Spotlight On: HGO Guild Volunteers Alex and Andrea di Bagno

Become one of our Houston Grand Opera Guild volunteers today! Visit HGOGuild.org for more information.  

Alex and Andrea di Bagno have been patrons of the opera for most of their lives. The two met in Italy when they were children, and kept in touch through the years as their friendship—and later their romance—blossomed. Now the two have been happily married for 46 years. His career brought them to Houston in the ’80s, and they soon fell in love with the city—and with Houston Grand Opera.  

The di Bagnos have been using their free time to give back to the art form for decades now. They started out volunteering informally, then joined the Houston Grand Opera Guild’s Artist Hospitality team, organizing transport for singers visiting the city and providing a welcoming environment for the performers they so admire. The couple’s many years of service have also seen them work in the Guild Boutique, host cast parties, attend Young Artist Vocal Academy farewell dinners, and even, in Alex’s case, perform on the Wortham stage as a supernumerary!  

Here’s Alex and Andrea on their lives and volunteer service, in their own words:  

ALEX: Before retiring, I was an executive for an Italian steel company, mostly doing business with oil and gas customers. Hence, Houston. After my first visit to Houston in the early ’70s, I managed to get myself transferred here as an expat for a couple years. After that, every time the company asked us to move somewhere else to further my career, we always said no. We loved Houston so much that we managed to stay over 40 years, until retirement a few years ago. 

ANDREA: I was Chief Painting Conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Houston for quite a number of years. Prior to that, I was at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, at the Louvre in Paris, and at the Menil Collection in Houston.  

ALEX: A very distinguished career during which she worked on paintings from the world’s most prominent Artists. One museum director once said, There is not a painting that Andrea cannot resuscitate. 

ALEX: I’m Italian, and as such, I have to love opera. It’s in my DNA.  

ANDREA: I am not Italian. Well, I am, because I married him, but I’m American. And I started loving opera at the age of 19. And when we got married, we kind of just said, hey, we both love opera. Let’s enjoy it. (laughs) So we’ve been going to the opera for a long time now. 

ALEX: But in the four or five years that we lived in Milano, we only went to Teatro alla Scala a couple of times because tickets were unavailable and absolutely unaffordable. We came to Houston, and we found out the affordability, not only of single tickets, but the subscription was the best deal in the world. We immediately subscribed. Then we realized that the subscription does not cover a big part of the cost it takes to put these shows on. So, we started saying, okay, we are not in a financial position to become big donors, but we’ll give a little bit. But we mostly give with our time and our activity in the Guild, trying to contribute something.  

ALEX: I didn’t expect the camaraderie that the Guild has, because everybody there is a friend. We invite each other over for dinner. We go out together.   

ANDREA: The Guild organizes lots of different activities. We did a bus trip to New Orleans to see Liam Bonner. We’ve done a lot of fun things with the Guild aside from just the volunteer work. We’ve all become friends.  

ALEX: The funny thing is, we started doing hospitality even before we knew that the Guild was doing hospitality. And we did it in a very primitive way that we wouldn’t be able to do today. If there was a visiting Italian artist, we would go backstage and knock on his dressing room and say, Bravissimo, maestro. This was a wonderful performance. Would you like to come over to our house for dinner tomorrow night? 

ANDREA: For spaghetti in our kitchen. Nothing fancy. 

ALEX: And everybody said yes. We started with Cinderella in 1995. We invited one singer whom we knew through friends. He said yes, and then he told all the other members of the cast. And during the production of that 1995 Cinderella, in which the entire cast was Italian, everybody was at dinner at our house once or twice a week during the rehearsal, all the time.  

ANDREA: Our goal was to make these visiting artists feel at home, since they are used to very formal work dinners where you have to say the right thing and so on. Here, we invited them to eat in our kitchen. Sometimes they cooked themselves.  

ANDREA: Alessandro Corbelli—he’s coming now for Cinderella—made us a wonderful risotto al Barolo. I’ll never forget it.  

ALEX: He was using a wonderful bottle of Barolo wine, and I was saying, no! Don’t put it in the rice! We need to drink that! (laughs) And he said, no, no, no. The rice needs it. And in fact, it was out of this world.  

ANDREA: What we found out with that first experience was how important it was to these Italian artists to have a place to join people in a relaxed setting and just enjoy good Italian food. We realized that these artists really give up a lot of their lives for their passion in opera, because they go from one opera house to another all over the world, and they live out of hotel rooms. So including them in our family life was, I noticed, very important to them. It helps that we’re both fluent in Italian. That also helps them feel at home—the fact that we can speak in their language so they’re not having to struggle with the English.  

ALEX: If I had to put one opera to take one on a desert island, it would be Tosca. No question about it. Tosca is a perfect opera. There is passion, love, jealousy, betrayal, murder, suicide—what more could you want? 

ANDREA: I love Don Giovanni. I’ve always loved it. I just find it musically so compelling and so complete. Don Giovanni, even though it takes place, usually, in Italy—or at least that’s where I imagine that Mozart wanted it to be—it’s more contained, the music is more intimate. And there’s the contrast there, the humor versus the tragedy.  

ALEX: I was lucky enough that I even was hired as a supernumerary for the last Tosca two years ago. I was side-by-side with my favorite singers, Tamara Wilson and Jonathan Tetelman, and interacted with them right on stage. I’ve been a supernumerary for about 20 years now, after I sent an email saying, do you ever need supers? And they answered, send us a picture. So, I sent a picture, and they hired me. My first role was the patriarch of Moscow in Boris Godunov, next to Samuel Ramey, blessing him, handing him the crown, and then he sings his monologue for me in the middle of the stage, with a chorus of 80 people behind me, the orchestra at my feet. Even though I was standing, it was the best seat in the house, I can tell you.  

ALEX: Houston was not on the map before, especially for Italian artists. It was not one of the prime destinations for them, and they did not know anybody. Now, if they have to choose between Beijing and Houston, they will definitely come to Houston, even if Beijing pays more, because having friends around—it’s wonderful. 

ANDREA: It’s wonderful for all of us. And we would love to have more people in the Guild. 

ALEX: We are there at intermission. Come by, talk to us, and ask us questions, and we are very happy to answer. I’m pretty sure if you try it, you’ll like it. Come see for yourself. Come have fun with us!