcomer to the town. He is serious and rather melancholy, according to the Bailiff’s friends, and nowhere near as suitable as Albert, Charlotte's fiancé, currently away on business.

Werther arrives, and he watches as Charlotte oversees the children's dinner—she has taken on the role of mother for the family, aided by her sister Sophie, and Werther is touched by her warmth. Sophie, in charge of the family in her sister's absence, insists that her father go and join his friends at the inn. She is then delighted at the unexpected arrival of Albert, who is eager to see his betrothed. Disappointed at not finding Charlotte at home, he binds Sophie to secrecy, promising to return in the morning.

Charlotte and Werther return from the ball. Although it is late, they find it difficult to part, as warmth and sympathy grow between them. Werther is deeply moved when Charlotte describes her mother's death and her efforts to live up to her mother's memory. They are interrupted when they hear her father calling out that Albert has returned. Charlotte explains that this is the man she promised her mother she would marry: after confessing that, for a moment, she had forgotten her vow, she rushes inside the house.

INTERMISSION

ACT II

On a Sunday afternoon in autumn, Charlotte and Albert arrive at church, having now been married three months. Albert tenderly asks Charlotte whether she is happy in her new life with him, and she reassures him that she has no regrets. Watching them alone from a distance, Werther asks God why he was led to such a perfect, but unavailable, woman.

Albert comes out in search of Werther. With great tact, he suggests that he senses his friend's torment at missing his chance with Charlotte. Werther assures Albert that, whatever he may have felt for her, only friendship remains in his heart.

Alone with Charlotte, Werther passionately recalls the night they met, but she reminds him that she is Albert’s wife now. Destiny has separated them: Werther must leave and never see her again. Shaken by his misery, she tells him he may return to visit her on Christmas Eve. Werther's mind turns to dark thoughts of death. He begs God to understand him, and, if his pain leads him to suicide, to accept his act and welcome him as His son.

INTERMISSION

ACT III

Alone on Christmas Eve, Charlotte can think of nothing but the absent Werther. She re-reads his letters to her, terrified by the latest one, which appears to suggest suicide. When Sophie arrives, Charlotte tries to hide her feelings, but at the mention of Werther she breaks down and weeps. Worried, Sophie makes Charlotte promise to join her family that evening and leaves.

Werther suddenly appears, keeping his appointment with Charlotte. He begs her to admit that she has always loved him but, summoning all her strength, she cries, "You will never see me again," and rushes out. Horrified at what he has done, Werther resolves to die.

Albert, returning with the news that Werther has been seen in town, senses the tense atmosphere. Before he can question Charlotte, a servant arrives with a note from Werther asking to borrow Albert’s pistols for a trip. Charlotte senses the truth and rushes out.

ACT IV

Charlotte arrives moments after Werther has shot himself. She confesses that she has always loved him. He asks Charlotte to bury him in the corner of the graveyard under the linden tree, or, if Christian ground is forbidden him, alone by the road or in a lonely valley, and to bless his grave with a tear.

HGO PERFORMANCE HISTORY

HGO previously presented Werther during the 1978-79 season.

Summers, Artistic and Music Director

VIOLIN

Denise Tarrant*, Concertmaster

Sarah and Ernest Butler Concertmaster Chair

Chloe Kim*, Assistant Concertmaster

Natalie Gaynor*, Principal Second Violin

Carrie Kauk*, Assistant Principal Second Violin

Miriam Belyatsky*

Anabel Detrick*

Rasa Kalesnykaite*

Hae-a Lee-Barnes*

Chavdar Parashkevov* Mary Reed*

Erica Robinson*

Linda Sanders*

Oleg Sulyga*

Sylvia VerMeulen*

Melissa Williams*

Andres Gonzalez Kana Kimura

Emily Madonia

Mila Neal

Patricia Quintero Garcia

Rachel Shepard Hannah Watson

VIOLA

Eliseo Rene Salazar*, Principal

Lorento Golofeev*, Assistant Principal Gayle Garcia-Shepard† Erika C. Lawson*

Suzanne LeFevre†

Dawson White†

Matthew Carrington Elizabeth Golofeev

Nicholas Lindell

Matthew Weathers

Sergein Yap

CELLO

Barrett Sills*, Principal

Erika Johnson*, Assistant Principal Ariana Nelson†

Wendy Smith-Butler*

Steven Wiggs† Shino Hayashi

Simon Housner

Kristiana Ignatjeva

DOUBLE BASS

Dennis Whittaker*, Principal Erik Gronfor*, Assistant Principal Carla Clark*

Deborah Dunham FLUTE

Henry Williford*, Principal Tyler Martin*

OBOE

Elizabeth Priestly Siffert*, Principal Mayu Isom*

CLARINET

Sean Krissman†, Principal Ilya Shterenberg, Acting Principal Eric Chi*

BASSOON

Amanda Swain*, Principal Michael Allard*

SAXOPHONE

Scott Plugge

FRENCH HORN

Sarah Cranston*, Principal Kimberly Penrod Minson*

Spencer Park† Kevin McIntyre Gavin Reed

TRUMPET

Tetsuya Lawson*, Principal Randal Adams*

TROMBONE

Thomas Hultén*, Principal

Mark Holley* Justin Bain† Brian Logan

TUBA

Mark Barton*, Principal

TIMPANI

Alison Chang*, Principal

PERCUSSION

Richard Brown*, Principal Christina Carroll

HARP Joan Eidman*, Principal

ORGAN/KEYBOARD GLOCKENSPIEL

Thomas Marvil

ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL

Richard Brown*

* HGO Orchestra core musician

† HGO Orchestra core musician on leave this production

MANAGER

Patrick

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

HGO CHILDREN'S CHORUS

Benjamin Armstrong Olivia Atanu Elizabeth Garcia Angelina Sophia Hernandez Daniel Karash Dante Petrozzi Nicolas Daniel Sanchez Peter Theurer

WHO'S WHO

ROBERT SPANO (UNITED STATES)

CONDUCTOR

Robert Spano is a conductor, pianist, composer, and teacher. Previously for HGO, he conducted Nixon in China (2017), Eugene Onegin (2002), and Billy Budd (1998). After 20 seasons as Music Director, he continues his association with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as Music Director Laureate. As Music Director of the Aspen Music Festival and School since 2011, he oversees the programming of more than 300 events and educational programs for 630 students and young performers. Principal Guest Conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra since 2019, Spano became Music Director Designate in April 2021, and began an initial three-year term as Music Director in August 2022. With a discography of critically acclaimed recordings for Telarc, Deutsche Grammophon, and ASO Media, Spano has won four Grammy Awards and eight nominations with the Atlanta Symphony. He serves on the faculty at Oberlin Conservatory and has received honorary doctorates from Bowling Green State University, the Curtis Institute of Music, Emory University, and Oberlin. He is a recipient of the Georgia Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities, and one of two classical musicians inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.

BENOÎT JACQUOT (FRANCE)

DIRECTOR

Benoît Jacquot is making his HGO debut. He made his Royal Opera debut in 2004 directing Werther. Jacquot began his career as an assistant director in films by Marguerite Duras, including Nathalie Granger (1972) and India Song (1975). He began his writing and directing career with L’Assassin musicien (1976) and has since gone on to direct more than 40 films, including Les Ailes de la colombe (1981), La Désenchantée (1990), La Fille seule (1995), L’École de la chair (1998), Pas de scandale (1999), Sade (2000), Adolphe (2002), Villa Amalia (2009), Les Adieux à la reine (2012), 3 Coeurs (2014), Journal d’une femme de chambre (2015), and Son corps (2017). Les Adieux à la reine opened the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, and 3 Coeurs competed for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film

Festival. In 2017, he also directed the film Eva, selected in the official competition at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2019, he directed Dernier Amour, and in 2021 he directed Suzanna Andler. Jacquot’s work in opera includes La traviata for Paris Opera and a film version of Tosca starring Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna, conducted by Antonio Pappano. He has directed television documentaries on figures including Jacques Lacan, Merce Cunningham, and Duras.

GENEVIÈVE DUFOUR (FRANCE) ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

Geneviève Dufour is making her HGO debut. Dufour began to work in the cinema on Marguerite Duras’s third film, Jaune le soleil, in 1971. She continued her collaboration with Duras as script supervisor on most of her films, including Nathalie Granger, La femme du Gange and India Song, and as editor for Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert, Césarée, Aurelia Steiner, Melbourne, and Le Dialogue de Rome. She worked as script supervisor on Benoît Jacquot’s first film, L’Assassin musicien, and continued working with him on pictures including Les Enfants du Placard, Les Ailes de la Colombe, Sade, Tosca, Princesse Marie, Les Adieux à la Reine, Le journal d’une femme de chambre, Eva, Dernier Amour, and Suzanna Andler. She Blue, White, Red, and with other directors including Jean-Daniel Pollet, Jean-Claude Biette, Robert Pansard-Besson, Luc Moullet/Antonietta Pizzorno, Raúl Ruiz, Nae Caranfil, and François Dupeyron. She worked with Benoît Jacquot as assistant director on his opera productions of Werther for Royal Opera House in 2004 and La traviata at Opéra Bastille in 2014.

CHARLES EDWARDS (UNITED KINGDOM) SET AND ORIGINAL LIGHTING DESIGNER

Charles Edwards designed the sets for HGO’s Macbeth (1997) and (2004), and the sets and lighting for Katya Kabanova (2000). For the Royal Opera in London, he designed sets and lighting for Werther, and designed sets for Faust and Adriana Lecouvreur. Other design work includes

Katya Kabanova, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lucia di Lammermoor, The Makropoulos Case, and , which won the 2007 Olivier Award for Best New Opera Production (English National Opera); Tosca, Norma, The Greek Passion, and the Little Greats series, which won Faust Kiss Me Kate (Théâtre du Châtelet); La gazza ladra (Frankfurt); I due Foscari, La battaglia di Legnano, and I Lombardi, which together won the 2014 Anniversary Production International Opera Award (Hamburg Staatsoper); Don Carlos (Metropolitan Opera); Wozzeck (Dallas, Chicago); Il trovatore and Billy Budd (Chicago); I masnadieri and La Calisto, which won the 2022 Premio Abbiati Prize for design (La Scala, Milan); and Die tote Stadt and Attila (Strasbourg). He made his directing debut with Così fan tutte has since directed and designed productions of Elektra (Royal Opera); Tristan und Isolde (Lisbon); The Tales of Hoffmann Idomeneo and Don Quichotte (Grange Park Opera); Oedipus Rex, Rigoletto, Joshua, and Pagliacci (Opera North); Turandot (Nationale Reisopera); and Maria di Rohan

CHRISTIAN GASC (FRANCE) COSTUME DESIGNER

This is the first time the work of Christian Gasc (1946-2022) has been presented at HGO. He began as a costume designer for cinema working with director Liliane Kermadec, for whom he designed costumes for Aloïse (1975). He subsequently worked with such film directors as Claire Denis, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacquot, Patrice Leconte, André Téchiné, and François Truffaut. For Benoît Jacquot his costume designs for films include Sade (2000), Au Fond des bois (2010), and Les Adieux à la reine (2012). He also worked with Jacquot on television projects and, in addition to Werther, La traviata at Paris Opera. Other opera credits include Così fan tutte (Grand Théâtre de Genève); Guillaume Tell (Zurich Opera); La clemenza di Tito and Manon Lescaut (La Scala, Milan); Falstaff, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Andrea Chénier Andrea Chénier (Monte Carlo); Cyrano de Bergerac (Opéra national de Montpellier); Peter Pan (Théâtre du Châtelet); Manon Lescaut (Teatro Regio, Turin); and Cosma’s Marius et Fanny (Marseilles and Avignon). He designed costumes for such opera stars as Anna Netrebko, Renée Fleming, Anne-Sophie Von Otter, Ruggiero Raimondi, and Angela Gheorghiu, among many others. In theater he designed costumes for plays by Chekhov, Claudel, Cocteau, Corneille, Dumas fils, Feydeau,

ADAM NOBLE (UNITED STATES) INTIMACY AND FIGHT DIRECTOR

For information on Adam Noble, please see page 39.

MICHAEL JAMES CLARK (UNITED STATES)

ASSOCIATE LIGHTING DESIGNER

For information on Michael James Clark, please see page 39.

KAREN REEVES (UNITED STATES) CHILDREN’S CHORUS DIRECTOR

Karen Reeves has been working with young singers at HGO since 1991. She is a Grammy Award winner, having served as chorus master for the HGO Children’s Chorus in the Houston Symphony’s performance of Berg’s Wozzeck, which won the 2017 Grammy for Best Opera Performance. She prepared HGO’s Juvenile Chorus for the world premiere of The House Without a Christmas Tree and child soloists for such operas as Otello, Carmen, La bohème, Dead Man Walking, Tosca, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hansel and Gretel, and The Little Prince, as well as the spring 2021 outdoor performance at the University of Houston, My Favorite Things: Songs from The Sound of Music. She was a member of the HGO Chorus for 13 seasons, and during the 1999–20 season, she became the founding director of the Bauer Family High School Voice Studio, HGO’s intensive program for high school students preparing for further vocal music study. She received her Bachelor of Music degree from Southwestern University and her Master of Music degree from Rice University. She taught on the voice faculty at Houston Baptist University, and for more than 20 years she taught in the voice department of Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts as an artist consultant. She has served as a grant evaluator for the Texas Commission on the Arts music and opera advisory panel. She is the opera program administrator at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.

MATTHEW POLENZANI (UNITED STATES) TENOR—WERTHER

Generously underwritten by Louise G. Chapman

Matthew Polenzani, making his HGO debut, has performed at leading operatic, concert, and recital venues worldwide. He opened the Met this season as Jason in Medea, and his 2022-23 season includes the title role in Don Carlos at Teatro di San Carlo, the Duke in Rigoletto and the title role in The Tales of Hoffmann at Staatsoper Hamburg, and role debuts as Jean in Hérodiade at Deutsche Oper Berlin and Orombello in Beatrice di Tenda at Teatro di San Carlo. Polenzani began the 2021-22 season at the Metropolitan Opera with a special performance of Verdi’s Requiem, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Also at the Met, he starred in Julie Taymor’s acclaimed production of The Magic Flute (Tamino), and the title role Verdi’s Don Carlos, marking his role debut in a new production by David McVicar. He returned to Paris Opera as Nemorino in The Elixir of Love and later made his debut at the Canadian Opera Company as Alfredo in La traviata. To date, he has starred in more than 300 performances at The Met, with highlights including the premieres of Bartlett Sher’s production of The Elixir of Love, Sir David McVicar’s production of Maria Stuarda (issued on DVD by Erato), and McVicar’s new production of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux, which was featured on PBS’s Great Performances at the Met

ISABEL LEONARD (UNITED STATES)

MEZZO-SOPRANO—CHARLOTTE

Generously underwritten by Louise G. Chapman

Multiple Grammy Award-winning mezzosoprano Isabel Leonard is making her HGO debut. In repertoire that spans from Vivaldi to Mozart to Nico Muhly, she has graced the stages of the Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera, Salzburg Festival, Bavarian State Opera, Carnegie Hall, Glyndebourne Festival, Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Aix-en-Provence Festival, The Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, LA Opera, and The Santa Fe Opera in The Barber of Seville (Rosina), La Cenerentola (Angelina), The Marriage of Figaro (Cherubino), Così fan tutte (Dorabella), Don Giovanni (Zerlina/Donna Elvira), La clemenza di Tito (Sesto), Werther (Charlotte), Dialogues of the Carmelites (Blanche de la Force), Griselda (Costanza), La bohème (Musetta), Giulio Cesare (Sesto), and the title roles in Carmen, La Périchole, Cendrillon, Marnie, and Der Rosenkavalier. Earlier this season Leonard made her La Scala debut as Miranda in The Tempest and performed in recital with guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas in Los Angeles; in spring 2023 she will appear as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera. During the 2021-22 season, she returned to The Metropolitan Opera for Cendrillon, The Marriage of Figaro (Cherubino), and Ariadne auf Naxos (Komponist); Washington National Opera for Come Home: A Celebration of Return and Carmen; and The Santa Fe Opera for Carmen. On the concert stage she returned to the National Symphony Orchestra for a 9/11 commemoration concert conducted by Giancarlo Noseda and University of Connecticut for a solo recital. She serves on the Board of Trustees at Carnegie Hall and the Artistic Advisory Board of ArtSmart.

SEAN MICHAEL PLUMB (UNITED STATES)

BARITONE—ALBERT

Sean Michael Plumb is making his HGO debut. He is a member of the Bavarian State Opera and in the 2022-23 season his Munich appearances include performances of La fanciulla del West, Peter Grimes, Die Teufel von Loudon, and Tristan und Isolde. This season he will make his Dallas Symphony Orchestra debut in performances of

Carmina Burana led by Music Director Fabio Luisi. Recent performance highlights at the Bavarian State Opera include Così fan tutte, The Magic Flute, La cenerentola, and La bohème. In North America he made a Metropolitan Opera debut in Ariadne auf Naxos and has appeared with and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic giving the world premiere of The Call by German composer Arnulf Hermann. Winner of a 2021 Career Grant from the Richard Tucker Music Foundation, Plumb won the 2016 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the top prize at the 2016 Gerda Lissner Foundation International Vocal Competition. He graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied under renowned instructors Mikael Eliasen and William Stone.

