Departing conductor looks back on 51 years of opera in Chicago

Back in 1956, the 2-year-old Lyric Opera of Chicago desperately needed a replacement conductor for its scheduled production of Verdi's "Il Trovatore" and almost reluctantly hired Bruno Bartoletti, a 30-year-old who was making a name for himself in his native Florence.

Bartoletti was a relative unknown who had never conducted in the United States, but he came with the endorsement of legendary baritone Tito Gobbi, who was a strong influence in Lyric's early days.

Gobbi proved right, and Bartoletti stayed with the Lyric Ã¢â‚¬â€ť for 51 years.

On Oct. 15, the 81-year-old maestro's association with the Lyric will come to an end, after some 600 performances. His tenure included 10 years as co-artistic director and 24 as the company's sole artistic director, a position from which he stepped down in 1999.

As he prepared for a recent matinee performance of another Verdi favorite, "La Traviata," Bartoletti sat in his office near the stage door and looked back on his Chicago years.

"I am returning to Florence to be with my family, and I will never again conduct outside Italy," he explained. "But I have many good and beautiful memories of this company and of Chicago. I think it is the most beautiful of modern cities. Rome, Florence, Venice; they are all very beautiful, but in a different way. Every year I come back to Chicago and find she has changed Ã¢â‚¬â€ť and in a good way."

Bartoletti's departure comes amid the stir caused by Lyric's firing of temperamental soprano Angela Gheorghiu for missing rehearsals, but the retiring maestro said the flap was nothing new. He noted that Lyric had survived the defection of its first superstar, soprano Maria Callas, along with the company's founding conductor, Nicola Rescigno, as well as the later firing of tenor Luciano Pavarotti.

"Opera is sometimes messy," he said. "That's because opera is life."

Callas was newly gone when Bartoletti arrived, but he said the young company never lacked for great talent, even in his earliest years on the podium that is now named for him.

"Renata Tebaldi, Gobbi, Jon Vickers, Renata Scotto, Mirella Freni Ã¢â‚¬â€ť what stars! What voices!" he raved.

But great voices sometimes come packaged with huge egos, and Bartoletti acknowledged that one of the most difficult facets of his job was harnessing some of those outsized personalities for what he sees as the most collaborative of art forms. Although he preferred not to name them, he said there were certain singers he would not work with.

Besides sheer talent, Bartoletti said opera should demand some other qualities in its singers.

"We need respect for the music, we need respect for the theater that engaged you, and we need respect for your colleagues," he said. "We have a common dream; to create a great performance."

Like most Italian opera conductors, Bartoletti cut his teeth on the standard works of his nation's 19th century tradition, but he has long been known in both Chicago and Florence as a champion of more modern operas, many of which he introduced into the repertory.

"One of the things I am proudest of is the premiere in this city of Alban Berg's 'Wozzeck,' which I think is the great masterpiece of the 20th century," he said.

But an even newer work, Krzysztof Penderecki's "Paradise Lost," gave Bartoletti the biggest headaches of his Lyric career. Lyric founder Carol Fox had commissioned the work for the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, and it can only be said hiring a Polish composer to celebrate that event with a setting of a British epic poem must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

"Sometimes when you commission an opera, you get problems," Bartoletti said, dryly.

There were many problems with the production, but the biggest was that Penderecki could not finish it in time for the 1976 season Ã¢â‚¬â€ť or for 1977 , either. And even as his final deadline in 1978 approached, Penderecki was still stalled.

Bartoletti remembers a scene about a month before the premiere as if it were yesterday:

"Penderecki is still writing his music on the second floor of the opera house and we think he'll finish. But then a man comes running in and yells, 'The new pope is from Poland!' Penderecki goes completely crazy," and begins toasting with vodka.

"I keep telling him, 'Finish the opera, you can toast the pope later,' but he won't listen."

Even after the dress rehearsal a month later, a minute or so of ballet music had to be added.

Bartoletti conducted the world premiere Nov. 29, 1978, but Penderecki took the podium himself for a later concert performance for the Polish Pope John Paul II.

"Paradise Lost" nearly bankrupted Lyric and caused a major management shake-up, but Bartoletti still defends it Ã¢â‚¬â€ť to a point.

"It for me is very good music, very important music, but it is more like oratorio, maybe not opera," he said.

When he celebrated his 50th anniversary at Lyric last year with another production of "Trovatore," Bartoletti remarked that "in 1956, I was a baby, but this company was a baby, too. We grew up together."