This month, the Lyric Opera of Chicago raises the curtain on its world premiere of Jimmy Lopez’s Bel Canto. This exciting new work features soprano Danielle de Niese as Roxane Coss, an American soprano performing abroad. Her character was inspired by Renee Fleming herself in Ann Patchett’s book Bel Canto on which the opera was based.
Although it is the crisis Bel Canto’s characters face and not their occupations that define the show, Bel Canto’s self-referential nature, an opera about an opera singer, is also distinctive. Few such works exist in the standard cannon; the most notable exceptions being the title characters of Puccini’s Tosca and Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, a singer and an actress, respectively.
Bel Canto also distinguishes itself by its unique libretto. The Lyric Opera of Chicago’s website reveals that the opera contains many different languages: “Spanish, English, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Latin, and Quechua.” Although many operas have been translated for performance in any one of several languages, few utilize many languages in a single performance (particularly if one excludes operas from multilingual status for solely having church scenes in Latin.) In fact, Weinberg’s The Passenger, which Lyric performed last season, is one of the few other multilingual works, containing German, English, Polish, Yiddish, French, Russian, and Czech.
As part of the Lyric Unlimited initiative, Lyric’s Bel Canto commission strives to break new ground and engage new audience demographics. It remains to be seen what other surprises this work has in store once it opens this December.