JASMINE HABERSHAM (UNITED STATES)

SOPRANO—SOPHIE

Jasmine Habersham is making her HGO debut. Other roles this season include Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro with Madison Opera and Gilda in Rigoletto with Utah Opera. During the 2021-22 season Habersham returned to Atlanta Opera for her role debut as Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, made her company debut with Opera North (United Kingdom) as Gilda in Rigoletto, appeared as The Dew Fairy in Hansel and Gretel with Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, and returned to Madison Opera for her role debut as Euridice in Orpheus in the Underworld. She also made her debut with the Atlanta Symphony performing Act III of Rigoletto in concert. In recent seasons she has performed in Opera in the Park Online with Madison Opera; as a Company Player with the Atlanta Opera as The Girl in Der Kaiser von Atlantis and Micaëla in Threepenny Carmen; made her debut with Seattle Opera as Zerlina in Don Giovanni; and sang Nannetta in Falstaff with Berkshire Opera. Other notable recent engagements include Pip in Moby Dick with Opera San Jose and Utah Opera, Katie Jackson in the world premiere of Joel Puckett’s The Fix with Minnesota Opera, Clara in Porgy and Bess with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Adina in The Elixir of Love The Magic Flute in The Magic Flute with Cincinnati Opera, Yum-Yum in The Mikado Kentucky Opera, Esther in Intimate Apparel with Cincinnati Opera Fusion, Porgy and Bess

PATRICK CARFIZZI (UNITED STATES)

BASS-BARITONE—THE BAILIFF

For information on Patrick Carfizzi, please see page 41.

RICARDO GARCIA (UNITED STATES)

TENOR—

SCHMIDT

Michelle Beale and Dick Anderson/ Dr. Ellen R. Gritz and Mr. Milton D. Rosenau Jr. Fellow

A third-year HGO Studio artist from Castro Valley, California, Ricardo Garcia completed his Master of Music in Voice at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and holds a Bachelor of Music in Voice from the University of the Pacific. For HGO’s 2021-22 season, Garcia’s roles included El Remendado in Carmen, Papí/Jasper in alternate cast performances of The Snowy Day, First Commissioner in Dialogues of the Carmelites, and Romeo in alternate cast and outdoor performances of Romeo and Juliet. Other HGO roles for 2022-23 include Alfredo Germont in alternate cast performances of La traviata and Third Jew in Salome During the 2020-21 HGO Digital season he appeared in Vinkensport as Hans Sach’s Trainer; The Making of The Snowy Day, an Opera for All; and Suite Española: Explorando Iberia. In summer 2021, he returned to Wolf Trap Opera as Valcour in The Anonymous Lover and sang the role of Grimoaldo in Rodelinda at the Aspen Music Festival. In summer 2022, he performed the role of Fabrizio Naccarelli in The Light in the Piazza with Central City Opera and joined Boston Lyric Opera in his company debut as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.

CORY MCGEE (UNITED STATES)

BASS—JOHANN Beth Madison Fellow

A third-year HGO Studio artist from Stafford, Virginia, Cory McGee completed his Master of Music degree at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He was the second prize winner in HGO’s 2020 Eleanor McCollum Competition Concert of Arias. Other HGO roles for 2022-23 include Doctor Grenvil in La traviata, Jailer in Tosca, and Fifth Jew in Salome. During the 2021-22 HGO season, he performed the role of Billy in The Snowy Day, and during the 2020-21 HGO Digital season he appeared in The Making of The Snowy Day, an Opera for All, and in Giving Voice. In summer 2019, he joined Santa Fe Opera as an apprentice artist, portraying the role of the Gardener in Ruder’s The Thirteenth Child. He returned to Santa Fe in summer 2021 as an apprentice artist for the second time, performing the role of Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and recently debuted the role of Colline in La bohème at Detroit Opera. In summer 2022, he sang the role of Caspar in Der Freischütz with Wolf Trap Opera.

EMILY TREIGLE (UNITED STATES)

MEZZO-SOPRANO—KÄTHCHEN

Mr. and Mrs. James W. Crownover/ John Serpe and Tracy Maddox Fellow

A second-year HGO Studio artist from New Orleans, Emily Treigle was named a Grand Finals Winner in the 2021 Metropolitan Opera’s Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition and was the third prize winner in HGO’s 2021 Eleanor McCollum Competition Concert of Arias. For HGO’s 2021-22 season, her roles included Mother Jeanne in Dialogues of the Carmelites and Gertrude in Romeo and Juliet. Other HGO roles for 202223 include Flora Bervoix in La traviata and Miss Violet in Another City. In 2021, she covered the title role of L’enfant in L’enfant et les Sortilèges at Rice. In 2019, Treigle trained with HGO’s Young Artist Vocal Academy and participated in the Aspen Music Festival, where she portrayed Madame Armfeldt in A Little Night Music. In the summer of 2021, she returned to Wolf Trap Opera as a Studio Artist for the second time. Previous roles include Bradamante in Alcina and Mrs. Ott in Susannah, an opera made famous by her grandfather, world-renowned bass-baritone Norman Treigle. Treigle pursued her Master of Music degree at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where she received her Bachelor of Music degree in 2020.

LUKE SUTLIFF (UNITED STATES) BARITONE—BRÜHLMANN

Lynn Gissel/ Brenda Harvey-Traylor/ Nancy Haywood Fellow

A second-year HGO Studio artist from Littleton, Colorado, Luke Sutliff holds a Master of Music degree from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He was recently awarded a 2022 Sara Tucker Study Grant. For HGO’s 2021-22 season, his roles included El Dancairo in Carmen, M. Javelinot / Thierry in Dialogues of the Carmelites, and Mercutio in alternate cast and outdoor performances of Romeo and Juliet. Other HGO roles for 2022-23 include Harvey in The Wreckers, Sciarrone in Tosca, and A Cappadocian in Salome. At the Shepherd School, he appeared as Kaiser Overall in Der Kaiser von Atlantis and Johannes Zegner in Proving Up. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Juilliard School, where he studied with the late Sanford Sylvan and made his Alice Tully Hall debut performing Fauré’s L’horizon chimérique. Sutliff previously performed the roles of Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Belcore in The Elixir of Love at the Chautauqua Institute. Sutliff joined Santa Fe Opera as an Apprentice Artist for summer 2021, covering the role of Jon Seward in The Lord of Cries and performing Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He returned to Santa Fe in 2022 to cover the role of Figaro in The Barber of Seville and perform El Dancairo in Carmen

The Show supports Houston Grand Opera’s Community and Learning initiative, including the Student Performance Series, Opera To Go!, and Storybook Opera. The program serves nearly 70,000 students every season and has been a Show grant recipient for the past 20 years.

Small Steps Nurturing Center is a comprehensive, high-quality early childhood education program that prepares children living in poverty for success in elementary school and life. Small Steps operates two preschools in Houston at no financial cost to the families they serve. Over the next year, Small Steps expects to serve approximately 180 children.

Schreiner University – Western Art Academy Scholarship Program awards scholarships to 48 students who participate in the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo School Art program each year. These scholarships allow high school students to study Western art and learn traditional studio techniques from practicing professional artists.

ANOTHER CITY NAVIGATING

A nother City director Emily Wells, composer Jeremy Howard Beck, and I are sitting in a ground-floor meeting room at New Hope Housing, a permanent supportive housing facility in Houston, Texas, on a sweltering June afternoon, speaking with a handful of residents, all of whom have experienced homelessness in the not-so-distant past. The answers come fast and furious:

“Old-school jazz, that’s what I mostly raised up on.”

“I was sitting in my room the other night and I was praying, you know, and all of a sudden I heard the harp.”

“Rhythm and blues.”

“A little bit of everything.”

—

To prepare for the process of creating our new opera for HGO, Jeremy and I travel to Houston in 2019 for two weeklong research trips designed to take in the landscape of homelessness in the city. The goal: to

process, distill, and shape what we’re absorbing into the stuff of opera. In response to these two trips, I will craft a libretto that will serve as the blueprint for the music Jeremy will compose.

Week one is spent getting the lay of the land—as Emily calls it, the 30,000-foot view—interviewing the guardians of a range of institutions serving Houston’s unhoused: Thao Costis, who helms Search, an organization that works to “engage, stabilize, educate, employ and house individuals and families facing homelessness”; Marc Eichenbaum, the impassioned, inspiring Special Assistant to the Mayor for Homeless Initiatives; Houston Public Library’s Hiawatha Henry, who has been known to fund a weekly lunch and movie program out of her own pocket in moments of budget shortfall; Eva Thibaudeau-Graczyk and Sara Martinez at Coalition for the Homeless, a catalyst connecting partners and maximizing resources; and many more.

What Jeremy and I take away from these conversations, in addition to a prodigious wealth of passion, a palpable sense of being on the front lines, and an abundance of grace, is an understanding of the immense complexity of the problem, as well as the substantial strides that Houston’s Housing First System has made in combating homelessness. The city’s coordinated access system, The Way Home, has become a model for other cities struggling with the growing epidemic of homelessness in America.

The New York Times recently featured Houston’s developments in a front-page story, part of the Times’s “Headway” series, “exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress.” To date, homelessness in Houston has declined by 64 percent since 2011. Yet clearly obstacles

Librettist Stephanie Fleischmann on the story behind HGO’s 74th world premiere.

“ IS THERE A MUSIC THAT MAKES YOU THINK OF HO ME?”

remain. As long as poverty is woven through the fabric of American life, the specter of homelessness looms. Far too many folks dwell in a continual state of precarity—one mishap away from losing everything. As Marc Eichenbaum is quick to say: “The spigot of homelessness is always on.” —

A few months later, Jeremy and I return to Houston. This visit promises to be boots-on-the-ground: We tour the Star of Hope, the men’s shelter downtown. We volunteer at the Beacon, a day center that offers laundry, showers, and lunch. We man the intake desk, participate in a clothing giveaway, work at the lunch counter. We meet the retired scientist responsible for setting up the laundry at the Beacon, who becomes the spark for the opera’s Miss Violet. A luminous two-hour conversation with an idealistic elderly gentleman inspires Manoj Mukherjee’s walking meditation through the streets of downtown Houston, the image with which we start and end the opera—a steady, continuous gesture that recurs periodically as the work unfolds, embodying the dilemma of the chronically homeless, and containing within it the extreme opposites of debilitating pain and hope.

A drifter sporting cowboy boots and a handlebar mustache makes it very clear he’s just passing through, and we begin to hear Hank Edwards’s song even before we’ve started writing. We interview a thoughtful young man who, the previous night, had slept out on the street for the first time. His story serves as inspiration for the character of Langston Rodriguez, whose journey into the depths of homelessness both frames the opera and lies at its core. We approach a woman who declines to speak with us. Later that afternoon, as Jeremy and I are taking a breather in Market Square Park, we spot her sitting on a bench, her pack beside her. The next day, there she is again. Our minds racing, we cannot let her go. She becomes our Cassandra, a returned veteran on the cusp of being housed. Cassandra’s story, like Langston’s, will grow into another chamber of the beating heart of the opera we’re in the process of uncovering.

At the Star of Hope’s Women and Family Development Center in Pearland, we meet Kenneth DeVon, a conservatory trained vocalist and one-time backup singer for Stevie Wonder, currently Director of Housing and Navigation Programs at the Salvation Army, who, after having lost a brother to homelessness, found him ten years later, via a random encounter—an experience through which he discovered his true calling, a life of work in the homelessness sector. Kenneth describes driving a van around the city’s encampments, “going where love has not yet arrived,”

bringing water, food, supplies. “For a lot of my clients,” he says, “I am the only family they will ever have. I want them to know: I see you. I hear you…What they want to know is ‘Do you care?’”

Kenneth tells us the story of a solitary man who lived in a tent hidden behind a thicket of underbrush for 15 years, for whom the transition to being housed felt insurmountable. As our ideas for the opera develop, Cassandra ruminates over this story as a way of processing her own ambivalence at the prospect of being housed.

In the early mornings and the evenings, we venture out on field-recording excursions. With his rig, Jeremy captures sounds of the city streets that are so much part of daily life here that Houstonians may not even notice them. He will later incorporate these sounds into the sonic fabric of the score, which in his own words, “sets out to sonically portray the beauty of these lives we continually look past by creating music out of similarly overlooked or unexpected materials: an interlocking, interdependent network of rhythms, a world that sings. Vernacular musical languages, danceable grooves, and tuneful songs share equal footing with microtonal counterpoint, chorale harmony, and tightly constructed symphonic development.” He will layer and interweave the field recordings made on these visits with swinging street band sounds, junk percussion, and truly operatic heights of emotion.

On one of our last days in Houston, we accompany a pair of Search Navigators on their rounds, as they traverse the city, looking for clients on street corners and in encampments. The Navigators’ job is to help the unhoused navigate the often labyrinthine bureaucracy that is the forerunner to having a place to call home. Via the Navigators’ intimate acquaintance with the map of homelessness in Houston, we begin to visualize two cities coexisting separately, one layered atop the other, the character of the Navigator serving as a bridge between the two worlds. As we sit in on a gathering organized by Brigid’s Hope, a program that supports previously incarcerated, formerly homeless women, the idea of testimonial, of affirmation, as a structure begins to unfold.

Almost everyone we approach opens up to us, telling us their story with a stunning generosity and self awareness. And so we listen. (For a small sample of the powerful words we hear, see right.)

Often the rhythms of speech are so indelible we know instantaneously that they will become music—we have deployed excerpts of certain interviews (with permission) word for word in the opera. The text spoken and sung by the character of Bruce, a mainstay of the recovery group,

Composer Jeremy Howard Beck recording the sounds of Houston.

Photo courtesy Stephanie Fleischmann.

is almost entirely extracted from a collage of testimonials, chunks of which are direct transcription. At other moments, the eloquence with which an individual articulates their understanding of how they came to be where they are, how the system serves as a net that holds them or doesn’t, resonates like the sounding of a bell. And we know that a new idea, another thematic layer, has found its way into the opera. Of course, we can’t use it all. None of the quotes at right ended up in the opera. And yet everything we see and hear undergirds what we are making.

—

Soon enough we understand that perhaps the biggest challenge the opera poses is this: How do we put a city, this city, on stage? For the experience of losing a home and gaining housing is not just one story. The face of homelessness is as diverse and innumerable as there are humans on this planet. We know we won’t do it justice by zeroing in on a single narrative arc. So we begin to weave this multiplicity into almost a fugue-like structure, a dramatic work consisting of interlacing threads, their juxtaposition full of tension, forward momentum, inevitability. We consider the question: Through whose eyes will we experience the stories we’ve chosen to tell? We look for ways to guide our audience in and through an often chaotic and devastating world. We seek moments of joy and nodes of connection amidst the pain. We make it our goal to conjure an experience of both cities, so that at least for the duration of the opera, via the eyes, ears, and hearts of the viewer, a divided metropolis becomes one.

Full up with data, overflowing with the pragmatics of the day-to-day struggles of the unhoused, flush with the gift of the stories with which we’ve been entrusted, the process of honing begins. This will involve countless (and as of the writing of this article, still evolving) drafts of the libretto, both before and after the libretto workshop; return visits to Houston in the midst of a pandemic for piano/vocal and orchestration workshops; a presentation at the 2022 Opera America conference in Minneapolis; and ongoing, epic restructuring and revising in response to the workshops—an almost five-year-long process involving an intricate and more in-depth back and forth between composer and librettist than any I’ve thus far encountered in my career as a librettist.

But for now, we are at the start of it all, nearing the end of the second of our two weeklong research trips in 2019, excruciatingly aware of how brief our immersion into “the other city” has been, and the fact that we are privileged to be able to go home at the end of the week— not yet cognizant of how deeply embedded these experiences engaging with this community will prove to be as we carry them with us over the next half decade. Brainstorming, we reach for an image, envisioning a space that can provide some sort of respite from the clamor of the city. After all, poetic thinking, metaphor, is a galvanizing language of opera. On a hunch, we spend an evening at the Live Oak Quaker Meeting House Skyspace. We are thinking about the sky, imagining what it’s like to live without a roof over one’s head. The Skyspace is that perfect paradox: a place of reflection whose roof opens to the sky. We look up. And the good work begins.

over one’s ones headd. The is tion whose roof opens f to the sk y s

WORDS FROM HOUSTON'S UNHOUSED COMMUNITY

“Home is what you make of it. If you make this home, it’s home. If you make your family home, it’s home. But really, you want to be home with yourself.”

“Nights when it gets really cold, and you don’t have a blanket and you’re just praying for the sun to come up, it’s a horrible feeling.”

“When you get into a place, you feel more like part of the community, more—less broken, less like a broken car.”

“When I left the Star of Hope, the lady came and picked me up and we went to Wal-Mart. And she spent two or three hundred dollars on little home furnishings—little things, like a carpet, you know, a clock to hang on the wall. Obscure little things, but it helped.”

“I love gospel. My father was a minister. I was raised up in a godly family. Well my father taught me right all the time, but I wanted to get out there on the streets, see those people from town. You know, and do wrong.”

“My ex-wife was a professional singer. Classical, opera. She was a choir teacher. Our house was full of music. The choir would practice in our living room. And so I would usually make the snacks while they were singing.”

“I’ve never been to the opera. I’ve never really been there. I never really listened to it. I wouldn’t mind experiencing it.”

From 2019 interviews conducted by the Another City creative team

Sarah Rothenberg Artistic Director

OPENING NIGHT DINNER: LA TRAVIATA

October 21, 2022

HGO toasted the 2022-23 season with its Opening Night performance of Verdi’s La traviata followed by a celebration dinner on the Wortham’s Fish Plaza. Chaired by longtime opera champions Molly and Jim Crownover, the occasion set attendance and fundraising records bringing in over $600,000.

