Opera director Yuval Sharon to deliver Berlin Family lectures beginning May 6

Yuval Sharon is widely recognized as one of the opera world’s most influential figures. Founder of the Los Angeles opera company The Industry, Sharon has pioneered site-specific, immersive and multisensory productions that brought opera into unexpected public spaces such as parking lots, abandoned buildings and train stations.

On May 6, 13, and 20, the visionary opera director will present this year’s Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures, produced by the Division of the Arts & Humanities at the University of Chicago. 

Since 2014, the Berlin Family Lectures have featured speakers making significant contributions to the arts, humanities and humanistic social sciences. Past speakers have included classicist Mary Beard, poet and playwright Claudia Rankine, political theorist Danielle Allen, architect Jeanne Gang and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.

Sharon’s three lectures are titled ‘Anarchy at the Opera’ and will explore reimagining opera not through modes of nostalgia or imitation, but through experimentation and collaboration. Sharon’s third and final lecture on May 20 will include a rare performance of John Cage’s Europera 5. The lectures and performance will be offered both in-person and online at 6 p.m. CDT at the Logan Center for the Arts, and on Zoom. Registration for the series is free and open to all.

“Yuval Sharon’s approach to opera is perfectly aligned with UChicago’s community of scholars and artists—leveraging a dynamic interplay of history, theory, and practice to catalyze new and inspiring forms of collaborative research and creative intelligence,” said Deborah L. Nelson, dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities. 

Sharon is currently the Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director of the Detroit Opera and, since 2023, has served as the inaugural Global Solutions Visiting Fellow at UChicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. In collaboration with the research team on the Neubauer’s Arts Labs Project, Sharon is exploring how to make opera and its institutions more innovative, breaking down barriers to entry for new and increasingly diverse audiences.

His numerous awards include the Götz Friedrich Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Mellon Foundation grant. In the fall of 2024, the Metropolitan Opera announced that Sharon will direct its next stagings of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Tristan und Isolde.

In this Q&A, the opera director discusses the present and future of opera, his ongoing relationship with UChicago, and how his latest book, A New Philosophy of Opera, has informed his upcoming Berlin Family Lectures and performance. 

Much of your work challenges the status quo—spatially, narratively, even logistically. What kinds of risks have yielded the most surprising or meaningful artistic results for you?

The most meaningful artistic results I’ve experienced in my work are from the times I’ve taken opera outside the opera house, performing it in parks, parking garages or in moving vehicles. These projects beyond the proscenium arch of the theater became the most visceral ways to remind audiences of their participatory power in a performance. The normal rules that dictate the relationship between artist and spectator are called into question once that architectural separation is lifted, and I find the exploration that becomes possible in that space truly exciting. 

How do you balance honoring the traditions of opera while pushing boundaries to explore new ideas?

This is one of the constant tensions for interpreters in any medium, although in opera, audiences are still becoming aware of the interpretative potential of the visual aspects of the art form. I still find myself explaining to audiences why a director has the license to change seemingly fixed elements of the narrative (and this is a major element of my book A New Philosophy of Opera). Theater does not have that same challenge with its public; how often do you hear calls for Shakespeare to be performed exclusively in tights? But I feel opera audiences are becoming more open to the creative license of directors and designers in connecting older texts with contemporary aesthetics and values. 

Each and every project is its own balancing act between tradition and innovation; what works well for one composer, or one composition, or one community, may not necessarily work when transposed into another situation. You have to approach each work on its own terms, making each production (to paraphrase the director Wieland Wagner) a journey to an unknown destination. 

How do you hope your work is influencing not just how opera is made today, but how institutions think about the future of productions, sustainability and audience relationships?

This is a central preoccupation in serving as an artistic director, a different role than when I am “merely” the artist. As artistic director, I am articulating the values of the institution as they unfold both in an artwork and in the making of that artwork. We have a fallacious view of opera as monolithic and hierarchical, when it is the most ridiculously collaborative art form that humans have yet come up with. As artistic director, I can create the conditions for every voice to maintain some of its autonomy, not simply be subsumed in my vision. That is one of the main topics of my upcoming lectures: an “anarchic” organization of artists feels to me an aspiration for opera, perhaps best encapsulated in the work of John Cage. 

How has your time as a Global Solutions Visiting Fellow at UChicago’s Neubauer Collegium contributed to your current work and your ongoing thinking about the history, theory and practice of opera?

It has been an enormous privilege to have the support of the Neubauer Collegium in the making of several projects. Their support of my production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte has helped me delve deep into the development of artificial intelligence and consider its philosophical underpinnings. They are currently creating a wonderful “home base” for the research and development of my Ring cycle for the Metropolitan Opera. But most importantly, they have plugged me into the incredible community of the university and put me in touch with the world of ideas flourishing here, which has been an invigorating experience for me!

What should audiences know about your upcoming lectures ‘Anarchy at the Opera?’ And why did you choose John Cage’s Europera 5 as the closing performance?

John Cage’s Europera cycle has had a formidable influence on my thinking around opera, and it embodies the idea of a “friendly anarchy” (or, as I like to call it, a joyful chaos). It offers a perfect encapsulation of the themes of my talks, so it has the potential to offer listeners a direct experience of those ideas in practice. I don’t feel I can just talk about opera for three lectures without also offering listeners a glimpse into what it is in practice! Plus, it gives me the satisfaction of having directed all five of the pieces in Cage’s cycle of works!

Visit the Berlin Family Lectures website to learn more and register to attend.