University Archives News

Northwestern's Opera Workshop

In 1946, Ruth Heiser founded the Northwestern Opera Workshop "to give vocal students the opportunity to learn and perform roles in the standard repertoire." Directed from 1954-57 by Eugene Dressler and from 1958-83 by Robert Gay, the workshop sought both to provide students with performance experience and to advance a more popularly accessible version of the art form. Works were usually sung in English translations, the objective being "to take the 'Grand' out of opera and reestablish this type of art-form as an expression of real and comprehensible ideas."

The Opera Workshop's repertoire ranged from canonical works by composers including Puccini, Stravinsky, and Poulenc to contemporary pieces by notables such as Ralph Vaughn Williams. The Workshop also hosted the world premieres of The Knot Garden by Michael Tippett, Walker-Trough-Walls by N.U. music professor Anthony Donato, and The Number of Fools by Robert Beadell, as well as the Chicago premieres of the complete version of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and Samuel Barber's Vanessa.

The strong reputation of the Workshop, fostered by Gay, facilitated these premieres, and also drew high-profile attention. In the 1957-58 season, composer Aaron Copland visited to conduct The Tender Land, his three-act opera first performed in 1954 by the New York City Opera. For a number of years, internationally renowned singer Lotte Lehmann spent weeks as a visiting vocal coach. Civic Opera star Edith Mason, who also performed at La Scala and Paris, donated trunks of her old costumes for the Workshop's use. Bringing the Workshop's productions to an even wider audience, WTTW, the Chicago public television station, filmed several performances as part of their educational arts programming, including a one-hour adaptation of Verdi's Falstaff in 1968 and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel in 1978.

In 1983, the same year Richard Alderson took over as director, the School of Music received a sizable endowment from William E. Ragland in honor of his wife, Edith Mason, and the Workshop became the Edith Mason and William E. Ragland Opera Theatre. Under these auspices the School of Music began presenting several mainstage productions each year, a tradition that still continues.

Notable alumni of the Workshop: Sherrill Milnes (Metropolitan Opera, Northwestern professor emeritus); Mary Beth Piel (The King and I with Yul Brynner, Dawson's Creek); Nancy Dussault (The Sound of Music, Do Re Mi, Into the Woods); Ron Holgate (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 1776); and Ronald Hussmann (Fiorello and Tenderloin, both with lyrics by N.U. alumnus Sheldon Harnick).