In a full-circle moment, the production of La traviata, was the same one that opened HGO’s Resilience Theater—a makeshift opera house in the GRB Convention Center that saved the opera season after Harvey poured 14 feet of water into the Wortham in 2017. Jim Crownover served as Board Chair at the time. And so, this dinner became a celebration of resilience.

The evening began with a full house for the national anthem conducted by HGO Patron Aaron Stai—a fun HGO tradition. The breathtaking performance of La traviata featured Grammy Award-winning soprano Angel Blue as Violetta and was dedicated to Ukrainian baritone Andrei Kymach as Giorgio. The night also marked the HGO debut of conductor Matthew Aucoin

Post-performance, guests made their way through The Events Company’s ten-foot floral Champagne flutes and a flurry of real bubbles to enjoy a Parisian meal by City Kitchen Catering. Current HGO Board Chair Claire Liu introduced the evening’s honorees, Board Chairs Janet Carrig (2018-20) and Allyn Risley (2020-22), paying homage to their inspiring leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and the COVID-19 pandemic. General Director and CEO Khori Dastoor and HGO Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers then introduced the La traviata cast and

standing ovation by all.

creative team to a

Khori Dastoor, Molly and Jim Crownover, Patrick Summers

Allyn Risley, Claire Liu, Jim Crownover, Janet Carrig La traviata

LAUREATE SOCIETY RECITAL FEATURING REGINALD SMITH, JR., BARITONE

October 16, 2022

HGO’s Laureate Society members kicked off the 2022-23 season at a favorite annual event, the Laureate Society Recital. This year’s performance featured Grammy and Emmy Award-winning baritone Reginald Smith, Jr., a graduate of the HGO Studio. Smith took a break from performing as Pascoe in The Wreckers to wow his HGO family—who know him as “Reggie”—with a stirring program of opera (Schumann, Verdi, and Wagner), ballads (Niles and Ellington), and hymns, all accompanied by Madeline Slettedahl

The Sunday recital and dinner is an annual treat reserved for HGO’s Laureate Society members, opera lovers who have made commitments to HGO in their estate plans. For information, contact Amanda Neiter at aneiter@hgo. org or 713-546-0216.

By including HGO Endowment in your will or as a beneficiary of your retirement plan or insurance policy, you become a partner with HGO in perpetuating the art form we love, sustaining its vibrant good health for future generations. As a member of the Laureate Society, your legacy gift helps ensure opera forever in Houston.

For more information, please contact Amanda Neiter at 713-546-0216 or aneiter@hgo.org.

Who will enjoy world-class opera because of your generosity?

Leonard Goldstein, Frank and Alan York, Helen Wils

Khori Dastoor, Reginald Smith, Jr., Betty TutorJulie and Logan Browning

Marsha Bourque, Jesse Weir, Fiona Toth

GRAND UNDERWRITERS

DINNER

November 3, 2022

Host Margaret Alkek Williams and fellow lead supporters of HGO joined Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers and Matthew Aucoin, on break from his HGO debut conducting La traviata, for a unique dinner experience from the conductor’s point of view. Guests got to dine in the Brown Theater’s orchestra pit with Aucoin, who is not only a conductor, but also a composer, author, and cofounder of his own opera company. All delighted in learning about the remarkable career of the modern-day prodigy, who composed his first opera at age 10, and his hopes for the future of the artform.

The Impresarios Circle is HGO’s premier donor recognition society and is instrumental to HGO’s success. For information, please contact Greg Robertson at 713-546-0274 or grobertson@hgo.org.

Margaret Alkek Williams and Matthew Aucoin

José and Teresa Ivo

Miguel and Valerie Miro-Quesada

Veer Vasishta, Ellen Gritz, Mickey Rosenau

Warren and Rachel Ellsworth

Don Pferdehirt and Selda GunselTerrylin Neale and Patrick Summers

A MONUMENTAL MOMENT

How Concert of Arias transforms the lives and careers of emerging artists

By Brian Speck, HGO Studio Director

After a long recruiting process that began with 945 applicants, the 35th annual Eleanor McCollum Competition will showcase an outstanding array of talented singers on February 3 in the Wortham’s Cullen Theater. Long known for identifying and launching the careers of the greatest emerging artists in the field, the competition serves as a life-changing moment for the selected finalists. One need only glance at the list of winners to understand the impact of the competition on singers’ lives; it is a list of stars.

For two current HGO Studio artists, Concert of Arias finalist Meryl Dominguez and first prize winner Navasard Hakobyan, that moment took place in January 2022. During the competition, these two talented artists made a deep impact on the judges and the Studio faculty. It was clear that time spent in the Studio program and on the HGO stage

would prepare them for the international careers they’re destined to have. We offered them the opportunity to come to HGO, and they began training with the program in August.

For Meryl, coming to HGO represented a long-time dream; as a young artist, she gained notice by many in the opera world during her time at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia. In 2018, she was an apprentice artist at Santa Fe Opera, where she sang the role of Naiad in Ariadne auf Naxos and demonstrated a voice of great beauty and clarity that rang easily to the back row of the theater. This is where I first heard her, and where her journey to HGO began. Over the next several years, she and I kept in touch, and she regularly sang auditions for the company.

Then, in early 2022, she sailed through auditions for the competition, impressing the panel at each stage of the

Finalists Meryl Dominguez and Navasard Hakobayan joined the HGO Stuudio following thhe 2022 competition

Photo: Wilsoon Parish

process. Her performance in Concert of Arias 2022, during which she showcased her artistry and versatility, sealed the deal. Following that magical moment, she suddenly found herself moving to Texas from Minnesota, where she and her husband had made their home during the pandemic. Meryl has a soprano voice of significant size that requires vocal maturity and experience to tackle challenging repertoire, and the offer to join HGO came at a pivotal moment.

Meryl sums up the experience: “It’s a very hard thing to accept as a young singer, but things really do happen when they are supposed to! In coming to HGO now, I have the support to discover and experiment with new directions that my voice would not have been ready for when I was younger.”

Navasard’s Concert of Arias story has quite a different beginning and brought about an even bigger change in his life. In fall 2021, he was studying at the music conservatory in Yerevan, Armenia, and participating in the young artist program of the city’s Academic Theatre and Ballet. As many singers did during the pandemic, he entered an online competition, sharing videos of his singing in hopes of winning a prize from the Premiere Opera Foundation in New York.

While judging this competition virtually, I heard Navasard’s voice and promptly invited him to participate in the Eleanor McCollum Competition. After a miraculously quick visa process, he flew to Houston, performing in person for HGO staff for the first time during the competition’s semifinals.

The finalists who performed in HGO's Concert of Arias 2022: Tatiana Carlos, Evan Lazdowski, Shannon Keegan, Navasard Hakobyan, Olivia Smith, Jongwon Han, Amanda Batista, Jonas Jud, and Meryl Dominguez.

Just a few months after learning about HGO, Navasard won the competition, wowing the judges by performing a rare aria, “O Mariya” from Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, that shined a bright light on his unique talents. On that day, having spent a total of seven days in the United States, he was invited to move to Houston and join the HGO Studio. He quickly accepted, and the long process of planning an international move and a new life in Houston began. After arriving in Houston in June, Navasard began a program of intensive English study, and today he converses easily in a language he didn’t know six months before.

In Navasard’s own words, “it was a fantastic feeling to win the Concert of Arias. After coming to Houston, I decided to change my life completely and develop my skills with the HGO Studio. I heard that this is the best talent development program in the world. When I was announced as the winner, my intuition told me that the time had come to make this big move and continue my career in Houston. I hope that my work with the professional team at HGO will help me to gradually, step by step, prepare myself for a big career in the major theaters of the world.”

Now the annual competition is back, and as I write this, I feel inspired by the knowledge that big changes are on the way for the next group of talents set to receive the life-altering opportunity to join the HGO Studio. Join us on February 3 in the Cullen Theater, or watch the livestream to hear their stories and weigh in on your own favorite artist during the Audience Choice Awards!

Meryl Dominguez, soprano Mr. and Mrs. Harlan C. Stai Fellow

Ricardo Garcia, tenor Michelle Beale and Dick Anderson/ Dr. Ellen R. Gritz and Mr. Milton D. Rosenau Jr. Fellow

Navasard Hakobyan, baritone Melinda and Bill Brunger/ Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. Nickson/ Gloria M. Portela Fellow

Cory McGee, bass Beth Madison Fellow

HGO STUDIO FACULTY & STAFF

Brian Speck, Director

Maureen Zoltek, Studio Music Director, Mr. and Mrs. Albert B. Alkek Chair

Jamie Gelfand, Studio Manager

Ana María Martínez, HGO Artistic Advisor

Stephen King, Director of Vocal Instruction Sponsored by Jill and Allyn Risley, Janet Sims, and James J. Drach Endowment Fund

Patrick Summers, Conducting Instructor and Coach, Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

HGO STUDIO SUPPORTERS

The HGO Studio is grateful for the in-kind support of the Texas Voice Center. The Young Artists Vocal Academy (YAVA) is generously underwritten by Mr. and Mrs. Robert N. Wakefield and the HGO Guild.

Additional support for YAVA is provided by Mr. Patrick Carfizzi, Gwyneth Campbell, and David and Norine Gill. HGO thanks Magnolia Houston for outstanding support of the HGO Studio and YAVA programs.

Additional support for the Houston Grand Opera Studio is provided by Sylvia Barnes and Jim Trimble, Dr. Raymond Chinn, Mr. and Mrs. Melvyn Hetzel, Ms. Diane K. Morales, Mr. and Mrs. Jay Watkins, and the following funds within the Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc.:

Michelle Papenfuss, pianist/coach Dr. Saúl and Ursula Balagura/ Dr. Laura E. Sulak and Dr. Richard W. Brown Fellow

Renée Richardson, soprano Kathleen Moore and Steven Homer/ Carolyn J. Levy/ Jeff Stocks and Juan Lopez Fellow

Luke Sutliff, baritone Lynn Gissel/ Brenda Harvey-Traylor/ Nancy Haywood Fellow

Eric Taylor, tenor Drs. Rachel and Warren A. Ellsworth IV/ Sharon Ley Lietzow and Robert Lietzow/ Jill and Allyn Risley Fellow

Emily Treigle, mezzo-soprano Mr. and Mrs. James W. Crownover/ John Serpe and Tracy Maddox Fellow

Erin Wagner, mezzo-soprano Amy and Mark Melton/ Drs. Liz Grimm and Jack Roth Fellow

Bin Yu Sanford, pianist/coach Lynn Des Prez/ Stephanie Larsen / Dr. and Mrs. Miguel Miro-Quesada Fellow

Peter Pasztor, Principal Coach

Sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. James A. Elkins Jr. Endowment Fund

Kirill Kuzmin, Head of Music Staff

Kevin J. Miller, Assistant Conductor

Madeline Slettedahl, Assistant Conductor

Brian Connelly, Piano Instructor

Tara Faircloth, Drama Coach, Showcase Director

Adam Noble, Movement Instructor, Showcase Fight and Intimacy Director

Christa Gaug, German Instructor

Enrica Vagliani Gray, Italian Instructor Sponsored by Marsha Montemayor

Raymond Hounfodji, French Instructor

Sponsored by Craig Miller and Chris Bacon

Joy Jonstone, English Instructor

Warren Jones, Guest Coach

Thomas Lausmann, Guest Coach

The Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation

Marjorie and Thomas Capshaw

James J. Drach Endowment Fund

The Evans and Portela Family Fund

Carol Lynn Lay Fletcher Endowment Fund

William Randolph Hearst

Charlotte Howe Memorial Scholarship Fund

Elva Lobit Opera Endowment Fund

Marian and Speros Martel

Erin Gregory Neale Endowment Fund

Dr. Mary Joan Nish and John M. O’Quinn Foundation Endowed Fund

Shell Lubricants (formerly

Mary C. Gayler Snook Endowment Fund

Tenneco, Inc., Endowment Fund

Weston-Cargill Endowed Fund

Mary C. Gayler Snook Endowment Fund

OUT OF CHARACTER

JASMINE HABERSHAM

By Catherine Matusow

Habersham is making her HGO debut as Sophie in Werther

When Opera Cues reached soprano Jasmine Habersham one recent day to chat, it was clear the singer was having a moment.

Habersham, who still resides in her hometown of Macon, Georgia and is only a few short years into her career in opera, took our call during a rare break in her schedule at Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York. She was preparing to perform in not one, but two world premiere works—as Mimi in a new pastiche opera, Gioachino Rossini and Ken Ludwig’s Tenor Overboard, and as Mary in Damien Geter and Lila Palmer’s Holy Ground

The 2022-23 season ahead would be packed for her, bringing a mix of solo concerts, world premieres, and classics from the repertoire, including her debut with HGO as Sophie in Werther

Adding to all the excitement, the evening before our conversation, she had learned that Opera North’s new production of Rigoletto from last season—directed by Femi Elufowoju, Jr., with Habersham as Gilda and Eric Green as Rigoletto— had just won a coveted Sky Arts South Bank Award.

As the Guardian had explained when Habersham was in England for the opera’s run, in a rave review that credited her with “most of the special moments,” the entire reimagined production was a “masterstroke.” “Rigoletto’s otherness is as a Black man with a vulnerable daughter existing on the margins of an entitled bunch of rich white party animals who cannot be trusted around young women,” the paper wrote. “Sound familiar?”

The day we chatted, it seemed so much had happened so quickly, Habersham was still wrapping her mind around it all. When we recounted to her something HGO Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers had said—that one of the things he’s most excited about in HGO’s entire 2022-23 season is the “ethereal beauty of Jasmine Habersham’s voice”—her smile was immediate. “Oh my God,” she managed, before taking a breath and telling us more.

Opera Cues: You’re one of the fastest-rising singers in opera today. How does it feel?

Jasmine Habersham: You know, I have to say, it feels fast. I’m just trying my best to focus on the music, but I had a moment yesterday! I just did a Rigoletto production at Opera North in the U.K., where I made my international debut. And we just won a Sky Arts South Bank Award for the opera category. And I sat back and thought, I can’t believe I did all of that. And then we won an award? It happened so fast. And sometimes, I forget to just stay in the moment. So that was a reminder last night—Jasmine, enjoy these moments. I’m extremely excited and grateful. It has been a little challenging keeping a work-life balance, but I’m finding different parts of myself along each step of the way.

OC: What drew you to this art form?

JH: I grew up in a very musical family, hearing all kinds of music, but mainly gospel and jazz. I started out with piano, and then I also played clarinet in middle school. And then, in high school, I went to this camp called MidSummer Macon, which was an arts camp, and I saw a program with this woman, Rita Davis, singing classical music. After that, I wondered if I could do it.

I started taking lessons at the college [Weslayan in Macon] with Nadine Whitney, and she said, you should really consider doing this as a career. I ended up going to Shorter University for my undergraduate, and then to University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music for my master’s and my AD.

Another moment at MidSummer Macon—I got introduced to Audra McDonald, because I was singing in the musical theater show. I saw her singing Ragtime, and wondered what else she had done. I heard her album, Daybreak in Alabama, and the first song was Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Dream Variations.” And I thought, this is something that I really want to do. It just sparked my joy.

OC: How do you prepare for a role debut such as Sophie in Werther?

JH: I have debuted ten roles within the past year and a half, and then, prior to the pandemic, there were a couple roles that I was also preparing. So, I’ve now learned my own system of getting things together now. The first thing that I do, I just read the libretto as it is. I’ll read it like a play. And then, from there, I highlight my score. Then I work solely on languages, perfecting that. And that’s when I go into the music of it with coaches and my voice teacher.

Habersham as Gilda, with Eric Greene as Rigoletto, in Opera North’s Rigoletto.

Photo: Clive Barda.

OC: The character of Sophie—how do you connect emotionally with her?

JH: With any character, I always think, okay, Jasmine—what has my character gone through up until that point? In this case, she has lost her mother, but she’s presented as a very sweet, kind, cheerful, and bubbly person. I try to match that with what I can bring to it, in a spiritual sense, of who I am. Also, listening to the music gives you cues about who the person is. And if you listen to Sophie’s music, it’s very bubbly and very spry and joyful. I try to match that quality. You’ll hear the contrast, especially when she’s talking to Werther.

OC: Tell us about Werther from Sophie’s perspective.

JH: He’s in love. It’s difficult because it’s so sad, because he commits suicide, and there could have been so many other ways to not get to that point. Sophie has sympathy for him; she wants the best for everyone. And then, she has a connection to him, too—she sees him somewhat as a brother, as a friend. She cares for him.

OC: Back to performing the role of Gilda at Opera North— can you share more about that?

JH: That was such an incredible experience, because it was such an innovative production, and it was amazing for it to be designed in the likeness of me. And what I mean by that is we had a Nigerian director who was the first Black director in the U.K. to direct an opera, so he centered it around being a Nigerian. Granted, I’m African American, not Nigerian. But he wanted to put the show in the likeness of having a Black Gilda and a Black father. And that was just so special.

And I think the way that he built the concept—it was like nothing that anyone had seen. I was able to wear braids in the show, and that was a part of the story. Often, because this is a very Eurocentric art form—you know, I don’t get to wear my braids as much. And it was a part of the story, that in Gilda’s likeness was her braids. And when she was with the Duke, he made her put on a wig, because that’s the way he wanted to view her. It was extremely powerful, especially the duet with my father. I’m taking the wig off. I’m telling him what happened. And it was a great experience to tell the story in the likeness of me.

