Lyric Opera of Chicago

Lyric Opera of Chicago’s mission is to express and promote the life-changing, transformative, revelatory power of great opera. Through artistic excellence coupled with innovative, relevant programming, Lyric delivers ever-more exciting, thought-provoking, and inclusive audience and community experiences. Under the leadership of General Director, President & CEO Anthony Freud, Music Director Sir Andrew Davis, Music Director Designate Enrique Mazzola, and Special Projects Advisor Renée Fleming, Lyric is committed to leading the advancement of the art form and redefining what it means to experience great opera today.

Each season, Lyric ignites transformation in our community by:
• offering our core product of eight outstanding mainstage operas and one musical theater production each season, attracting some of the most accomplished artists in the world and leveraging the vast talent of Chicago to create art of the absolute highest caliber;
• drawing on more than three decades of experience in Chicago Public Schools to provide vital, high-quality arts education to Chicago’s students through Lyric Unlimited education and community engagement programming;
• building on longstanding relationships and establishing new partnerships within Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods to reach new audiences and create a platform for Chicagoans to share their voices;
• fostering the development of exceptional emerging opera artists through residencies at the internationally renowned Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center; and
• maintaining a position of fiscal stability that will support our steadfast commitment to providing excellent and relevant art in Chicago.

Faced with a rapidly evolving social, political, and cultural climate, Lyric, like many performing arts organizations nationwide, has had to be creative and dynamic in navigating changing consumer and audience behavior in the 21st century. While Lyric still sells more than 23,000 subscription packages per season—one of the largest subscription bases in Chicago and across the field—subscription sales have dramatically decreased in the last 15 years. To address the changing audience landscape, Lyric has worked to right-size program offerings each season, ensuring the optimum number of performances to leverage evolving audience demand.

At the same time, Lyric has created a wide range of new programming to maintain our relevance, increase and diversify our revenue streams, and broaden our civic footprint, resulting in a significant growth in operations. While these opportunities are strengthening relationships with new and existing Lyric audiences and communities across our city, ticket revenue and philanthropic revenue have not been commensurate with the rate of growth in expenditures. To that end, Lyric continues to identify, cultivate, and solicit unrestricted operating support each season to ensure that the core artistic, education, and training activities of our organization can continue at the highest level.

Lyric Unlimited—Learning & Creative Engagement serves approximately 85,000 people each year through programs at the Lyric Opera House and across Chicago. Through arts education and community engagement programming, Lyric Unlimited has built valuable relationships with schools, neighborhood organizations, and local leaders representing communities across Chicago. Through Lyric Unlimited, the company can share the performing arts and the operatic art form in ways that are relevant to the people with whom we seek to collaborate. Through partnerships that form the backbone of Lyric Unlimited programs, we have gained essential insight into the needs and interests of new audiences and communities. At Lyric, it is vital that we engage communities on their terms, not ours, to ensure that Lyric programs provide purposeful and impactful service.

The Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center was established in 1974 as the professional artist-development program for Lyric Opera of Chicago. Since its inception, the Ryan Opera Center has been recognized as one of the premier programs of its kind in the world, offering the finest emerging singers and pianists unparalleled training and experience. The Ryan Opera Center Ensemble is made up of 12 singers and one pianist. These outstanding artists will perform and understudy dozens of roles in Lyric mainstage productions throughout the season.

With a strong record of fiscal stability, visionary leadership, and a commitment to excellence in artistic and community programming, Lyric is uniquely poised to provide an indispensable cultural service to the greater Chicago area. Each season, eight mainstage opera productions serve as the artistic core of the company, through which Lyric offers its patrons a world-class roster of singers, conductors, directors, designers, choreographers, and dancers in a wide-ranging repertoire. Lyric’s artistic strategy includes presenting a balance of classic and contemporary masterworks, world and company premieres that speak to opera’s relevance today, and programs that welcome new audiences to the art form and deepen the experience of returning opera lovers. For more than six decades, Lyric’s mainstage productions have made a profound impact on the artistic landscape of Chicago, reaching more than 150,000 people each season.

