How "safronia" was born

From pandemic parking garage to Sunday service energy on the Lyric stage.

When avery r. young first collaborated with Lyric Opera of Chicago during the pandemic-era production Twilight: Gods, few could have predicted that the partnership would lead to a full-scale world premiere.

In 2021, Lyric transformed the Millennium Park parking garage into the setting for Wagner’s Ring cycle. Conceived by Yuval Sharon, the drive-through production reimagined epic opera for an unprecedented moment. young contributed and performed poetic transitions that reframed Wagner’s mythology through a distinctly Chicago lens — rooted in rhythm, language, and lived experience.

The collaboration revealed something essential. young’s voice did not simply complement opera — it expanded it.

Following the success of Twilight: Gods, Lyric invited the Chicago native to imagine a work of his own for the stage. That invitation would become safronia, a new opera closing Lyric’s 2025/26 Season with performances on April 17 and 18.

A deeply personal story

Selected in 2023 as Chicago’s first Poet Laureate, young has built a career that spans poetry, music, visual art, and performance. He tours nationally with his band, de deacon board, and serves as co-director of the interdisciplinary arts collective Floating Museum.

With safronia, he steps into opera fully as composer, librettist, and performer.

The work draws on his own family’s Great Migration story — land, inheritance, memory — and the musical traditions of Chicago’s West Side. It is both intimate and expansive: a personal narrative that resonates far beyond one household.

The project had its first life in performance during July 2021, when Lyric partnered with VAM Studios to create a series of short films directed by Vincent Martell and shot throughout the Lyric Opera House — in the foyer, on the stage, in the house of the theater, and more. In those early visual explorations based on young’s dreams for the piece, he and a small ensemble performed three selections from safronia: “baar (or booker from now on),” “pilate,” and “norf.” Even then, the piece carried the pulse of gospel, blues, and spoken word — intimate, rhythmic, and unmistakably Chicago.

An initial workshop followed in August 2023, bringing collaborators into the room to begin shaping the work theatrically and musically. Meagan McNeal participated in that workshop as the original safronia, establishing a creative foundation and long-standing relationship with the project that continues into the world premiere.

The score was workshopped live in February 2025, with the libretto finalized in April 2025, allowing collaborators to explore its rhythmic elasticity and communal energy in real time. The visceral impact of young’s music was immediate and unmistakable as the rehearsal room came to life with a style that young described to Fox-32 Chicago as “put yourself in the mind of Curtis Mayfield conducting Parliament-Funkadelic with The Staples Singers and Deniece Williams doing the singing.” 

Conductor and orchestrator Paul Byssainthe Jr., who joined the project in May 2025, has played a vital role in shaping the work’s sonic world for the Lyric Opera Orchestra. His orchestrations preserve the pulse of gospel and funk while expanding them into a full operatic palette.

“American classical music”

From the start, young was clear about what the music in safronia would be.

“The music Black people made in this country is American classical music,” he says. “In safronia, those traditions — gospel hymns, blues progressions, funk rhythms, and the layered call-and-response of the Black church — are not softened or translated. They are the foundation.”

Rather than placing Black musical traditions at the margins of opera, safronia positions them at its core. Clapping, snapping, percussive movement, and rhythmic vocal textures are embedded directly into the score. The energy of a Sunday service informs the structure of the work itself. The opera house becomes a communal space — participatory, immediate, alive.

Expanding what opera can be

Lyric’s commitment to new work stretches back decades, from mid-20th century premieres to contemporary American operas that speak directly to the present moment. General Director John Mangum has often emphasized the importance of widening opera’s creative reach.

“I would love for Lyric to continue to expand as a place where all sorts of creative musical artists can see themselves and their work,” Mangum says. “Opera is a much wider net than one might assume.”

safronia embodies that vision. A Chicago poet who had never written an opera before now stands at the center of a Lyric commission. Gospel, blues, and funk do not enter the opera house as guests — they arrive as hosts.

What began in a parking garage becomes a world premiere on the Lyric stage.

And what began as a question — what is defined as American classical music? — becomes a work that answers it in rhythm, harmony, and communal voice.