OC: Are you looking forward to working with HGO?

JH: I’m just beyond thrilled to work at one of the best houses in the country—and in the world, frankly. I’m so delighted to be making my debut at the company.

I feel ready to take on the challenge of the role, and to be a part of such a fantastic cast. Sean Michael Plumb and I were young artists at Glimmerglass together. So it’s nice to realize, Oh, we’re grownups now and doing this professionally. (laughs) We actually did Papagena and Papageno together. And to meet Isabel Leonard and Matthew Polenzani—it’s a dream cast. I hope people come out and see this cast and this tragic but amazing story.

As far as Houston, Texas, I’ve heard the food is amazing. I’m looking forward to having barbecue. And I am, of course, a big Beyoncé fan. I’m going to the birthplace of Beyoncé! I’m so excited.

FUN WITH YOUNG OPERA FANS

Hosting art-loving teens at the Wortham for Opera Club and High School Night

The Community and Learning team has been having a blast with young Houston art fans, whether hosting High School Night for La traviata, gathering with the Opera Club for The Wreckers, or training with the young artists in the Bauer Family High School Voice Studio!

Opera Club member Riley Chang, a freshman at Bellaire High School, had this to say about the first meeting of the Opera Club, which met for a dress rehearsal of The Wreckers on October 25:

“I was thrilled to watch HGO’s dress rehearsal of The Wreckers. Before the performance, the staff shared with us critical background information about the show and some key elements to look for, which I found very helpful. It allowed me to sympathize with the opera easily. The outreach program helped me ‘plug in’ and take in what was happening...I hope fellow students will have the opportunity to try out this program too. After all, opera is a beautiful art to be shared across all ages.”

Well said, Riley!

Do you have an opera-loving teen in your life? They can still join HGO's spring 2023 Opera Club meetings ahead of dress rehearsal performances of Marriage of Figaro and Tosca. Learn more at HGO.org/ community-and-learning. —Sonia Hamer

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AND HGO

For decades, HGO has centered its work around collaborating with the Houston community. This season we are taking a comprehensive approach to creating outstanding and enriching experienc es for our diverse audiences by:

Serving those with little to no access to the art form: One recent example is the partnerships we’ve created with our neighbors experiencing homelessness. We’ve found deeply impactful artistic experiences through recitals and classes for the unhoused community of Houston, working closely with staff from the Coalition for the Homeless, Ecclesia, The Beacon, SEARCH, and many other groups. According to research done by the non-profit organization Americans for the Arts, arts participation contributes to social cohesion by “reducing isolation, encouraging cooperation, and building community networks.”

During these activities, HGO teaching artists share personal connections to the music they present and, in turn, “new to opera” audiences share tears, applause, and sometimes their own memories—as we take one step closer to building community.

Collaborating with other pillars of the arts and the local community: HGO is just one of the many entities creating great art for Houston. With all the diversity and excellence found in our city, we owe it to ourselves—and every operagoer—to share the stage with our local talent.

One example of how we are expanding our collaborative initiatives is HGO’s annual Giving Voice event. Once a concert held at the Wortham Theater featuring international soloists and local performers, it has evolved into a concert celebrating our region’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities and wealth of church choirs, along with some of the best operatic talent in the world.

Join us for the fourth Giving Voice at Houston’s historic Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church for a celebration featuring the church’s choral performers; artists from Texas Southern University and Prairie View A&M University; and voices from the Houston Ebony Opera Guild and the HGO Chorus. 7:30 p.m. February 24, 2023. Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in Third Ward. Tell everyone you know! All are invited. Free tickets at HGO.org/givingvoice.

Offering space for individual reflection and self-discovery through the arts: Because every person is on an individual path, the way they experience art and music is unique. This season we have created much-needed moments of meditation and reflection with a “labyrinth walk” before four of our operas: The Wreckers, El Milagro del Recuerdo, Werther, and Salome.

The labyrinth walks, designed by local artist Reginald Adams, will feature poetry performances reflecting on each opera, as well as meditation bracelets designed by artist Eepi Chaad. Audiences will have the opportunity to engage with themes from our operas and how they relate to own personal experiences.

Next up is opening night for Werther on January 27. Join us at Fish Plaza outside the Wortham from 5 to 7 p.m. —Alisa Magallón, Associate Director of Programming and Engagement

Soprano Aarianna Longino at Ecclesia Downtown.

The 2022 performance at the Cullen Theater.

Artist Sophie Recio at December's labyrinth walk.

MUSIC AT THE MUSEUM

In October, HGO and the Houston Museum of Natural Science partnered up to celebrate the opening of the museum’s new Hall of the Americas. HGO teaching artists performed the Storybook Opera Agua, Agüita/ Fuego Fueguito for audiences at the Burke Baker Planetarium.

This Storybook Opera offering was adapted with the help of HGO teaching artists and the author of the stories, Jorge Tetl Argueta, a celebrated Salvadoran and Pipil Nahua Indian poet and writer whose bilingual children’s books have received numerous awards. Agua,

Agüita/ Fuego Fueguito centers around the power of nature, respect for the elements, and music as part of the natural world.

It was a multilingual experience: audiences enjoyed Argueta reading his Nahuat poetry as well as the teaching artists' performance in English and Spanish. To book your Storybook Opera performance, email storybook@hgo.org. —Chelsea Lerner, Programs Manager

TEACHING ARTISTS IN THE COMMUNITY

Some recent highlights:

HGO teaching artists including Sophia Formella joined Ulrich Intermediate School Choir groups for a six-week residency, sharing vocal techniques with students.

The team visited The House of Tiny Treasures for a Storybook Opera reading. New HGO teaching artist (and former Bauer Family High School Vocal Studio student) Leah Moody introduced students to the story Lula the Mighty Griot, written by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton.

HGO joined the festivities at KBR Kids Day at Tony Marron Park. Teaching artists Sam Mathis and Julie Hoeltzel gave a Storybook Opera performance of The Armadillo’s Dream by Dennis Arrowsmith.

—Chelsea Lerner, Programs Manager

HGO is conducting a yearlong residency at Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, with HGO staff, HGO Studio artists, teaching artists, and guests collaborating with the school’s young artists twice a week. Pictured: Studio artist Cory McGee and Studio pianist Kevin J. Miller with students.

COMMUNITY AND LEARNING FUNDERS

Guarantors

The Brown Foundation, Inc.

City of Houston through the

William Randolph Hearst Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Sara and Bill Morgan

The Wortham Foundation, Inc.

Grand Underwriter

Judy and Dick Agee

Mathilda Cochran

ConocoPhillips

H-E-B

Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo ™

The Powell Foundation

Underwriters

Ruth and Ted Bauer Family Foundation Shelly Cyprus Rosemary Malbin Vivian L. Smith Foundation Alan and Frank York

Supporters

Adrienne Bond

M. David Lowe and Nana Booker

Mr. and Mrs. Lester P. Burgess

The Lawrence E. Carlton, MD,

The Cockrell Family Fund

James J. Drach Endowment Fund

William E. and Natoma Harvey Charitable Trust

Albert and Ethel Herzstein Foundation

Houston Grand Opera Guild Lee Huber

Ms. Rachel Le and Mr. Lam Hguy Dr. Laura Marsh

Mr. and Mrs. Michael J. Pancherz

Texas Commission on the Arts

Union Pacific Foundation

The activities of Houston Grand Opera are supported in part by funds provided by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.

The NEXUS Initiative

Community and Learning programs including Student Performances and HGO’s performances at Miller Outdoor Theatre, are supported through the NEXUS initiative, which is made possible by: The Brown Foundation, Inc.

The Wortham Foundation, Inc. Shell USA, Inc.

The Impresarios Circle is Houston Grand Opera’s premier donor recognition society. These vanguard supporters who provide annual support of at least $100,000 are instrumental to HGO’s success. For information, please contact Greg Robertson, chief philanthropy officer, at 713-546-0274 or grobertson@hgo.org.

JUDY AND RICHARD AGEE

HGO subscribers for more than two decades, Judy and Dick are ardent believers in the power of storytelling through words and music. They partnered with the Archdiocese of GalvestonHouston Inner-City Catholic Schools to expand student access to HGO Community and Learning programs.udy and Dick, the founder and chairman of Wapiti Energy LLC and Bayou Well Holdings Company LLC, also support mainstage productions. Dick is a member of the HGO Board of Directors.

ROBIN ANGLY AND MILES SMITH

HGO subscribers Robin and Miles joined the Founders Council in 2010. The company is honored to have Robin on the HGO Board of Directors and as a member of HGO’s Laureate Society. The couple is very familiar with the view from the HGO stage as well—both are former singers in the HGO Chorus.

Robin and Miles have been donors to HGO special events, the Young Artists Vocal Academy, and HGO’s Ring cycle. They are charter members of the Impresarios Circle and generously underwrite a mainstage production each season.

JANICE BARROW

Jan’s relationship with HGO extends back to the early 1980s, when she and her late husband, Dr. Thomas Barrow, first became subscribers. Jan is a member of HGO’s Laureate Society and the Founders Council, contributing to HGO’s main stage and special events. She also supports the HGO Studio, having underwritten several rising opera stars over the past 20 years. Jan’s late husband, Tom, former chairman of the HGO Board of Directors, was instrumental in the concept and construction of the Wortham Center. A lifelong lover of music, Jan is past president of the Houston Symphony and has a special affinity for Puccini and Wagner.

THE BROWN FOUNDATION, INC.

The Brown Foundation, Inc., established in 1951 by Herman and Margarett Root Brown and George R. and Alice Pratt Brown, has been a treasured partner of HGO since 1984. Based in Houston, the Foundation distributes funds principally for education, community service, and the arts, especially the visual and performing arts. HGO is tremendously grateful for The Brown Foundation’s leadership support, which has been critical to the company’s unprecedented growth and success in recent years. The Brown Foundation was among the lead contributors to HGO’s Hurricane Harvey and COVID-19 recovery efforts.

SARAH AND ERNEST BUTLER

HGO subscribers for over 30 years, Sarah and Ernest are the lead underwriters for the company’s digital artistic programming. They also have generously endowed three chairs at HGO: those of HGO Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers, Chorus Master Richard Bado, and HGO Orchestra Concertmaster Denise Tarrant. Because supporting young artists is a particular passion for both, HGO’s Concert of Arias is one of their favorite annual events. Ernest and Sarah reside in Austin and are longtime supporters of Ballet Austin, Austin Opera, Austin Symphony Orchestra, the Texas Cultural Trust, and the University of Texas Butler School of Music, which has carried their name since 2008. Sarah and Ernest are world travelers, and they never miss an opportunity to see opera in the cities they visit.

ANNE AND ALBERT CHAO

Anne and Albert have been subscribers and supporters of HGO for the past two decades. While serving as president and CEO of Westlake Corporation, Albert finds time for numerous cultural causes. He is a member of the HGO Board of Directors and was the co-chair of Inspiring Performance—The Campaign for Houston Grand Opera. Over the years, the Chaos have sponsored HGO special events, the HGO Studio, Song of Houston, and mainstage productions. The couple has also supported the HGO Endowment. This season they will chair the annual Opera Ball.

LOUISE G. CHAPMAN

Louise Chapman of Corpus Christi, Texas, a longtime supporter of HGO, recently joined the HGO Board of Directors. Louise’s late husband, John O. Chapman, was a south Texas agricultural businessman and philanthropist. In addition to HGO, the Chapmans have supported numerous organizations in health, education, and the arts, including Texas A & M University, the Corpus Christi Symphony, and the Art Museum of South Texas. Louise and HGO Trustee Connie Dyer have known each other since they were college roommates at The University of Texas.

THE ROBERT AND JANE CIZIK FOUNDATION

The Cizik family name is synonymous with passion, devotion, and service to the people of Houston. The Ciziks have always been associated with hard work, high achievement, inspirational leadership, and love for their family. Survived by his wife, Jane, Robert Cizik spearheaded the fundraising and building of HGO’s home, the Wortham Theater Center. The Robert and

Robin Angly, Chair

Jane Cizik Foundation gives generously to many educational institutions and charitable organizations, including UTHealth, Harvard University, the University of Houston, and the University of Connecticut. In 2017, the School of Nursing at UTHealth was re-named the Jane and Robert Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth in recognition of the family’s dedicated support.

MATHILDA COCHRAN

Mathilda is a native of New Orleans and a long-time resident of Houston. She is a retired museum educator, having served for many years as Manager of the Docent and Tour Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as well as a volunteer with Taping for the Blind, Inc. She and her late husband, Mike, created the Cochran Family Professorship in Earth and Environmental Sciences to support Tulane University’s School of Science and Engineering. Mathilda currently serves as a member of the HGO Board of Directors and is chair of the Community and Learning Committee. She has been an HGO subscriber since the 1986-87 season.

CONOCOPHILLIPS

For over 40 years, ConocoPhillips has supported various programs at HGO, from special events to mainstage productions, including a long-standing tradition of supporting HGO’s season-opening operas. In 2009, the company gave a major multi-year grant to establish ConocoPhillips New Initiatives, a far-reaching program that allows the Opera to develop new and innovative education and community collaboration programs. Kelly Rose, general counsel and SVP, serves on the HGO Board of Directors.

JIM AND MOLLY CROWNOVER

Molly and Jim have been HGO subscribers for over 30 years and are members of the Impresarios Circle and Laureate Society. Jim has been a member of HGO’s Board of Directors since 1987 including service as chairman from 2016-18 and on the Executive, Governance, Development, and Finance Committees. He currently serves as Chair Emeritus. In 1998, Jim retired from a 30-year career with McKinsey & Company, Inc. and has served on myriad corporate and non-profit boards including Rice University (past board chair), United Way (past campaign chair), and most recently as M.D. Anderson Foundation President. Molly continues to serve on the HGO Studio and Special Events Committees. She also serves as Chairman of The Shepherd Society at Rice University and on the Houston Ballet Board of Trustees (past Executive Committee and Ballet Ball chair). Molly and Jim have chaired HGO's Concert of Arias, been honorees at Concert of Arias and Opening Night Dinner, and chaired this season's Opening Night.

THE CULLEN FOUNDATION

For more than three decades, The Cullen Foundation has been a vital member of the HGO family. Established in 1947, the Foundation has more than a half-century history of giving generously to education, health care, and the arts in Texas, primarily in the Greater Houston area. The Opera is very grateful for the Foundation’s longstanding leadership support of HGO’s Family and Holiday Opera Series, as well as special support for HGO’s COVID-19 recovery efforts.

THE CULLEN TRUST FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

The Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts has been a lead underwriter of HGO’s mainstage season for nearly 30 years. The Trust was established from assets of The Cullen Foundation to specifically benefit Texas performing arts institutions, particularly those within the Greater Houston area. In recent years, The Cullen Trust has provided lead support for memorable productions including HGO’s Family and Holiday Opera Series, and made a leadership contribution to HGO’s Hurricane Harvey recovery fund, as well as a generous gift to HGO’s COVID-19 recovery efforts.

CONNIE DYER

Connie Dyer has been an important member of the HGO family for decades. Connie loves HGO Opening Night festivities and the Concert of Arias. She is a leadership donor, Trustee, and a member of the Laureate Society and the Founders Council for Artistic Excellence. With her late husband Byron, she has hosted receptions for HGO Patrons in their beautiful home in Santa Fe. They were early and enthusiastic underwriters for HGO’s Seeking the Human Spirit initiative, and most recently Connie made a grand grand guarantor pledge for HGO’s COVID Relief Campaign. HGO Board Member Louise Chapman and Connie were college roommates at the University of Texas, Austin.

FROST BANK

Frost Bank has been a supporter of HGO for over a decade, helping bring to life some of the world’s most treasured operas, as well as supporting new works including the 2019 world premiere of The Phoenix. Since Frost’s founding in 1868, the bank has invested in the communities it serves through hard work, customer service, and support of the arts, education, economic development, and health and human services. David LePori, Regional President, serves on the HGO Board of Directors.

DRS. LIZ GRIMM AND JACK ROTH

HGO subscribers since the 2013–14 season, Liz and Jack have both committed themselves to cancer research and patient care through their work at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Jack is a member of the HGO Board of Directors and serves as HGO Studio Committee Chair. Liz and Jack were generous underwriters of HGO’s historic, first-ever Ring cycle and lead supporters of HGO’s German repertoire, including Elektra.Additionally, Liz and Jack chaired the 2018 Opera Ball and chaired last season’s Concert of Arias.

NANCY HAYWOOD

Long-time Trustee Nancy Haywood loves HGO, and her particular passion is the HGO Studio and supporting young artists. Her enthusiasm is infectious. This season Nancy is underwriting second-year HGO Studio artist Luke Sutliff. Her love for supporting young artists goes beyond HGO to the Houston Boy Choir, where she is one of their most ardent benefactors and Board Members. Nancy is a member of HGO’s Studio Committee, Philanthropy Committee, and the Laureate Society. Most recently, she made a guarantor pledge for HGO’s COVID Relief Campaign. Nancy and her late husband, Dr. Ted Haywood, approached every opera performance as a “date night.” Ted Haywood was a prince.

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST FOUNDATION

The William Randolph Hearst Foundation is a national philanthropic resource for organizations working in the fields of culture, education, health, and social services. The Foundation identifies and funds outstanding nonprofits to ensure that people of all backgrounds in the United States have the opportunity to build healthy, productive, and inspiring lives. A dedicated supporter of HGO, the Foundation is a leading advocate for the Opera's Community and Learning initiatives. The continued support from the Foundation makes it possible for Houstonians of all ages to explore, engage, and learn through the inspiring art of opera.

