For ‘King Roger,’ Chicago opera goes big
Long-neglected show features Polish language, Greco-Roman allusions
Like so many artists during the COVID-19 lockdown, Lidiya Yankovskaya fantasized about how her company, Chicago Opera Theater, would reemerge from the pandemic.
“The plan was to come back out of the pandemic with something big that took advantage of the things that only live music can offer,” she says.
That wish culminates on Nov. 18 and 20 with COT’s local premiere of “King Roger,” composed in 1924 by Karol Szymanowski to a libretto by his cousin, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (whose literary pseudonym was Eleuter). The opera is based on the real-life story of King Roger II, who reigned over Sicily and North Africa from 1105 to 1130 and is remembered for his religious, racial and linguistic tolerance over the lands in his dominion.
“King Roger” has seldom been performed in the United States. Its first stumbling block is the forces required to perform it — the same thing that drew Yankovskaya to the opera in the first place. COT’s performance features a massive chorus of more than 120 Chicago-area singers, anchored by the chamber choristers of Lira Ensemble, Chicago’s Polish performing arts company.
“King Roger” also requires all those performers to sing in Polish — a tall order for a language all but sidelined in opera pedagogy.
In addition to the Lira choristers, two Polish singers headline COT’s production: baritone Mariusz Godlewski (King Roger) and soprano Iwona Sobotka (Queen Roxana). As for all the others, luckily, COT has an ace coach in assistant conductor Michael Pecak, who grew up in a Polish-speaking household on the Northwest Side and has led Polish diction workshops at other music presenters. To assist non-Polish-speaking performers, Pecak recorded himself saying the entire libretto, created a complete English translation and sent out a phonetic guide for the piece.
“Polish is notorious for its dense consonant clusters, which are unlike anything we have in the English language,” Pecak said. “I approach (coaching Polish) in much the same way I do when coaching the more standard classical-operatic languages like Italian or French. But it’s one thing to know how to pronounce the words, and it’s another thing to sing them.”
Lira Ensemble founder, artistic director and general manager Lucyna Migala agreed.
“I’ve heard ‘King Roger’ live once before, in Poland, and I’d say it’s a medium difficult piece. But it’s very difficult if you don’t speak Polish,” she said.
A third possible reason for “King Roger’s” longtime neglect here may be the homoerotic undercurrents in Szymanowski and Iwaszkiewicz’s story. Szymanowski and Iwaszkiewicz both left records of their attraction to men; the former was apparently inspired to set his next opera in medieval Sicily after his travels through the Mediterranean, which marked a turning point in embracing his own sexuality. In their telling of the King Roger story, the monarch’s open-mindedness is tested by the arrival of a charismatic young Shepherd who ideologically seduces him toward paganism.
Some stagings emphasize this subtext more than others. When he spoke to the Tribune, tenor Tyrone Chambers II — a COT regular singing as the Shepherd for this month’s production — had just returned from a “King Roger” production in Cottbus, Germany, in which the sexual tension between the two characters had been played to the hilt.
Chambers said he planned on a more elliptical interpretation for COT’s production, allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions about the nature of the relationship between the Shepherd and King Roger.
“Hopefully, what (audiences) will see is a closeness between men that’s possible without sex — of the sort of intimacy that women are allowed to have, and that men in some cultures still do have, but which we don’t see in Western settings,” he said.
Adding yet another layer, director Dylan Evans and artist Edward Cabral’s semi-staged concept is packed with GrecoRoman allusions, especially the duality between Apollonian austerity (represented by King Roger and his court) and Dionysian sensuality (embodied by the Shepherd). Cabral’s original masks for the production are inspired by wall paintings found in the ruins of Pompeii.
“A lot of my work is neoclassical, and we’re both ancient history-o-philes,” said Cabral. “We’ve been together for eight years, and I think this is our fourth collaboration together. It’s not our first run around the block.”
Nor is it Lira Ensemble’s. Founded in 1965 and formally incorporated in 1976, Lira is not only the only American performing arts company that specializes in Polish arts and dance; it is likely the oldest continuously run ethnic arts organization in the Midwest.
Whenever Chicago’s classical mainstream has uplifted Polish composers and music, Lira has, without fail, been a rallying force behind the scenes. Migala recalls Polish Chicagoans flooding to Orchestra Hall by the hundreds in 1983 to hear the Chicago Symphony premiere of Witold Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 3, now considered one of the touchstone symphonies of the 20th century. At a post-performance soiree Lira hosted, Lutosławski was plainly humbled by the enthusiastic reception.
“At one point, he was still sitting there at 3 o’clock in the morning. I said, ‘Maestro, aren’t you tired?’ He said, ‘No, I’m not tired. I’m in heaven. I have all the energy in the world, because of what has happened here in Chicago,’ ” Migala remembers.
“It was a day I will never forget. And I don’t think he forgot it until the day he died.”
COT and Lira are expecting a similarly enthusiastic showing at these performances, the belated Chicago premiere of “King Roger.” The production’s coincidence with Polish Independence Day on Nov. 11, as well as COT’s upcoming 50th anniversary, only burnishes the milestone.
“At first, we were just a bunch of kids singing,” Migala says of Lira’s early days. “Chicago is the city that most people from southern Poland came to, and most people that came were of peasant origin. I’m very proud to be of peasant origin. … My parents’ life has come to fruition.”
Chicago Opera Theater’s “King Roger” is 7:30 p.m. Nov. 18 and 3 p.m. Nov. 20 at Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph St; tickets $25$65 at chicagooperatheater.org