Da Boss

An Interview with John Mangum

by A View From The Pit staff

VP: We wanted to start with your “origin” story. Was there a particular event, performance, experience, or person that made you want to work in the arts?

JM: When I was nine, we moved to a new town, There was a kid my age across the street, and my mother pushed me out the door and said, "Go over there and make a friend."It turned out his mom was a piano teacher. He did not become a friend, but I went home and told my mother, "I want to take piano lessons." I didn't grow up in a musical family. My parents don't play instruments, and we didn't have an instrument in the house. But she said “yes”, and so I started taking piano lessons with Mrs. Neuschwander. That started what's been a lifelong love of music. When I was in high school, I had a job, I swam, played water polo, and played the piano. I had a great piano teacher then. One of the really nice things about working with him was that he had two seven or nine-foot pianos. They looked huge to me.When I was about 15 or 16, he said, "Look, I can tell you're really interested in music, but I can also tell that you're not going to get to the point where you'll be a professional performing musician." So, he started loaning me books and recordings and that was a whole different path of musical education. That was, I think, why I ended up becoming a historian and musicologist at UCLA.

VP: Was there a particular book that sparked your interest?

JM: He loaned me Maynard Solomon's biography of Beethoven. Solomon takes a psychoanalytical approach to telling the story of Beethoven's life. I found it utterly fascinating. I was also taking a psychology class my senior year of high school. All that I was learning in that class was roiling around in my brain while I was reading this book. It was the first Beethoven biography that I'd read. The public library had a great collection of LPs and CDs. I could go there and find ways to listen to a lot of the pieces that were mentioned in the book. Solomon had a beautiful way of writing about the music, which was really engaging.

VP: Was Fidelio exciting last year?

JM: Fidelio was amazing last year. What was interesting was, I've seen it staged a couple of times, but until last year, I'd always felt it was more successful in the concert hall, because it feels like a piece that actively resists staging. It's anti-dramatic at some points, and I thought Matthew Ozawa's production did a really nice job of solving those problems and making it dramatically effective. We did it in San Francisco in a concert with the symphony when I was there. We had a great cast, Nina Stemme, Brandon Jovanovich, and that was effective as a concert piece. I thought, okay, it's never going to get better than that.

VP: Until now!

JM: Exactly.

VP: When you were in college, you majored in music history?

JM: I was a history major as an undergraduate and then a history and musicology PhD and I did all 10 years at UCLA.

VP: What was your thesis?

JM: I wrote about the political and social uses of 18th century Italian opera seria in German-speaking Central Europe.

VP: How did you get there?

JM: I really love Baroque opera, specifically Handel and in terms of scholarship, Handel was a well-trod path. This was kind of Handel adjacent. Initially, I was interested in a contemporary of Handel, slightly younger, Hasse. Handel was high Baroque and Hasse was that shift into the gallant style, pre-classical. I got a grant from the German government to do some archival preparatory work before presenting my dissertation outline. I ended up staying in Berlin for the rest of the grant, looking in their archives there.

VP: Do you speak German as well?

JM: It takes a little while now to warm up, but you know, at one point I could present my academic work.

VP: During Sir Andrew's time, we did a fair number of Handel operas. Is that something you’d like to see return?

JM: I would love to see us bring back Handel opera. You know, things are planned out, I inherited a lot of planning, all of which I’m really excited about. The Medea was fabulous. That was amazing. I'd seen it at the Met in '22 and at the time had told people, not knowing I was going to be at Lyric Opera of Chicago, that it was one of the best nights I'd spent at the theater. And it was even better here. Don't tell Peter Gelb I said that. So, Handel operas, there are a couple of productions that I've seen that I really have enjoyed recently.

VP: Are there any directors that you're excitedabout right now?

JM:  I saw a production this summer in Aix-en-Provence by Jetske Mijnssen. She did Cavalli's La Calisto. She mapped the story of Dangerous Liaisons onto the story of La Calisto, which worked beautifully, and set it in pre-revolutionary France with the costumes and the drawing rooms and all that. I would love to bring something of hers to Lyric at some point. Claus Guth is another one whose work I really admire. David McVicar, whom we all know and love, I think he's superb. And Matthew Ozawa.

VP: What do you feel Lyric is doing well for our audiences?

JM: A lot of things starting with the artistic values. I think what we're presenting in terms of the orchestra, the chorus, the productions on the stage, the casts, the level is very high. It's something we should be proud of. Our audiences, even if they can't articulate that last 5% between very good and stellar, feel it leaving the theater. That's all our responsibility, primarily my responsibility, that we're making sure that we give them that experience of first-class performance. Also, we're doing a good job of mixing tradition and innovation. This season especially is a good representation of that balance. I'm also proud of the work that we're doing in schools and out in the community. I think we're doing that beautifully and I'm excited that we found a way to engage more students in coming to the dress rehearsals and preparing them with teacher training and classroom visits so that they don't just wander in and go, 'oh'. They know what they're coming to experience. There are studies that show that exposure is really what leads to coming back and buying a ticket later in life. So, it's critical, and I'm happy we're doing that. The opera in the neighborhoods program seems to be going well. I’m feeling good about the work that we do in that area.

VP: What have been some of your favorite discoveries in Chicago?

JM:  We live in Lakeview and love the view of the lake from our apartment because there's nothing like that in Houston, Most of the restaurants that we really like are in the West Loop. Rosemary is one that we've really enjoyed and a Japanese place called Dokuthat we like. Oh, Monteverdi, the pasta place. That place is incredible. It's handmade pasta, it is so good. We like walking around our neighborhood. Broadway has a lot of shops and there's a great bookstore called Unabridged on Broadway.

VP: You said you like having a bookstore nearby. Do you have any favorite authors?

JM: I read a lot of nonfiction. Erik Larson I always enjoy. The Devil in the White City is about Chicago, and he wrote one about the ambassador to Berlin during the Weimar Republic (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin) and everything that he observed. That was fascinating. There’s one about the Lusitania. I like reading books that have some kind of cultural connection to whatever music I'm interested in.

VP: What's on your bedside table right now?

JM: A book about Handel's Messiah called Every Valley. That's what I'm reading right now.

VP: Just in time for Christmas! Anything else you'd like to tell us?

JM: Just that I'm so happy to be here. It's such an amazing, special place. I'm excited about the future.  The 2030 season is our big 75th anniversary. We're talking about how we can commemorate the history of the theater, the history of the company, but also show a sense of what the future might look like. The other thing I really love about Chicago is not just Lyric but the level of the performing and visual arts institutions here is so high and there's so much, it’s such a rich environment. I want the audience to feel really connected to the chorus and the orchestra because you all are the constant. Enrique's the music director, but even Enrique's not here all the time. I just want them to know who's performing for them every time they come to Lyric and feel that connection.