For over 115 years, H-E-B has contributed to worthy causes throughout Texas and Mexico, a tradition proudly maintained today. And for over 20 years, H-E-B has been a lead supporter of the Opera's arts education programs for Houston area students. H-E-B’s partnership helps over 70,000 young people experience the magic of opera each season. Always celebrating Houston’s cultural diversity, H-E-B helped make possible last season’s The Snowy Day and this December's El Milagro del Recuerdo.

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA ENDOWMENT, INC.

Established and incorporated in 1982, the Houston Grand Opera Endowment (HGOE) is a vital financial management tool that ensures HGO has a reliable, regular source of income. Today, the Endowment contains over 50 named funds, both unrestricted and restricted, and annually distributes 4.5 percent of the Endowment’s average market value to HGO, making it the largest single annual funder of the Opera. HGOE leadership includes Chair Yolanda Knull, Senior Chair Tom Rushing, and several members of the HGO Board of Directors.

HOUSTON METHODIST

For over ten years, Houston Grand Opera has partnered with Houston Methodist, the official health care provider for HGO. Houston Methodist’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine (CPAM) is the only center of its kind in the country, comprising a specialized group of more than 100 physicians working collaboratively to address the specific demands placed upon performing artists. In addition to the first-rate

medical care CPAM provides HGO artists, Houston Methodist also generously supports HGO’s mainstage season and partners frequently on Community and Learning collaborations. HGO is fortunate to have Dr. Warren Ellsworth and Dr. Apurva Thekdi serve as Houston Methodist’s corporate trustees.

HUMPHREYS FOUNDATION

Based in Liberty, Texas, Humphreys Foundation has been a major underwriter of HGO’s mainstage season since 1980. Geraldine Davis Humphreys (d. 1961), a member of the pioneer Hardin family of Liberty, Texas, bequeathed her estate to Humphreys Foundation, which was formally established in 1959. The Foundation provides support for performing arts in Texas and college scholarship funding for students in the arts. Linda Bertman, Louis Paine, and Robert Wall serve as trustees of Humphreys Foundation. This season, the Foundation is supporting two family-friendly productions, El Milagro del Recuerdo and The Marriage of Figaro

We like to think that HGO helped “set the stage” for Elizabeth and Richard Husseini's love story. When a set malfunction at the end of the first act of HGO’s The Flying Dutchman forced Maestro to re-start the opera from the top, the two seatmates bonded in their shared delight that they got to hear more Wagner! The two got engaged one year later (at HGO, of course). Richard is a tax partner at Kirkland & Ellis, a generous HGO corporate supporter, and serves on both the HGO Board of Directors and the HGO Endowment Board. Elizabeth retired from Baker Botts as a corporate and securities partner and devotes her attention to family and community matters, including Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, Preservation Houston, the Junior League, and River Oaks Baptist School, which the Husseinis' two sons attend. Enthusiastic supporters of the young artists and alumni of the HGO Studio, the couple chaired the 2019 Concert of Arias. This season, the Husseinis are generously underwriting the U.S. premiere of The Wreckers as well as HGO Studio alumna Tamara Wilson's much-anticipated role debut in the titular role of Tosca

DONNA KAPLAN AND RICHARD LYDECKER

Richard Lydecker has been an HGO subscriber and supporter for more than three decades. He is a member of the HGO Board of Directors and Impresarios Circle. Richard has great passion for opera, especially Wagner, and he and Donna were underwriters for HGO’s Ring cycle. They are also special events sponsors, supporting Opera Ball and Concert of Arias.

CLAIRE LIU AND JOE GREENBERG

Claire and Joe have subscribed to HGO for many seasons and are members of HGO’s Founders Council for Artistic Excellence. Claire assumed the role of Chair of the HGO Board of Directors in August 2022. She is newly retired from LyondellBassell Industries where she led the corporate finance team, and was formerly a managing director with Bank of America. Joe is founder and CEO of Alta Resources, L.L.C., a private company involved in the development of shale oil and gas resources in North America. Claire and Joe support many organizations, with particular emphasis on educational organizations including YES Prep and Beatrice Mayes Charter School. An avid runner, Claire has completed a marathon in all 50 states.

BETH MADISON

This season marks Beth’s 23rd as an HGO subscriber. HGO has had the honor of her support since 2004. Past chair of the HGO Board of Directors, she currently serves on the HGO Studio Committee, and is an active member of HGO’s Founders Council. She was the honoree at the 2017 Concert of Arias. Beth generously supports the HGO Studio, special events, and mainstage operas. Beth has been inducted into the Greater Houston Women’s Hall of Fame and serves on the University of Houston System Board of Regents.

LAURA AND BRAD MCWILLIAMS

HGO subscribers for 35 years, Laura and Brad have been passionate advocates for HGO. A longtime Trustee, Laura has served on the HGO Finance Committee, chaired the Annual Fund Drive, and serves on the Laureate Society Council. Laura and Brad’s generosity has impacted almost every area of the company including HGO Special Events – they chaired the 32nd Annual Concert of Arias in 2020. They most recently created the McWilliams Fund for Artistic Excellence to underwrite HGO’s mainstage operas for the 22/23, 23/24 and 24/25 seasons.

PAUL MARSDEN AND JAY ROCKWELL

Paul Marsden and Jay Rockwell became HGO Trustees in the 2020–21 season and generously increased their support to join the Impresario’s Circle in late 2021. Paul is President of Bechtel’s Energy global business unit in Houston and has served in key leadership roles for over two decades, dating back to his start with the company in London in 1995. His background as a pianist comes in handy as he accompanies his partner Jay Rockwell, an accomplished operatic baritone, who has sung with the Houston Grand Opera Chorus in recent productions.

THE ROBERT AND JANICE MCNAIR FOUNDATION

Janice and the late Bob McNair, longtime HGO subscribers and supporters, are well known for their incredible philanthropy and for bringing the NFL back to Houston. Bob was a former chair of the HGO Board of Directors (1995-97). Through the family’s passionate support of students, young entrepreneurs,

medical research and the community, The Robert and Janice McNair Foundation is transforming some of the biggest challenges our nation faces today into the solutions of tomorrow. As the lead supporter of HGO’s Holiday Opera Series, the McNair Foundation makes it possible for thousands of students and families to experience shorter length family-friendly operas during the holiday season each year.

M.D. ANDERSON FOUNDATION

The M.D. Anderson Foundation has provided general operating support to HGO for more than 30 years. The Foundation was established in 1936 by Monroe Dunaway Anderson, whose company, Anderson, Clayton and Co., was the world’s largest cotton merchant. While the Foundation started the Texas Medical Center and was instrumental in bringing to it one of the premier cancer centers in the world, the Foundation’s trustees also looked to improve the wellness of communities through th e arts. HGO is privileged to have such a longstanding and committed partner in enhancing the quality of life for all Houstonians.

SARA AND BILL MORGAN

Sara and Bill have been supporting HGO since 2002. Sara is a co-founder of the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, where she currently serves on the board. Bill is a co-founder of the Kinder Morgan companies and the retired vice chairman and president of Kinder Morgan, Inc., and Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, LP. The Morgans support Community and Learning initiatives, HGO’s special events, and mainstage productions, including the Holiday Opera Series. HGO is thrilled to have Sara serve on the HGO Board of Directors and as a member and past chair of the Community and Learning Committee.

NOVUM ENERGY/MARCIA AND ALFREDO VILAS

Founder and President of Novum Energy, Alfredo Vilas serves on the HGO Board of Directors. He is a passionate lover of opera and together with his wife Marcia chaired HGO’s unforgettable “Cielito Lindo” Opera Ball in 2018. The Vilases and Novum Energy have generously supported many operas over the past decade, including all three of HGO’s celebrated mariachi operas, and are proud underwriters for this season’s production of El Milagro del Recuerdo

ALLYSON PRITCHETT

Allyson Pritchett is the Founder & CEO of Bodka Creek Capital, a Houston-based real estate private equity firm with over $100M in assets under management. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics & Archaeology from Harvard University. After attending her first opera at HGO last season (Carmen), she joined the Young Patrons Circle and quickly demonstrated her passion for opera by underwriting Angel Blue in La traviata this season.

JILL AND ALLYN RISLEY

Jill and Allyn Risley have been HGO subscribers since the 2003-04 season and are members of the company’s Founders Council. Allyn and Jill have been key influencers of HGO programs for many years, with special affection for our esteemed HGO Studio. They co-sponsor HGO Studio Artist Eric Taylor and faculty member Dr. Stephen King, Director of Vocal Instruction. Allyn is Chairman of Gaztransport & Technigaz (GTT) North America, an engineering company specializing in liquid gas containment systems using cryogenics. Allyn served as Chair of the HGO Board of Directors from 2020 to August 2022.

GLEN ROSENBAUM

Glen Rosenbaum is a Senior Partner of Tax at Vinson & Elkins. As part of his broad-based tax practice Glen works on behalf of civic and cultural organizations, for which he handles formation, obtaining of tax-exempt status, and various corporate, tax, and business matters, some on a pro bono basis. Glen received his B.B.A. from the University of Texas and his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law. He is a Board member of the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association and serves on its Executive Committee, as well as President and Board member of Houston Food Bank Endowment, and a Trustee of the Nathan J. Klein Fund. Glen is a member of HGO’s Board of Directors, serving as its Chairman from 2009-11, and is currently a member of the Finance and Philanthropy Committees. As a long-serving Board member, Glen led a team of Vinson & Elkins lawyers from 1983-87 that represented HGO in connection with the negotiation and drafting of the various development and operating agreements relating to the Wortham Center and the Wortham Center Operating Company. These agreements remain in effect today.

SHELL USA, INC.

Shell USA, Inc. is a leader in the Houston arts community, supporting HGO for over 40 years. Shell USA, Inc.’s leadership support makes opera more accessible to everyone through the NEXUS Initiative for Affordability and inspires young minds with STEM-aligned arts education opportunities like our annual Opera Camps. Shell USA, Inc. was also a major supporter of HGO’s Hurricane Harvey recovery. HGO is honored to have Selda Gunsel, president, Shell Global Solutions, as a member of the Board of Directors, and Christos Angelides, head of energy transition integration, as a Trustee.

DIAN AND HARLAN STAI

Harlan, a member of the HGO Board of Directors, and Dian are charter members of HGO’s Founders Council for Artistic Excellence, and their leadership support includes mainstage productions, the HGO Studio, the HGO Endowment, and special events. The Stais have also sponsored HGO Studio artists and they host annual recitals featuring HGO Studio artists at Mansefeldt, their renowned Fredericksburg ranch. HGO was privileged to recognize Dian and Harlan as the honorees of Opening Night 2008 and the 2014 Concert of Arias.

TEXAS COMMISSION ON THE ARTS

The mission of the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) is to advance our state economically and culturally by investing in creative projects and programs. TCA supports a diverse and innovative arts community in the state, throughout the nation, and internationally by providing resources to enhance economic development, arts education, cultural tourism, and artist sustainability initiatives. Over the years, TCA has provided invaluable support to many HGO projects, including mainstage productions and Community and Learning education initiatives.

JOHN G. TURNER & JERRY G. FISCHER

John and Jerry, based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, travel around the world to experience the best that opera has to offer. HGO subscribers and donors for over a decade, the couple’s leadership support of Wagner’s Ring cycle (2014–17) was the largest gift ever made to HGO for a single production. John, a shareholder at Turner Industries Group, is a member of the HGO Board of Directors and past chair of the HGO Studio Committee. Jerry is a board member of Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra. In recent years, John and Jerry have supported HGO mainstage productions, the HGO Studio, and special events. They are members of the Founders Council for Artistic Excellence, and John is a member of HGO’s Laureate Society.

VINSON & ELKINS LLP

HGO has been privileged to have the support of international law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP for 40 years. For more than 100 years, Vinson & Elkins LLP has been deeply committed to empowering the communities in which it serves. It has enriched the cultural vibrancy of Houston by supporting HGO through in-kind legal services and contributions to special events and mainstage productions, including this season’s Tosca. The Opera is honored to have two Vinson & Elkins LLP partners serve on its board of directors: from left, Chris Bacon and Glen A. Rosenbaum.

MARGARET ALKEK WILLIAMS

Margaret, a longtime singer, possesses a deep affinity for all music, and especially opera, supporting HGO for over 30 years. Currently, Margaret continues her parents’ legacy as chairman of their foundation, where her son Charles A. Williams serves as president. HGO is humbled by Margaret’s incredible generosity and dedication to the company, both as an individual donor and through her family’s foundation. She has endowed the Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, held by HGO General Director Khori Dastoor, and is a member of HGO’s Laureate Society. A valued member of the HGO Board of Directors, Margaret was the honoree of the 2009 Opera Ball and chairman of the 2014 Ball, and she generously chaired the 2018 Hurricane Harvey benefit Concert HGO and Plácido: Coming Home!

THE WORTHAM FOUNDATION, INC.

In the 1980s, the Wortham Foundation contributed $20 million to lead the capital campaign for the Wortham Theater Center, guided by businessman Gus S. Wortham’s early recognition of the vital role of the arts in making Houston an appealing place to live and work. During their lifetimes, Gus and his wife, Lyndall, were dedicated to improving the lives of Houstonians. The Foundation continues to support the Opera through the Wortham Foundation Permanent Endowment and generous annual operating support. This leadership support has been vital to HGO’s growth and commitment to excellence. The Wortham Foundation’s support of HGO’s Hurricane Harvey recovery helped to bring the company back home, and its special support of HGO's COVID-19 recovery efforts have helped us come back stronger than ever.

ANNUAL SUPPORT

LYNN WYATT

Lynn’s generosity touches every aspect of HGO. She is a Lifetime Trustee of HGO and serves as the vice chairman of the HGO Board of Directors. She chaired HGO’s Golden Jubilee Gala in 2005. Oscar Wyatt endowed The Lynn Wyatt Great Artist Fund in 2010, honoring Lynn’s service to the company and dedication to bringing the world’s best operatic artists to HGO, and she was the honoree at the 2010 Opera Ball. Lynn and Oscar have been lead supporters of a number of HGO productions and programs, including the multiyear company-wide initiative Seeking the Human Spirit.

Houston Grand Opera Trustees and Patrons Circle members support the Opera with annual donations of $10,000 or $5,000, respectively, and make possible the incredible work of HGO. Trustees and Patrons enjoy many benefits at the Opera, including Masterson Green Room privileges during performance intermissions, behind-the-scenes experiences, personalized ticket service, two tickets to all open dress rehearsals, Opera Guild membership, a discount on Opera Guild Boutique purchases, and much more. For information on joining as a Trustee or Patron, please contact David Krohn, director of philanthropy, at 713-980-8685 or dkrohn@hgo.org.

