A Letter from Patrick Summers to HGO's Audience

For many years, one of the joys of my professional life has been sharing HGO's new seasons with you, our audience members and supporters. I have felt the same excitement this year as ever, accompanied by wistfulness, since after this season I will be stepping down as the company’s Artistic and Music Director, a position I have held in some form for more than a quarter of a century, which is more than a third of the company’s entire history.

My goals have been multiform: as a conductor, I have always tried to support the many visions of a composer, whether or not that composer is alive, and never to superimpose my own ideas except when I felt they aligned with the composer’s. As the Artistic Director, I have endeavored to balance the provocative with the comforting, the garde with the avant-garde, and create a set of memorable experiences. And always, throughout my artistic life at Houston Grand Opera, I have tried to shepherd a new generation of singers into this extraordinary art, chiefly, though not solely, through the amazing talents who choose the Butler Studio as their artistic destination, or those many who have chosen HGO as the place where they want to debut major roles. That has been an enormously gratifying part of my work, and the aspect I will most miss.

And through everything: hurricanes, pandemics, the highs and lows, you have been there with us. For me, the highlights will always be the company’s first Wagner Ring, the Verdi operas that I was privileged to conduct three times each: La traviata, Rigoletto, and Il trovatore, the many Mozart operas, Handel’s Saul, Mieczysław Weinberg's The Passenger, Daniel Catán's Florencia en el Amazonas, and the deep work on so many premieres, by Carlisle Floyd (especially his masterpiece Cold Sassy Tree) and Jake Heggie— whose Three Decembers, which we premiered, has become one of the most-performed operas in the United States.

This season, I was overjoyed to finally be able to bring Puccini’s extraordinary Trittico to Houston, something I’d tried to make happen for the entirety of my tenure, because Trittico is one of the most brilliantly conceived operas ever composed, comprised of three one-act works that each share a powerful unifying theme: the effect of a single death on all left alive. And my final performances as HGO’s Music Director are of one of the few musical works in history that is by both of my favorite composers, Handel and Mozart, in Robert Wilson’s enigmatic and thrilling production of Messiah.

Opera is big in all ways; there is nothing diminutive about its ideas, and the whole idea of a “season” is to explore a few slices of opera’s vast ambitions. This is an art about the giving of voice: singers and conductors lend their voices to the voice of the composer, who guides the voices of designers, directors, and the huge family of artists whose individual voices make opera happen. But know this, friends: the most important voices at Houston Grand Opera are yours, the voices of our audiences. The monarchs and noble families who were responsible for opera’s beginnings are obviously long gone, lost within the centuries—the voices of opera are now here, with you in our own theater, because you are the reason we do it at all.

There is a lot I could say, but I will limit myself to this: thank you, dear HGO family, for your many years of support, interest, and enjoyment of opera. Being in the same room with a great voice, as you well know, can be a transformative and epiphanic experience. I have sought it all of my life, and I will continue to do so. My profound thanks to you all.