Building upon decades of Lyric programs serving Chicago students, Lyric Unlimited—Learning & Creative Engagement serves as the company’s arts education and community engagement division. With more than one dozen programs that engage Chicagoans of all ages and representing every neighborhood and community, Lyric Unlimited plays an invaluable role in the artistic fabric of our city and ensures the arts are a part of everyday life for every Chicagoan. All programs are offered for free or deeply discounted rates to reduce barriers to participation. Lyric Unlimited programs take place in schools, community venues, and at the historic Lyric Opera House.

Lyric Unlimited has helped Lyric share opera and the performing arts with diverse audiences across Chicago and fostered valuable relationships with schools, neighborhood organizations, and local civic, arts, and business leaders across Chicago. Lyric Unlimited earns the interest of communities for whom opera and opera companies have previously had little relevance, including communities who have often been marginalized by cultural and civic institutions. Relationship building, listening, and collaboration with individuals and organizations throughout the city guides Lyric to engage with communities on their terms, not ours.

The Ryan Opera Center's mission is to foster the next generation of great opera artists at the highest level of performance and creativity. The cornerstone of its training program is the year-round instruction provided by its expert faculty. Faculty members have comprehensive expertise in their respective fields and include superb music, language, and drama coaches. A broad range of music is taught, encompassing styles from opera and art song to musical theater. Ensemble members are also given outstanding performance experience, highlighted by their participation in Lyric's mainstage season. This enables them to put into practice the lessons they have learned from the faculty while working with some of the world's leading singers, conductors, and directors.

For more than six decades, Lyric’s mainstage productions have made a profound impact on the artistic landscape of Chicago, reaching more than 150,000 people each season and sharing the transformative power of opera with audiences and communities across Chicago. Lyric, like nearly every performing arts organization nationwide, faces a rapidly evolving social, political, and cultural climate that impacts every aspect of our existence: our art form, our business model, our collaboration with artists, and our relationship with audiences. To face these challenges and ensure a bright future for Lyric and the art form we steward, we must be creative, dynamic, and self-reflective. Lyric recently undertook several strategic projects to facilitate this self-reflection and evolution. Many of these projects yielded such positive and meaningful results that the company integrated their processes as an ongoing component of Lyric’s day-to-day activity.

Lyric made a significant investment in developing an expanded digital engagement strategy by leveraging existing audio, video, image, and narrative content, and selectively creating targeted new content. Deployment of this significantly enhanced strategy ensures that even during social distancing, our company, the operatic genre, and the performing arts remain a part of everyday life for students, families, and opera fans across Chicago and around the world. Enhanced email communications and social media posts showcase uplifting artistic and educational content related to popular Lyric performances and performers.

Lyric has taken strategic steps to capitalize on our company’s diversification of performance genres offered: our mainstage grand opera and annual musical theatre production, the presentation of an annual chamber opera in a community venue, and the diverse programs presented within our historic Lyric Opera House.

To ensure the company’s ongoing relevance to our audiences, our city, and the national and international opera community, Lyric has a responsibility to ensure that our artistic work, professional practices, and audience engagement efforts truly serve our community. In 2018, Lyric created the IDEA Initiative to develop, implement, and measure our organizational commitment to IDEA: Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility. Lyric is working with its six volunteer boards, including the Board of Directors, to embed IDEA principles into their structures and practices. To ensure that IDEA permeates every part of the institution, Lyric created both an implementation team of departmental leaders and a cross-organizational IDEA Working Group of approximately 30 artists and administrative and artistic staff. This Working Group is tasked with driving actionable, measurable outcomes related to IDEA within Lyric’s everyday function. These groups have helped embed IDEA efforts in the functionality of the company, impacting projects and processes across the organization.