CHAIR, DONOR ENGAGEMENT COMMITTEE

Ms. Gwyneth Campbell, Chair, Donor Engagement Committee

Christopher Bacon and Craig Miller

Mr. and Mrs. Frank N. Barnes Blanche S. and Robert C. Bast, Jr., MD Jack Bell

Dr. James A. Belli and Dr. Patricia Eifel Dr. Dennis Berthold and

Dr. Michael and Susan Bloome Adrienne Bond

Walt and Nancy Bratic Mr. Stephen Brossart and Mr. Gerrod George Dr. Janet Bruner

Mollie and Wayne Brunetti

Elise Bungo

Mr. and Mrs. Lester P. Burgess Mr. and Mrs. Richard Burleson

Mr. Tom Burley and Mr. Michael Arellano Mrs. Carol Butler

Drs. Ian and Patricia Butler Ms. Gwyneth Campbell and Mr. and Mrs. Beto Cardenas

Jess and Patricia Carnes

Mr. Eliodoro Castillo and Dr. Eric McLaughlin Dr. Peter Chang and Hon. Theresa Chang Mr. Robert N. Chanon Mr. Anthony Chapman Michael and Cheryl Clancy Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Clarke Julie and Bert Cornelison Mr. Robert L. Cook and

Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Davis Anna M. Dean Dr. Elaine Decanio

Dr. and Mrs. Roupen Dekmezian Ms. Elisabeth DeWitts Jeanette and John DiFilippo Johanna and Stephen Donson Anna and Brad Eastman

Perry Ewing Mary Ann and Larry Faulkner

Carol Lay Fletcher Wanda and Roger Fowler Ms. Marion Freeman and Patricia B. Freeman and

S. Scott and Gina Gaille

Dr. and Mrs. Ronald Galfione

Mr. and Mrs. Scott J. Garber

Gerard and Christine Gaynor Dr. and Mrs. David P. Gill

Mrs. Geraldine C. Gill

Mr. Wesley Goble and Mr. Barry Liss Sandy and Lee Godfrey

Mr. and Mrs. Melvyn Hetzel

Rosalie and William M. Hitchcock Dr. Patricia Holmes Lee M. Huber

Sarah Johnson Linda Katz

Ann and Stephen Kaufman

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Knull III Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Kolb Ann Koster

Elizabeth and Bill Kroger

Mr. and Mrs. Blair Labatt

Mr. and Mrs. Randall B. Lake Mr. Alfred W. Lasher III

Dr. and Mrs. Ernst Leiss

Max Levit

Ms. Bernice Lindstrom

Ms. Michele Malloy

Ms. Diane M. Marcinek

Mary Marquardsen

Dorothy McCaine

Mr. and Mrs. D. Patrick McCelvey

Ms. Janice McNeil

Dr. Alice R. McPherson

Jan and Nathan Meehan

Ginger Menown

Jerry and Sharyn Metcalf

Chadd Mikulin and Amanda Lenertz

Dr. Indira Mysorekar Mills and Dr. Jason Mills Dr. and Mrs. William E. Mitch

Marsha L. Montemayor

Erik B. Nelson and Terry R. Brandhorst

John Newton and Peggy Cramer

Beverly and Staman Ogilvie

Susan and Edward Osterberg

Mr. and Mrs. Michael J. Pancherz

Ms. Jeanne M. Perdue

Ms. Elizabeth Phillips

Mr. Mark Poag and Dr. Mary Poag Dr. Angela Rechichi-Apollo

Ms. Katherine Reynolds Mr. Serge Ribot

Ed and Janet Rinehart

Mr. and Mrs. Walter Ritchie Mr. Mike Rydin

Adel and Jason Sander

Judy and Henry Sauer

Ms. Jill Schaar and Mr. George Caflisch

Mr. Vance Senter and Mrs. Jane Senter

Mrs. Helen P. Shaffer

Hinda Simon

Ms. Janet Sims

Dr. Ioannis Skaribas and Dr. Evelina Skaribas Diana Strassmann and Jeffrey Smisek

Bruce Stein

Kathy and Richard Stout

Mrs. Carolyn Taub

Mr. Minas and Dr. Jennifer Tektiridis Ann Tornyos

James M. Trimble and Sylvia Barnes

Mr. and Mrs. John Untereker

Salle Vaughn

Mr. and Mrs. Alexander van Veldhoven

Mr. and Mrs. Robert N. Wakefield

Mary Lee and Jim Wallace

Mr. and Mrs. Jay Watkins Mr. and Mrs. K.C. Weiner

Mr. and Mrs. David S. Wolff

Mr. and Mrs. C. Clifford Wright, Jr. Mr. Trey M. Yates

Mr. Hugh Zhang and Ms. Lulu Tan 1 Anonymous

Emily Bivona and Ryan Manser

Michelle Klinger and Ru Flanagan

Mr. and Mrs. Damian Gill

Meredith and Joseph Gomez

Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Hanno Ms. Kathleen Henry Mr. Peter Hermosa Ms. Ellen Liu and Ms. Ilana Walder-Biesanz Mr. Andrew Pappas Drs. Mauricio Perillo and Luján Stasevicius Lauren Randle

Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Ritter Dr. Nico Roussel and Ms. Teresa Procter Jennifer Salcich

Mr. Michael Steeves Drs. Vivek and Ishwaria Subbiah Mr. and Mrs. Steven Tang Dr. Yin Yiu

1 Anonymous

Ms. Alissa Adkins, Corpus Christi, TX Ms. Jacqueline S. Akins, San Antonio, TX Mrs. Estella Hollin-Avery, Fredericksburg, TX Jorge Bernal and Andrea Maher,

Dr. Dennis Berthold and Dr. Pamela Matthews Mr. Richard E. Boner and Ms. Susan Pryor,

Mr. Bryce Cotner, Austin, TX

Dr. Thomas S. DeNapoli and

Mr. James M. Duerr and

Mr. and Mrs. Brian Duncan, Santa Fe, NM Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Evans, Coldspring, TX Jack and Marsha Firestone, Miami, FL Mr. Charles Hanes, San Jose, CA

Brian Hencey and Charles Ross Jr., Austin, TX Edward and Patricia Hymson,

Mrs. Judy Kay, Dallas, TX Dr. and Mrs. Morton Leonard Jr.,

Cathleen C. and Jerome M. Loving, Bryan, TX Barbara and Camp Matens, Baton Rogue, LA

Mr. Kenton McDonald, Corpus Christi, TX Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Mehrens, Longview, TX Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Misamore, Sedona, AZ

Mr. John P. Muth, Wimberly, TX

Ms. Claire O'Malley, San Antonio, TX Ms. Wanda A. Reynolds, Austin, TX

Dr. Sid Roberts and Mrs. Catherine Roberts, James and Nathanael Rosenheim,

Mr. Donald Wertz, Austin, TX

Ms. Charlotte Williams, Killeen, TX Valerie and David Woodcock, College Station, TX

Ms. Jacquelyn M. Abbott

Mr. W. Kendall Adam

Mrs. Norah G. Adams

Mrs. Nancy C. Allen

Mr. and Mrs. Orlando Alvarado Alfredo Tijerina and JP Anderson Shaza and Mark Anderson

Dr. Julia Andrieni and Dr. Robert Phillips Chris and Michelle Angelides

Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Ardell

Bill A. Arning and Aaron Skolnick Maida Asofsky

Mr. Neely Atkinson

Mr. and Mrs. Bryan W. Bagley

Kate Baker

Nancy and Paul Balmert

Dr. Roger Barascout

Mr. William Bartlett

Mr. and Mrs. James Becker Drs. Robert S. and Nancy Benjamin Dr. and Mrs. Joel M. Berman Drs. Henry and Louise Bethea Mr. and Mrs. Stanley C. Beyer Mr. and Mrs. Stephen D. Bickel Dr. Joan Hacken Bitar Dr. Jerry L. Bohannon Mr. Jeffery Bosworth and

Mr. Al Brende and Mrs. Ann Bayless Mr. Chester Brooke and Dr. Nancy Poindexter Dr. Luis Camacho

Ms. Marion Cameron Mr. Patrick Carfizzi

Mrs. John R. Castano

Dr. Beth Chambers and Mr. J. Michael Chambers Ms. Nada Chandler Mr. and Mrs. Jack Christiansen Janet Clark

Ms. Donna Collins

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Collier Dr. and Mrs. J. Michael Condit Dr. Nancy I. Cook Ms. Sasha Davis Dr. and Mrs. William F. Donovan Mr. and Mrs. Larry Dooley Mr. James Dorough-Lewis and Mr. Jacob Carr Dr. and Mrs. Giulio Draetta Kellie Elder and David Halbert Mrs. James A. Elkins III Parrish N. Erwin Jr.

Ms. Ann L. Faget

Mr. Brian Faulkner and Ms. Jackie Macha Ms. Vicki Schmid Faulkner Ms. Ursula Felmet

Ms. Julie Fischer Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Fish

Mr. John E. Frantz

Drs. Daniel and Jean Freeman

Mr. and Mrs. William B. Freeman Jr. Dr. Alice Gates and Dr. Wayne Wilner Dr. Layne O. Gentry

Nancy Glass, M.D. and John Belmont, M.D. Rhoda Goldberg

Mary Frances Gonzalez Sue Goott

Mrs. Gwynn F. Gorsuch

Dr. and Mrs. David Y. Graham Joyce Z. Greenberg

Dr. and Mrs. Stephen B. Greenberg Ms. Dianne L. Gross William and Jane Guest

Mr. Walker Hale and Dr. Katherine Hale

Mrs. Mary Hankey Mr. Frank Harmon III and

Mr. and Mrs. A. John Harper III Dr. Linda L. Hart Ms. Paige Hassall Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Hewell

Mrs. Ann G. Hightower

Doug Hirsch and Maureen Semple-Hirsch Deborah and Michael Hirsch Dr. Holly Holmes

Alan and Ellen Holzberg Mr. and Mrs. John H. Homier

Dr. and Mrs. Gabriel N. Hortobagyi Mr. and Mrs. Clay Hoster Dr. Kevin Hude

Robert and Kitty Hunter Dr. Alan J. Hurwitz

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Jacob Mr. and Mrs. Malick Jamal Ms. Joan Jeffrey Mr. and Mrs. James K. Jennings, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Basil Joffe Mr. and Mrs. Anson Jones Charlotte Jones

Mr. Richard F. Kantenberger

Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Kauffman

Mr. Anthony K.

Mr. and Mrs. George B. Kelly

Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Rice Kelly

Ms. Nancy J. Kerby

Mr. and Mrs. Albert Kidd Mr. Mark Klitzke

Dr. and Mrs. Lary R. Kupor Dr. Helen W. Lane

Mr. and Mrs. Bryant Lee Mr. Richard Leibman Dr. Mike Lemanski

Dr. and Mrs. Olivier Lhemann Ms. Eileen Louvier Ms. Lynn Luster

Mr. and Mrs. Paul A. Lynn Renee Margolin

Mark and Juliet Markovich Mr. Joseph Matulevich

Mr. R. Davis Maxey

Dr. and Mrs. Malcolm Mazow Wynn and Shawna McCloskey Gillian and Michael McCord

Mimi Reed McGehee

Keith and Elizabeth McPherson Wendy and Patrick McWilliams Kay and Larry Medford Mrs. Anne C. Mendelsohn

Dr. Douglas D. Miller Mr. David Montague

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney S. Moran Ms. Anne Morris

Mr. and Mrs. Stephen J. Morris Ms. Shannon Morrison Ms. Linda C. Murray

Franci Neely

Mrs. Bobbie Newman

Maureen O'Driscoll-Levy, M.D. Drs. John and Karen Oldham

Geoffry H. Oshman

Mrs. Maria Papadopoulos Adrienn L. Parsons

Susan and Ward Pennebaker

Mr. and Mrs. Harry C. Pinson

Mr. and Mrs. Elvin B. Pippert Jr. Mrs. Jenny Popatia

Lou and Joan Pucher

Dr. and Mrs. Florante A. Quiocho Radoff Family

Ms. Judith Raines

Dr. David Reininger and Ms. Laura Lee Jones Carol F. Relihan

Mr. Robert Richter Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Gregory S. Robertson Mrs. Henry K. Roos Drs. Alejandro and Lynn Rosas Dr. and Mrs. Franklin Rose Dr. and Mrs. Sean Rosenbaum Mrs. Shirley Rose

Mrs. Richard P. Schissler Jr.

Ms. Denmon Sigler and Mr. Peter Chok Mr. Douglas Skopp

Mr. and Mrs. George Sneed Karen Somer and David Shein

Mr. and Mrs. Aaron J. Stai Mr. Per A. Staunstrup and Ms. Joan Bruun Richard P. Steele and Mary McKerall Mrs. Sue Stocks

Mr. Burke Strickland Dr. Pavlina Suchanova

Drs. Adaani E. Frost and Wadi N. Suki Ms. Susan L. Thompson Ms. Sara Tirschwell

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Tobias Mrs. Ann Gordon Trammell

Dr. Elizabeth Travis and Mr. Jerry Hyde John C. Tweed

Mr. and Mrs. Larry Veselka

Greg Vetter and Irene Kosturakis Ms. Marie-Louise S. Viada

Dean Walker

Mr. and Mrs. M. C. "Bill" Walker III Geoffrey Walker and Ann Kennedy Diane and Raymond Wallace Mr. Jesse Weir Ms. Pippa Wiley

Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Williams Dr. Courtney Williams

Ms. Jane L. Williams

Loretta and Lawrence Williams

Nancy and Sid Williams Mr. and Mrs. Scott Wise Ms. Debra Witges

Mr. and Mrs. John W. Wright Drs. Edward Yeh and Hui-Ming Chang Dr. and Mrs. Peirong Yu John L. Zipprich II 5 Anonymous

Dr. Matthew J. Bicocca and

Pavel Blinchik

Steve and Sarah Bond Mr. David Broadwell Ms. Lindsay Buchanan Mr. Sholto Davidson

Mr. Alex Flores and Ms. Morgan Davis Mr. Albert Garcia Jr. Ms. Anna Gryska

Mr. Birk Hutchens and Ms. Lauren Alleman Mr. Daniel Katz

Lady Kimbrell and Mr. Joshua Allison Mr. Brett Lutz and Mrs. Elizabeth Lutz Rachael and Daniel MacLeod Mr. and Mrs. William McElhiney Ms. Zoe Miller

Adam and Tina Outland Ms. Constance Rose-Edwards Mr. Justin Rowinsky and Ms. Catarina Saraiva Ms. Joan Sanborn and Mr. Dan Parisian Abby Sanchez-Matzen and Lennart Matzen Ms. Emily Schreiber Emily Schultz and Pavel Blinchik Mr. Lars Seemann and

Kelsey Stewart Ms. Susan Tan Julia and Jason Wang

Joshua and Rebekah Wilkinson Mr. and Mrs. Jamie Yarbrough Ms. Cynthia Akagi and Mr. Tom Akagi,

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas R. Allison, Olympia, WA Dr. Debra Blatz, Austin, TX Tom and Kay Brahaney, Midland, TX Dr. Bernd U. Budelmann, Galveston, TX Mrs. Carol W. Byrd, Wetumka, OK Ms. Louise Cantwell, San Antonio, TX Ms. Susan Carvel, New Braunfels, TX Mr. and Mrs. F. H. Cloudman III, Boulder, CO Dr. and Mrs. Marvin A. Fishman, NM Michael Freeburger and Matilda Perkins,

Mr. Raymond Goldstein and Ms. Gabriella M. Guerra, San Antonio, TX Ms. Gail Jarratt, San Antonio, TX Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey S. Kay, Austin, TX Jeff and Gail Kodosky, Austin, TX Mr. Peter Manis and

Dr. and Mrs. Stanley Milstein, Olney, MD Dr. James F. Nelson and Mr. William Nicholas, Georgetown, TX John and Elizabeth Nielsen-Gammon, Mr. and Mrs. Eliseo Salazar, San Antonio, TX Mr. Richard See, Lagunas Baru, Costa Rica Mr. and Mrs. Victor E. Serrato, Pharr, TX Robert and Nancy Shivers, San Antonio, TX Ms. Alice Simkins, San Antonio, TX Eleanor and Philip Straub, Metairie, LA Ms. Lori Summa, Lancaster, NH Mr. Kiyoshi Tamagawa and Mr. Bill Dick,

Dr. and Mrs. Clark D. Terrell, Boerne, TX Dr. David N. Tobey and Dr. Michelle Berger, Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Tucker, Bryan, TX Mr. Tom Turnbull and

Mrs. Rons Voogt, Huntsville, TX

Mr. and Mrs. Kirk Weaver, Washington, D.C. Didi and Alan Weinblatt, Jim and Sydney Wild, San Antonio, TX Dr. Raymond Chinn, San Diego, CA

HGO DONORS

Houston Grand Opera appreciates all individuals who contribute to the company’s success. Support in any amount is received most gratefully. Our donors share a dedication to supporting the arts in our community, and the generosity of these individuals makes it possible for HGO to sustain world-class opera in the Houston area. For information on becoming a Houston Grand Opera donor, please contact David Krohn, director of philanthropy, at 713-980-8685 or dkrohn@hgo.org.

$2,000 OR MORE

Dr. Robert E. Anderson

Mr. and Mrs. V. G. Beghini Ms. Sonja Bruzauskas and

Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Carvelli

Mr. and Mrs. M. J. Castelberg Kenneth T. Chin

Mr. Donald W. Clarke

Vicki Clepper

Mr. Jerry Conry Ms. Joyce Cramer

Mr. and Mrs. Warren Dean Cynthia A. Diller

Mr. Alan England

Mr. and Mrs. Blake Eskew

Dr. Wm. David George

Susan Giannatonio and Bruce Winquist

Mr. Michael Gillin and Ms. Pamela Newberry

Mr. and Mrs. Kirk Girouard

Mr. and Mrs. David Guenther

Mr. Claudio Gutierrez

Mr. and Mrs. Dewuse Guyton

Ms. Julia Gwaltney

Dr. and Mrs. Carlos R. Hamilton, Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Michael F. Henderek

Mr. Stanley A. Hoffberger

Mr. and Mrs. Ronald E. Huebsch

Mr. Christopher Huff

Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Jackson

Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Kaplan Mr. John Keville

Lynn Lamkin

Mr. Joel Luks

Ana María Martínez

Onalee and Dr. Michael C. McEwen

Mr. James L. McNett

Ms. Maria C. (Macky) Osorio

Mr. Nigel Prior

Ms. Michelle Denise Profit

Suzanne Page-Pryde and Arthur Pryde

Mr. Jack Rooker

Sharon Ruhly

Ramon and Chula Sanchez Ms. Jo Ann W. Schaffer

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Schufreider Christopher B. Schulze, M.D. Dr. Wayne X. Shandera

Virginia Snider and Michael Osborne

Dr. Robert Southard and Mrs. Kristi Southard Mr. Leon Thomsen and Mrs. Pat Thomsen Nancy Thompson

Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Trainer Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. John Wallace

Mr. and Mrs. Alton L. Warren Barbara Wendland - The Cook Foundation Ms. Susan Trammell Whitfield Pamela and James Wilhite Ms. Elizabeth D. Williams Dr. Randall Wolf 3 Anonymous MORE Ms. Cecilia Aguilar Mr. and Mrs. Neil Ken Alexander Joan Alexander Mrs. Linda Alexander

Mr. and Mrs. Orlando Alvarado Mr. Robert K. Arnett Jr. Ms. Dorothy B. Autin Dr. Carlos Bacino Mrs. Deborah S. Bautch Mr. Mervyn G. Blieden Jim and Susan Boone

Mr. Bob F. Boydston Ms. Julia Cambra Ms. Mary Clark Dr. Claude Cech Mr. and Mrs. James Collins Mr. and Mrs. Larry Corona

