Lyric Opera’s 2025-26 season concludes with the world premiere of avery r. young’ssafronia on stage April 17-18.
When the Booker family returns to Mississippi to bury their father and reclaim land stripped from them, what begins as a burial ignites a reckoning with memory, inheritance and the unfinished business of U.S. history. young—a composer, librettist and performer who also happens to be Chicago’s first poet laureate—has created a new opera rooted in blues, gospel and funk that places the Great Migration at its center.
Note: This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Windy City Times: I was just telling someone the other day that I will always have a personal connection to you because of that incredible poem you read during the 2023 Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame induction—so, thank you.
avery r. young: You can thank C.C. Carter, who I call “Boss Lady.” [Smiles] She said, “We need you to write the poem. I said, “Okay: For you, I’ll hook it up.” But the poem really wrote itself. Everybody who I wrote about was amazing and shifted the culture of the city in ways that [involved them] navigating the space with all of their modifiers. It wasn’t like “I’m in church, let me put the gay Black shit over here” or “I’m going into a business meeting—let me put the gay Black shit over here.”
WCT: Tell me how safronia came about.
ary: I was minding my own Black business. [Both laugh.] I got an email inviting me to have a conversation about becoming the librettist for a production of Twilight Gods that was being directed by Yuval Sharon. And then I was asked if I had a story that I wanted to tell through opera. And I was, like, “Okay.”
And I asked, “You want me to write the libretto and the score?” After they said yes, I said, “It’s not gonna be chocolate covered Mozart; it’s gonna be juke joint, church house. It’s gonna be that. It’s gonna be some harmonica. And they said, “That’s actually what we want what you do on stage.” Opera as a material is a level of spectacle that I am enjoying—and I’m not even talking about from a budgetary point of view.
It’s the hardest work I’ve had coming up with music and poetry for this piece—but it was work that I had to do to really understand what I could do.
WCT: I saw you say something in a promotional video and I wrote it down. You said, “Music is nerve.” What did you mean by that?
ary: It’s feeling—especially in the context of where Black people experience music.
In the opera world, when certain folks experience the emotional connection, it anchors them, right?
WCT: So you mean “nerve” as in feeling, not attitude?
ary: Well, with Mahalia Jackson, it’s feeling an attitude in a church song. “How I Got Over” is as much about feeling as it is rock ‘n roll. And nerve being with Black folk, when we are emotional about something, we are then activated physically. Our response to emotion then is to get up, clap and party; we’re not gonna sit back and sink in the song. That’s just how we are wired. And so when I mean music is nerve, music is feeling. You know how your knee works when the mallet hits it and your leg go up? That’s what music is supposed to do.
And different keys—you know, C sharp, D minor—make you feel two different things. So when you are composing a work and you want this to happen, in this scene, that’s the one thing you have to consider. The tonality, the key will bring us here. The voices in the opera that are the darker characters are usually the lower voices; the heroes and the main characters are the higher voices. The chorus has to kind of sing all of it.
WCT: You are an interdisciplinary artist. And I looked at your background for a minute. You knew early on that you would be an artist because at Mather High School, you were…
ary: [Laughs] Shut that up! You really did some digging!
I’m so glad that you brought that up. Yeah—I was in the chorus, the free press and even the Filipino Club; I was into cultural dancing. Drama, club—all of that.
I think Black people are multidisciplinary. You have to be multifaceted and multidisciplinary in your joint. You just can’t do one thing. It’s about survival—and what’s essential to your survival is being a polyglot. If you’re not interdisciplinary, you can’t pivot.
WCT: What does representation mean to you?
ary: I will say this: Representation without imagination is still discrimination. That’s what I would say. So it’s just not the work to represent, but it’s also the work to imagine. Put the bodies everywhere.
It’s just not enough to see me on TV. It’s just not enough for these babies to come to the opera and see Black people on the stage. These Black people also have to be framed through the imagination.
WCT: What do you want people to take away from safronia?
ary: I want people to really leave the work with a melody in their hearts. And I want them to then understand that pausing to handle your mental and spiritual [needs] is necessary.
With an opera or in theater, you get to pause the world and see something kind of happen slowly. But we should be able to take that practice in our lives. We are in very anxious times.
And I would also like to say that magic only happens when you have to be brave to do it. That’s the only time magic shows up.safronia takes place April 17-18 at the Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Dr.