The Lyric Opera of Chicago is a recurring setting where music binds family memory to public performance and, years later, creates an unexpected occasion for friendship. Henry first remembers it through his mother’s singing and the joy she shared with his father; when he returns as an adult, the opera house’s crowded, ornate interior frames an evening with Charisse that belongs to neither his usual companion Clare nor their shared domestic life.

A Family Memory and a Singer’s Rise

One of Henry’s earliest memories of the opera house is of his mother singing in Lulu. At the end of the first act, he sees his father sitting beside him, smiling up at her with utter exhilaration. The recollection makes the Lyric more than a performance venue: it preserves an image of his parents together, with his mother onstage and his father looking on in delighted admiration.

That childhood moment belongs to a larger family archive of music. Henry remembers sitting with his mother at Orchestra Hall while his father played Beethoven under Boulez, and recalls performing Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger” at a party before his mother swept him up and kissed him. The Lyric memory sits among these scenes of artistic parents and a child drawn into their world, giving the place an intimate meaning before it becomes associated with his mother’s professional ascent.

At the Lyric, his mother’s career develops from small roles into larger opportunities. She studies with Jehan Meek and Mary Delacroix, attracts the attention of Louis Behaire, understudies Linea Waverleigh’s Aida, and is then chosen to sing Carmen. Other companies take notice. Her progress turns the opera house into a point of departure: the family begins traveling around the world, while she records Schubert for Decca and Verdi and Weill for EMI.

The change in scale is startling from a child’s perspective. Henry remembers hotels and airplanes as an almost endless succession, and recalls watching his mother’s performance of Madama Butterfly at Lincoln Center on television with his grandparents in Muncie. He is six, and can hardly believe the singer on the small black-and-white screen is his own mother. The Lyric’s local stage thus opens onto a life of international performance, while Henry’s memories keep that career connected to the child watching from home.

The Opera House as a Family Future

The Lyric also figures in the family’s plans for a future beyond Chicago. Henry remembers his parents planning to move to Vienna after the end of the Lyric’s 1969–70 season, with his father auditioning at the Philharmonic. The prospect of departure grows out of his mother’s success: the same institution that marks the beginning of her rise becomes the timetable around which the family imagines a new life.

The plans arrive amid signs that her career has gathered momentum. Henry recalls that calls come from his mother’s manager, Uncle Ish, and from people at record labels. In retrospect, the opera season is both a concrete professional marker and a threshold. The family’s future seems to be expanding through music, travel, and opportunity, while the later recollections of the parents’ happiness give those plans the poignancy of a life remembered after it can no longer continue in the same way.

The opera house’s significance is therefore not limited to the performances themselves. It joins the parents’ private relationship to the public work that carries them outward: his father’s exhilarated attention to his mother, her growing prominence onstage, and the family’s ensuing travel all gather around the Lyric as part of a shared history. Henry’s memories do not separate the artist from the mother. They hold both identities together, from the woman singing to the child to the celebrated performer glimpsed on television.

A Later Visit with Charisse

On February 18, 2005, Henry goes to the Lyric with Charisse to see Tristan und Isolde. Clare is not with them because she has an extreme aversion to Wagner. Henry and Clare hold season tickets and he is willing to attend the opera, but the invitation grows from a conversation at Charisse and Gomez’s home: Charisse wistfully says she has never been to the opera, and Henry offers to take her.

The outing begins as an act of inclusion, but Henry is not especially eager. He says he is not in the mood and cannot remember the last time he and Charisse did anything alone. He likes her very much, yet feels they have little to say to each other. Gomez sends them off with a joking parental warning not to keep Charisse out too late. The evening is therefore not a return to family intimacy; it is a tentative social excursion, shaped by the contrast between Henry’s willingness to share what he loves and his uncertainty about how the two of them will spend the time.

Inside, the Lyric’s public grandeur gives Charisse something new to take in. Henry shepherds her through the crowd and she looks around the splendid lobby, with its marble and sweeping high galleries, where richly dressed patrons and students mingle. Libretto vendors sing in two-part harmony at the entrance. Henry notes that Wagner’s devotees seem unusually close-knit, greeting one another with air kisses as he and Charisse climb to the mezzanine. These details place the pair among an established audience and community, while marking Charisse as a first-time visitor encountering the building with fresh attention.

The Shared Performance

Henry and Clare have a private box, one of their indulgences, and he draws back its curtain for Charisse. She steps inside with an exclamation of surprise. Henry takes her coat and drapes it over a chair; they settle in as she folds her small hands in her lap and absorbs the room. The ornate gold-and-green screen, the plasterwork around the arches and domes, and the crowd’s excited murmur make the opera house itself part of the occasion, not merely a container for the music.

When the lights go down and the screen rises, the performance takes over. The action opens on a boat, with Isolde singing, and Henry leans back and loses himself in the current of her voice. The scene briefly restores the solitary absorption he associates with opera, but now Charisse is beside him, experiencing the form for the first time. The shared outing rests on two different kinds of attention: Henry’s familiarity with the performance and Charisse’s discovery of the whole event, from the lobby to the stage.

Four hours later, after the love potion and a standing ovation, Henry asks Charisse what she thought. She calls the opera silly, but says that the singing kept it from being silly. Her response makes the evening’s success neither a conversion to Wagner nor a dismissal of the experience. She can find the story absurd while still being moved by its performance. Henry’s return to the Lyric thus connects childhood memories of his mother’s voice with a new, more modest form of companionship: a first visit shared, and an answer that respects both the opera’s theatrical excess and the force of singing.

Recurrence and Significance

Across Henry’s memories and adult life, the Lyric gathers distinct kinds of musical experience. It is where he remembers his mother performing Lulu and where her career advances toward Carmen; it anchors the family’s plans to move to Vienna after the 1969–70 season; and it later becomes the destination for a Wagner performance shared with Charisse. The recurring place links his parents’ artistic world to his own adult relationships without making those relationships identical.

The contrast between the episodes is particularly telling. As a child, Henry watches a mother whose growing fame carries the family across countries; as an adult, he accompanies a friend who has never attended an opera, while his wife stays home because she dislikes Wagner. The first story expands outward into career and travel, while the second is bounded by one evening, one private box, and Charisse’s candid judgment. Yet both depend on music as an experience that can be witnessed together, even when the listeners’ perspectives differ.

The Lyric’s narrative importance comes from that recurrence rather than from a single decisive event. It holds the remembered image of Henry’s father smiling at his mother, the family’s future-facing plans, and the later exchange in which Charisse finds the singing more persuasive than the plot. The opera house is at once a public landmark in the family’s musical history and a personal measure of how performance changes meaning across generations: first as a child’s view of his mother, and later as something Henry can offer someone else.