Mr. John Dazey

Peggy DeMarsh

Dr. Susan E. Denson Dr. and Mrs. R. L. Deter Mrs. Sarah D. Donaho

Mr. and Mrs. J. Thomas Eubank Steve and Marie Fay Evnochides

Sylvia B. Fatzer

Mr. and Mrs. Peter J. Ferenz Mrs. Madeleine Ferris

Mr. David Fleischer

Mr. and Mrs. Michael Fowler

Lucy Gebhart

Mr. Enrico R. Giannetti

Mr. David Gockley Ruzena Gordon

Mr. Urban Grass Ms. Janet Graves Ms. Suzanne Green

Dr. James E. Griffin III and Dr. Margo Denke

Mr. and Mrs. Ira Gruber

Mr. and Mrs. W. F. Guinee

Mr. and Mrs. Philip Gunnels Mr. Donald Hang Ms. Rebecca Hansen Mr. Rawley Penick and Mrs. Meredith L. Hathorn

Dr. Ralph J. Herring

Ms. Eliane S. Herring

Dr. Sallie T. Hightower

Kay and Michael W. Hilliard

Mr. Edward L. Hoffman

Mr. Steven Jay Hooker

Mr. John Hrncir

Mr. Francisco J. Izaguirre

Mr. Mark E. Jacobs

Mr. and Mrs. John Jordan Dr. Ngaruiya Kariuki

Lynda and Frank Kelly

Mr. and Mrs. John Lattin

Mr. John Lauber and Ms. Susan M. Coughlin

Ms. Rachel Le and Mr. Lam Nguy

Mrs. Yildiz Lee

Mr. David Leebron and Ms. Ping Sun

Dr. Benjamin Lichtiger

Ms. Nadine Littles

Mrs. Sylvia Lohkamp and Mr. Tucker Coughlen

Mr. and Mrs. Karl R. Loos Mr. Robert Lorio

Dr. Robert Louis

Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Y. Lui

Mr. and Mrs. C. Robert Mace

Ms. Nancy Manderson

Dr. and Mrs. Moshe H. Maor

Mr. and Mrs. Ben Marshall

Mr. H. Woods Martin

Ms. Marion Andrus McCollam

Dr. Mary Fae McKay

Alexandra and Frank Meckel

Mrs. Theresa L. Meyer

Mr. Frank Modruson

Ms. Celia Morgan

Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Moynier

Mr. and Mrs. Marvin H. Mueller

Mr. and Mrs. Mike Newman

Mr. Dean Niemeyer and

Ms. Marilyn Oshman

Mr. and Ms. Carl Pascoe

Dr. and Mrs. Richard B. Pesikoff

Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Phillips Mr. and Mrs. Phil Plant Dr. V.A. Pittman-Waller

Susie and Jim Pokorski

Ms. Ella W. Prichard

Mr. and Mrs. William Rawl

Mr. and Mrs. Richard Reynolds

Mr. and Mrs. Gene Steve Rhea

Mr. William K. Rice Mrs. Carol Ritter

Mansel and Brenda Rubenstein

Alan J. Savada Mr. Alan Schmitz

Kenneth and Deborah Scianna

Mr. Nick Shumway and Mr. Robert Mayott

Mr. Herbert Simons

Jan Simpson

Mr. John S. Skaggs

Mr. and Mrs. Louis. S. Sklar

Ms. Anne Sloan

Len Slusser

Ms. Linda F. Sonier

Mr. and Mrs. George Stark

Dr. and Mrs. C. Richard Stasney

Mr. Leon Strieder

Mr. and Mrs. Tim Unger

Dr. and Mrs. Lieven J. Van Riet

Darlene Walker and Reagan Redman

Andrea Ward and David Trahan

Mr. Peter J. Wender

J. M. Weltzien

Mrs. Dolores Wilkenfeld

Ms. Irena Witt

Dr. Thomas Woodell II

Drs. William and Huda Yahya Zoghbi 3 Anonymous

CORPORATE, FOUNDATION, AND GOVERNMENT SUPPORTERS

Houston Grand Opera’s corporate, foundation, and government partners make it possible for HGO to create and share great art with our community. We are incredibly proud to work with these organizations and grateful for all they do. For information on joining HGO’s valued team of corporate and foundation supporters, please contact Kelly Finn, director of institutional giving, at 713-546-0265 or kfinn@hgo.org.

Greenan, Corporate Council Chair

CORPORATE, FOUNDATION, GOVERNMENT

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA CORPORATE COUNCIL

Thomas R. Ajamie, Ajamie LLP

Chris Angelides, Shell USA, Inc.

J. Scott Arnoldy, Triten Corporation

Chris Bacon, Vinson & Elkins LLP

C. Mark Baker, Norton Rose Fulbright LLP Astley Blair, Marine Well

Meg Boulware, Boulware & Valoir

Albert Chao,

Adam Cook, Tokio Marine HCC

Joshua Davidson, Baker Botts L.L.P.

Frederic Dyen, Schlumberger

Susan R. Eisenberg, Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Warren Ellsworth, MD, Houston Methodist

John C. Harrell, Truist

Michael Hilliard, Winstead PC

Richard Husseini, Kirkland & Ellis LLP

Michelle Huth, Frost Bank

Beth Jarlock, EY

Patrick Keller, Truist

Bill Kroger, Baker Botts L.L.P.

Richard Leibman, FROSCH

David LePori, Frost Bank

Bryce Lindner, Bank of America

Claire Liu, LyondellBasell (Retired)

Craig Miller, Frost Bank

Ward Pennebaker, Pennebaker

Gloria M. Portela, Seyfarth Shaw LLP

Allyn Risley, GTT North America

Susan Rivera, Tokio Marine HCC

Kelly Rose, ConocoPhillips

Glen Rosenbaum, Vinson & Elkins LLP

Silvia Salle, Bank of America

Susan Saurage-Altenloh,

Peter D. Seltz, Principal Apurva Thekdi, MD, Houston Methodist

Ignacio Torras, Tricon Energy Tom Van Arsdel, Winstead PC Alfredo Vilas, Novum Energy

CORPORATE SUPPORTERS

ConocoPhillips †

Frost Bank † H-E-B †

Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo™ † Houston Methodist †* Novum Energy

Vinson & Elkins LLP †*

Ajamie LLP Bank of America †

M. David Lowe and Nana Booker

Kirkland & Ellis LLP Shell USA, Inc. †

Baker Botts L.L.P. † Boulware & Valoir

Norton Rose Fulbright LLP †

Principal

Saurage Marketing Research Tokio Marine HCC Truist Wells Fargo

Westlake Corporation †

Winstead PC CenterPoint Energy Locke Lord LLP † Infosys Maovor, Inc. Patterson & Sheridan LLP Union Pacific

IN-KIND CONTRIBUTORS TO OPERATIONS AND SPECIAL EVENTS

Abrahams Oriental Rugs ALTO

City Kitchen Catering The Events Company

Kirksey Gregg Productions Magnolia Houston

BCN Taste and Tradition

Elegant Events and Catering by Michael Fort Bend Music Company Medallion Global Wine Group

The Corinthian at Franklin Lofts David Peck

The Lancaster Hotel

Michaela

ANNUAL SUPPORT

The Four Seasons Hotel Houston

Masterson Design/Mariquita Masterson Shaftel Diamond Co.

Brasserie du Parc

Chu Okoli Art

Connie Kwan-Wong/CWK Collection Inc. Dar Schafer Art

Elliott Marketing Group

Ellsworth Plastic Surgery

Gittings Portraiture Glade Cultural Center

The Glimmerglass Festival Guard and Grace

Hayden Lasher

The Hotel ZaZa

Joan Laughlin Art

Kim Ritter Art

Las Terrazas Resort & Residences

Lavandula Design

Matt Ringel/Red Light Management

Mayfield Piano Service

Megan Murray Photography

Page Piland Art

Rhonda Lanclos Art

Sandi Seltzer Bryant Art

Shoocha Photography

FOUNDATIONS AND GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

The Brown Foundation, Inc. †

Houston Grand Opera Endowment Inc. †

The Wortham Foundation, Inc. †

Anonymous City of Houston through The Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts †

The Alkek and Williams Foundation †

M.D. Anderson Foundation †

The Cullen Foundation †

Humphreys Foundation †

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation †

Texas Commission on the Arts †

Anonymous

The Robert & Jane Cizik Foundation

The Robert and Janice McNair Foundation †

National Endowment for the Arts †

The Sarofim Foundation

William Randolph Hearst Foundation

Houston Endowment Inc. Houston Saengerbund

The Nathan J. Klein Fund

* Contribution includes in- kind support † Ten or more years of consecutive support

CORPORATE MATCHING

Baker Hughes Foundation

Bank of America Charitable Foundation

BP Foundation

Chevron Humankind

Coca-Cola North America

ConocoPhillips

Encana

EOG Resources, Inc.

EQT Foundation

ExxonMobil Foundation

Fannie Mae

City of Houston through the

John P. McGovern Foundation †

The Powell Foundation †

Hewlett-Packard Company

IBM Corporation

Illinois Tools Works Inc. LyondellBasell Chemical Company Macquarie

Carol Franc Buck Foundation

Ruth and Ted Bauer Family Foundation †

Stedman West Foundation †

Vivian L. Smith Foundation

Microsoft Employee Giving

Nintendo Of America Quantlab Financial, LLC Salesforce

Shell USA, Inc. Foundation

Albert and Ethel Herzstein

Cockrell Family Fund

Marineau Family Foundation

OPERA America

Sterling-Turner Foundation

The Vaughn Foundation

William E. and Natoma Pyle

The Boeing Company Union Pacific Williams Companies

University of Houston

George and Mary Josephine

Houston Grand Opera Guild †

LAUREATE SOCIETY

Wils, Chair

The Laureate Society comprises individuals who have helped ensure the future of Houston Grand Opera by remembering the Opera in their wills, retirement plans, trusts, or other types of estate plans. The Laureate Society does not require a minimum amount to become a member. Planned estate gifts to the Houston Grand Opera Endowment can be used to support general or specific Opera programs. Houston Grand Opera is deeply grateful to these individuals. Their generosity and foresight enable the Opera to maintain its growth and stability, thus enriching the lives of future generations. For information regarding charitable estate gift planning and how it might positively impact you, your loved ones, and Houston Grand Opera, please contact Amanda Neiter, director of legacy giving, at 713-5460216 or aneiter@hgo.org.

LAUREATE SOCIETY MEMBERS

Ms. Gerry Aitken

Margaret Alkek Williams

Mr. William J. Altenloh and Dr. Susan Saurage-Altenloh Mrs. Judy Amonett

Robin Angly and Miles Smith

Bill A. Arning and Aaron Skolnick

Mrs. Judie Aronson

Christopher Bacon and Craig Miller

Gilbert Baker

Dr. Saúl and Ursula Balagura

Janice Barrow

Mr. William Bartlett

Mr. James Barton

Mr. Lary Dewain Barton

Michelle Beale and Dick Anderson Marcheta Leighton-Beasley Mrs. Natalie Beller

Dr. James A. Belli and Dr. Patricia Eifel Mr. and Mrs. Stanley C. Beyer Dr. Joan Hacken Bitar

Susan Ross Black

Dr. Michael and Susan Bloome Dr. and Mrs. Jules H. Bohnn Ms. Lynda Bowman

Mr. and Mrs. Harry W. Bristol Ms. Zu Dell Broadwater

Catherine Brock

Myra Brown

Mr. Richard S. Brown

Mr. and Mrs. Logan D. Browning Mr. Richard H. Buffett

Mr. Tom Burley and Mr. Michael Arellano

Mr. Ralph Byle

Ms. Gwyneth Campbell

Roxi Cargill and Peter Weston, M.D. Jess and Patricia Carnes

Ms. Janet Langford Carrig

Sylvia J. Carroll

Ms. Nada Chandler Mr. Robert N. Chanon Ms. Virginia Ann Clark

Mathilda Cochran

Mr. William E. Colburn

Mr. and Mrs. Paul L. Comstock Mr. Jim O. Connell

Mrs. Christa M. Cooper

Mr. Efraín Z. Corzo and Mr. Andrew Bowen

Mr. and Mrs. James W. Crownover

Shelly Cyprus

Mr. Karl Dahm

Dr. Lida Dahm Mr. Darrin Davis Ms. Sasha Davis Ms. Anna M. Dean

Peggy DeMarsh

Ian Derrer and Daniel James Dr. and Mrs. R. L. Deter Ms. Elisabeth DeWitts

Connie Dyer

Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Evans Ms. Thea M. Fabio and Mr. Richard Merrill Ms. Ann L. Faget

Ms. Vicki Schmid Faulkner Mrs. Thomas Fauntleroy

Carol Sue Finkelstein

Jack and Marsha Firestone

Carol Lay Fletcher

Mr. Bruce Ford

Dr. Donna Fox

Dr. Alice Gates and Dr. Wayne Wilner Dr. Layne O. Gentry

Mr. Michael B. George Dr. Wm. David George

Dr. and Mrs. David P. Gill

Lynn Gissel

Mr. Wesley Goble

Mr. David Gockley Rhoda Goldberg

Leonard A. Goldstein and Helen B. Wils Mary Frances Gonzalez

Jon Kevin Gossett

Mr. and Mrs. Fred Gott

Mr. and Mrs. Donald Graubart

Claire Liu and Joe Greenberg

Dr. Nichols Grimes

Dr. Ellen R. Gritz and Mr. Milton D. Rosenau Jr. Mr. Jas A. Gundry

Mr. Claudio Gutierrez

Dr. Robert W. Guynn

Mr. and Mrs. William Haase

Dr. Linda L. Hart

Mrs. Brenda Harvey-Traylor

Nancy Haywood

Teresita and Michael Hernandez

Dr. Ralph J. Herring

Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Hewell

Mr. Edward L. Hoffman

Gary Hollingsworth and Ken Hyde

Alan and Ellen Holzberg

Mr. Frank Hood

Ms. Ami J. Hooper

Helen

Mr. and Mrs. George M. Hricik

Lee M. Huber

Robert and Kitty Hunter

Greg Ingram

Mrs. Lamar Jackson

Brian James

Spencer A. Jeffries and Kim Hawkins

Ms. Marianne Kah

Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Kauffman Ann and Stephen Kaufman

Charles Dennis and Steve Kelley Mr. Anthony K. Mr. Kyle Kerr

Ms. Virginia E. Kiser Ann Koster

Dr. Lynn Lamkin

Ms. Michele LaNoue and Mr. Gerald Seidl Carolyn J. Levy

Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Liesner

Mr. Michael Linkins

Mr. and Mrs. Karl R. Loos

Mrs. Marilyn Lummis

Dr. Jo Wilkinson Lyday

Mr. and Mrs. Paul A. Lynn Sandy L. Magers

Mrs. Rosemary Malbin

Ms. Michele Malloy Emily Bivona and Ryan Manser

Mr. and Mrs. J. Landis Martin Ms. B. Lynn Mathre Ms. Nancy Wynne Mattison Dr. and Mrs. Malcolm Mazow Mrs. Dorothy McCaine Mrs. Sarah McCollum

Deirdre McDowell

Muffy and Mike McLanahan

Will L. McLendon

Mr. Allen McReynolds

Ms. Maryellen McSweeney

Mr. and Mrs. D. Bradley McWilliams

Christianne Melanson and Durwin Sharp

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Menzie Ms. Georgette M. Michko

Ms. Suzanne Mimnaugh

Kathleen Moore and Steven Homer

Sid Moorhead Juan R. Morales

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney S. Moran

Mr. and Mrs. Marvin H. Mueller Ms. Linda C. Murray Terrylin G. Neale Erik B. Nelson and Terry R. Brandhorst Mrs. Bobbie Newman Mrs. Tassie Nicandros

Mrs. James W. O'Keefe

Beverly and Staman Ogilvie Geoffry H. Oshman

Ms. Maria C. (Macky) Osorio Susan and Edward Osterberg Mrs. Joan D. Osterweil

Mr. and Mrs. Richard A. Percoco Sara M. Peterson

Mark and Nancy Picus

Mr. and Mrs. Harry C. Pinson Susie and Jim Pokorski Gloria M. Portela

Suzanne Page-Pryde and Arthur Pryde Dr. Angela Rechichi-Apollo Mr. Todd Reppert Conrad and Charlaine Reynolds Ms. Wanda A. Reynolds Ed and Janet Rinehart Edward N. Robinson Mrs. Shirley Rose Glen A. Rosenbaum Mr. John C. Rudder Jr. Mr. and Mrs. Tom Rushing Mr. and Mrs. Terrell F. Sanders Ms. Wanda Schaffner Mr. Chris Schilling Kenneth and Deborah Scianna Mr. and Mrs. Charles Senuta Mrs. Helen P. Shaffer Ms. Sue A. Shirley-Howard

Hinda Simon

Mr. Herbert Simons Ms. Susan Simpson Ms. Janet Sims Bruce Smith Mr. Robert J. Smouse

Ms. Linda F. Sonier Dian and Harlan Stai

Ms. Darla Y. Stange

Dr. and Mrs. C. Richard Stasney Catherine Stevenson

Bruce Suter

Rhonda Sweeney

Mrs. Carolyn Taub

Mr. Quentin Thigpen and Ms. Amy Psaris

Mr. John G. Turner and Mr. Jerry G. Fischer Mr. and Mrs. Paul Turner

Mr. and Mrs. Jesse B. Tutor Birgitt van Wijk

Mr. and Mrs. Alfredo Vilas Marietta Voglis Mrs. Rons Voogt

Dean Walker

Mr. William V. Walker Shirley Warshaw

Mr. Gordon D. Watson

Ms. Rebecca Weaver Mr. Jesse Weir

Mr. Geoffrey Westergaard Pippa Wiley

Ms. Jane L. Williams

Mr. and Mrs. David S. Wolff Dr. Fabian Worthing Lynn Wyatt

Alan and Frank York

Mr. and Mrs. Mark Yzaguirre Mrs. Lorena Zavala John L. Zipprich II 28 Anonymous

WE HONOR THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO INCLUDED HGO IN THEIR ESTATE PLANS:

Elaine Jaffe Altschuler

Dr. Antonio Arana

Dr. Thomas D. Barrow

Ms. Evelyn M. Bedard Ronald Borschow

Mr. Stephen R. Brenner Mr. Ira B. Brown

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Capshaw

Dr. Lawrence E. Carlton

Mr. Tony Carroll, LCSW

Michael Cochran

Judy Cummings

Karl A. Dahm

Ms. Marilyn R. Davis

Dick Evans

Frank R. Eyler

Linda Finger

Christine E. George

Adelma Graham

Roberta and Jack Harris

Jackson C. Hicks

Dr. Marjorie Horning

Mark Lensky

Mary R. Lewis

Bette and Peter Liebgold

Mrs. Margaret Love

Ms. Marsha Malev

Mr. Constantine Nicandros M. Joan Nish

Mr. James W. O’Keefe

Barbara M. Osborne

Mrs. Mary Ann Phillips

Mr. Howard Pieper

Mr. and Mrs. Craig M. Rowley

Mrs. Joseph P. Ruddell

Mr. Eric W. Stein Sr. John and Fanny Stone

Dr. Carlos Vallbona

Daisy Wong

Miss Bonnie Sue Wooldridge

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA ENDOWMENT

The Houston Grand Opera Endowment, Inc., is a separate nonprofit organization that invests contributions to earn income for the benefit of Houston Grand Opera Association. The Endowment Board works with CAPTRUST, an independent investment counsel, to engage professional investment managers. An endowed fund can be permanently established within the Houston Grand Opera Endowment through a direct contribution or via a planned gift such as a bequest. The fund can be designated for general purposes or specific interests. For a discussion on endowing a fund, please contact Deborah Hirsch, senior director of philanthropy, at 713-546-0259 or dhirsch@hgo.org. HGO acknowledges with deep gratitude the following endowed funds.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Officers

Yolanda Knull, Chair

Tom Rushing, Senior Chair

Janet L. Carrig, Chair Emeritus

Marianne Kah, Vice Chair

Terrylin Neale, Secretary; Treasurer

Members at Large

Thomas R. Ajamie

Khori Dastoor

Richard Husseini

Stephen Kaufman

Claire Liu

Mark Poag

Scott Wise

GENERAL ENDOWMENT FUNDS

Susan Saurage-Altenloh and William

The Rudy Avelar Patron Services Fund

Charles T. (Ted) Bauer Memorial Fund

Sandra Bernhard Endowed Fund

The Stanley and Shirley Beyer

Ronald C. Borschow Endowment Fund

Mary Frances Newton

Pat and Daniel A. Breen Endowment Fund

The Brown Foundation Endowment Fund

Jane and Robert Cizik Endowment

Michael and Mathilda Cochran

Douglas E. Colin Endowment Fund

The Gerald and Bobbie-Vee Cooney

Mary Jane Fedder Endowed Fund

Linda K. Finger Endowed Fund

Robert W. George Endowment Fund

Yolanda Knull, Chair

ANNUAL SUPPORT

Adelma Graham Endowed Fund

Frank Greenberg, M.D. Endowment Fund

Roberta and Jack Harris Endowed Fund

Jackson D. Hicks Endowment Fund

General and Mrs. Maurice Hirsch

Ann Holmes Endowed Fund

Ira Brown Endowment Fund

Elizabeth Rieke and Wayne V. Jones

Leech Family Resilience Fund

Lensky Family Endowed Fund

Mary R. Lewis Endowed Fund

Beth Madison Endowed Fund

Franci Neely Endowed Fund

Constantine S. Nicandros

Cynthia and Anthony Petrello

PRINCIPAL ARTISTS FUNDS

Jesse Weir and Roberto Ayala Artist Fund

ENDOWED CHAIRS AND FELLOWSHIPS

Margaret Alkek Williams Chair:

Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair:

Dr. Mary Joan Nish and Patricia Bratsas

Shell Lubricants (formerly Pennzoil —

Mary C. Gayler Snook Endowment Fund

Dian and Harlan Stai Fund

Weston-Cargill Endowed Fund

Sarah and Ernest Butler Sarah and Ernest Butler

Mr. and Mrs. James A. Elkins Jr.

Mr. and Mrs. Albert B. Alkek Chair:

James A. Elkins Jr. Endowed Visiting

ELECTRONIC MEDIA FUNDS

Kitty King Powell Endowment Fund

Rowley Family Endowment Fund

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA STUDIO FUNDS

Shell Lubricants (formerly Pennzoil —

Dian and Harlan Stai Fund

Marietta Voglis Endowed Fund

Bonnie Sue Wooldridge Endowment Fund

PRODUCTION FUNDS

Edward and Frances Bing Fund

James J. Drach Endowment Fund

Carol Lynn Lay Fletcher Endowment Fund

Charlotte Howe Memorial

EDUCATION FUNDS

Bauer Family Fund

Sandra Bernhard Education Fund

Lawrence E. Carlton, M.D.,

James J. Drach Endowment Fund

Fondren Foundation Fund for Endowed Fund for Educational Programs

OUTREACH FUNDS

Guyla Pircher Harris Project

Laura and Bradley McWilliams

Erin Gregory Neale Endowment Fund

CONCERT OF ARIAS

Eleanor Searle McCollum

SAVE THE DATES

JANUARY 13, 15M, 20, 22M, 26, 28

Performances of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Wortham Theater Center’s Brown Theater. Ticketholders are invited to Opera Insights conversations with Dramaturg Jeremy Johnson and special guests, held in the Brown’s Orchestra section 45 minutes prior to each performance. Special intermission reception for members of Opening Nights for Young Professionals at the January 13 performance only.

JANUARY 23-MAY 19

Monkey and Francine in the City of Tigers: This year’s Opera to Go! touring production for students presents Kamala Sankaram and David Johnston’s HGO-commissioned original opera. Drawing on influences including ’60s Bollywood, psychedelic Afro-fusion, this opera grooves! Recommended for children grades 2-8. Visit HGO.org/operatogo for more information.

JANUARY 27

Local artist Reginald Adams presents a labyrinth installation inspired by Massenet’s Werther on Fish Plaza, outside of the Wortham Center. 5-7 p.m. Free.

JANUARY 27, 29M, FEBRUARY 4, 8, 10

Performances of Massenet’s Werther. Wortham Theater Center’s Brown Theater. Ticketholders are invited to Opera Insights conversations with Dramaturg Jeremy Johnson and special guests, held in the Brown’s Orchestra section 45 minutes prior to each performance. Special intermission reception for members of Opening Nights for Young Professionals at the January 27 performance only.

FEBRUARY 3

Concert of Arias: The 35th Annual Eleanor McCollum Competition for Young Singers Concert of Arias, a celebration of the future of opera. 7 p.m. live competition finals and concert. Dinner with the artists follows in the

Grand Foyer. Rita Leader and Glen Rosenbaum, chairs. For information, contact Brooke Rogers at 713-546-0271 or brogers@hgo.org. HGO.org/COA

FEBRUARY 5

HGO presents singers from the Bauer Family High School Voice Studio in a masterclass with a company artist. 2 p.m. Free; public invited. Contact Lisa Vickers at lvickers@hgo.org for information.

APRIL 21, 23M, 29, MAY 2, 5

Performances of Puccini’s Tosca. Wortham Theater Center’s Brown Theater. Ticketholders are invited to Opera Insights conversations with Dramaturg Jeremy Johnson and special guests, held in the Brown’s Orchestra section 45 minutes prior to each performance. Special intermission reception for members of Opening Nights for Young Professionals at the April 21 performance only.

FEBRUARY 24

Giving Voice: HGO’s 4th annual concert celebrates Black artists in opera and musical traditions during Black History Month, at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church. 7:30 p.m. Free tickets at HGO.org/GivingVoice.

MARCH

9, 10, 11M

Another City: The HGO-commissioned opera by Jeremy Howard Beck and Stephanie Fleischmann—based on stories collected from Houston's unhoused community and its passionate advocates—makes its world premiere at Ecclesia Houston's Downtown Campus. 7:30 p.m. March 9 and 10; 2 p.m. March 11.

APRIL 15

Opera Ball 2023: Enjoy cocktails, dinner, a luxe silent auction, dancing the night away, and more! 6:30 p.m. Wortham Theater Center. Anne and Albert Chao, chairs. For information, contact Brooke Rogers at 713-546-0271 or brogers@hgo.org. HGO.org/OperaBall.

APRIL 28, 30M, MAY 6, 10, 12

Performances of Strauss’s Salome. Wortham Theater Center’s Brown Theater. Ticketholders are invited to Opera Insights conversations with Dramaturg Jeremy Johnson and special guests, held in the Brown’s Orchestra section 45 minutes prior to each performance. Special intermission reception for members of Opening Nights for Young Professionals at the April 28 performance only, and for members of Overture at the May 6 performance only.

For more performances and events, visit HGO.org!

PLAN YOUR VISIT

RESOURCES

HGO is here to make your outing to the opera a special one. When planning your visit, you have multiple resources:

Visit our website, HGO.org, to learn more about the opera you’re seeing, get directions to the theater, purchase tickets and merchandise, make a donation, and much more.

Contact HGO’s Customer Care Center at 713-228-6737 or customercare@hgo.org to request assistance with performance information, purchase or exchange tickets, or make a donation. 1-5 M-F, 10-curtain performance days.

Purchase tickets and make exchanges in person at the HGO Box Office at the Wortham Theater Center, 550 Prairie. 10-5 M-F; nooncurtain weekends during performances. Hours are subject to change.

ENJOY THE WORTHAM

We encourage our guests to make full use of the Wortham Theater Center when at an HGO performance. You can:

Attend a free Opera Insights lecture: Brush up on the day’s opera during one of HGO's popular talks featuring Dramaturg Jeremy Johnson and special guests. Join us on the Orchestra level of the Brown Auditorium 45 minutes before curtain time.

Relax and reflect: The Wortham Theater Center’s Brown and Cullen alcoves are there for all to enjoy. Step inside one of these golden-hued spaces in the Grand Foyer, and you’ll find a calm place to reflect on the day’s performance.

Rent a pair of binoculars: Want to see the action up close? You can rent binoculars on the Grand Tier level (5th floor).

Browse the merchandise: Posters from our current season, T-shirts, and more are available at the boutique in the Grand Foyer.

Dine in: Food services are available prior to each performance, with seating available throughout the Grand Foyer.

Enjoy a drink: The lobby bars are open before each performance and during intermission. Pro tip: Pre-order beverages for intermission at any of the bars when you arrive at the theater, and your drinks will be waiting for you!

The Founders Salon: The Founders Salon features a prix fixe, seasonally inspired menu. Reservations are required, with a priority reservation window open for Patrons Circle members up to 72 hours before the performance date. Reservations then open to full-season subscribers. To reserve, call 713.533.9318 or email cafe@eleganteventsbymichael.com.

TICKET ASSISTANCE

Exchanging tickets: Subscribers may exchange their tickets for a different performance of the same opera without fee, subject to availability, by phone. Non-subscription single tickets may be exchanged with a service fee of $10 per ticket. When exchanged for tickets of greater value, the customer will be responsible for the difference; no refunds will be made. No exchanges are permitted after the performance has begun.

Replacing lost or misplaced tickets: Contact the Customer Care Center to request replacement tickets, which will be reprinted and held at the Will Call window for you free of charge.

Options for patrons with disabilities: The Wortham features wheelchair access to both theaters with a choice of seating locations and ticket prices. An FM assistive listening device, provided by the Houston First Corporation, is available for use free of charge at all performances. Contact the Customer Care Center for details. Descriptive services for persons with vision loss are available with 48-hour advance reservations; call 713-980-8662 for details.

PARKING

Nearby paid-parking garages: These include The Theater District Parking Garage, the Lyric Parking Garage, and the Alley Theatre Garage. All are credit card-only.

Parking for guests with disabilities: If you have a state-issued disability permit and need valet parking, you may purchase special passes by contacting the Customer Care Center.

Parking spots for disabled ticket holders are also available in the Theater District Garage on a first-come, first-served basis.

Patrons Circle parking: Members enjoy complimentary self-parking in the reserved Patron Circle section of the Theater District Parking Garage.

Trustee valet parking: Trustees may utilize the valet station located on Prairie Street. If you would like information about Patrons Circle or Trustee membership, please contact HGO’s Philanthropy staff at 713-546-0704 or donorservices@hgo.org.

Leave your car at home: Alto is the official rideshare of HGO. Use the special designated drop-off/pick up area located 551 Prairie Street.

EXPLORE DOWNTOWN

HGO's recommendations for making the most of our vibrant neighborhood

Many of our audience members take the opportunity to explore downtown during a night or afternoon out at the opera. Here are some of our favorites for dining near the Wortham:

Lyric Market food hall, for a wide variety of tasty cuisines and a gorgeous bar in a fun, urban setting.

Georgia James Tavern, for an incredible burger and a cocktail. Guard and Grace, for steaks, oysters, and charcuterie with a view.

B&B Butchers & Restaurant, for the finest Texas and Japanese Wagyu hand-cut steaks.

Bravery Food Hall, for a casual, chef-driven culinary experience.

Cultivated F+B in the Lancaster Hotel, for a refined night out at a historic Houston landmark.

Rosalie Italian Soul in the C. Baldwin, for red-sauce Italian in a gorgeous setting.

Common Bond Brasserie, for French comfort classics in an adorable dining room.

POST Houston Food Hall, for a foodie paradise inside an eye-popping downtown landmark (as featured on Top Chef !).

For guests coming in from out of town, or any operagoer wanting to make it a downtown staycation, we recommend:

The Lancaster, for old-world glamour and service to match.

Magnolia Hotel, for historic charm with modern style.

Hilton-Americas, for refined elegance plus all the amenities.

There’s lots of fun to be had downtown! Spots to explore include:

The Buffalo Bayou Walking Trail: Walk or take a tour of the bayou on a Segway and cover more ground.

Downtown Houston Tunnel System: a system of underground tunnels that includes myriad restaurants and food halls.

Bayou Place: a collection of entertainment and dining venues.

Minute Maid Park: home of the Houston Astros.

Discovery Green: a vibrant urban park.

Julia Ideson Library: historic library with distinctive and elegant Spanish architecture.

Avenida Houston: fun place to sip, stroll, and savor.

Toyota Center: home of the Houston Rockets.

Wells Fargo Tower Observation Deck: FREE!

EAT STAY DO

Sam Houston Park: eight historic homes in a park setting, open for tours.

Market Square Park: Houston’s oldest park.

Khori Dastoor

General Director and CEO Margaret Alkek Williams Chair

Patrick Summers

Artistic and Music Director * Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair

ADVISOR

Ana María Martínez, Artistic Advisor

EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP GROUP

Richard Bado, Director of Artistic Planning/ Sarah and Ernest

AUDIENCES

SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM

Natalie Barron, Associate Director of

THE GENEVIEVE P. DEMME ARCHIVES AND RESOURCE CENTER

Allison Reeves, Associate Director of

David Krohn, Director of Philanthropy

Alisa Magallón, Associate Director of

COMMUNITY AND LEARNING

PRODUCTION

OFFICE OF THE GENERAL DIRECTOR

ARTISTIC

FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION OPERATIONS PHILANTHROPY

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA STUDIO

Strauss’s erotic psychodrama Salomereturns to HGO with the U.S. premiere from Spanish director Francisco Negrin, who makes his company debut with this gripping production. Based on the scandalous play by Oscar Wilde, the opera recounts the story of a deeply disturbed princess who has fallen in love with Jokanaan (also known as John the Baptist). After he denies her advances, she performs the infamous and seductive Dance of the Seven Veils for King Herod in exchange for John’s head.

The cast includes three Houston favorites and HGO Studio alumni: bass-baritone Ryan McKinny as Jokanaan, tenor Chad Shelton as Herod, and mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as Herodias. HGO’s internationally acclaimed Principal Guest Conductor, Eun Sun Kim, takes the podium.

LOVE FREE OR DIE

A combustible mix of political crime, love, and obsession explodes in tragedy in Puccini’s masterpiece, Tosca, one of the world’s favorite operas. The story is set in Rome in the early 1800s, where the singer Floria Tosca and the painter Cavaradossi are in love. But their romance is doomed by the toxic Baron Scarpia, who is on the hunt for the escaped political prisoner whom Cavaradossi is protecting. To make matters worse, Scarpia decides he wants Tosca for himself, jails her lover, and threatens to kill him. Tosca tries to save Cavaradossi’s life by striking a terrible bargain with Scarpia, but he betrays her—and all is lost.

Soprano Tamara Wilson, an HGO Studio alumna who is now one of the most recognizable voices in opera, performs her role debut as the fiery Tosca in this riveting revival production directed by frequent HGO collaborator John Caird. Star tenor Jonathan Tetelman performs as Cavaradossi, making his company debut in his signature role, and Grammy-nominated baritone Rod Gilfry returns to HGO as Scarpia.

SUNG IN ITALIAN WITH PROJECTED ENGLISH TRANSLATION Apr. 21 -May 5