Lucy Fitz Gibbon: The Joy of Exploring and Sharing
New Year’s Day was 12 degrees and cloudy in Chicago, but all chill soon disappeared as I met with soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon that morning for a cozy, cheerful and wide-ranging interview in anticipation of her upcoming appearances at Guarneri Hall. Praised for her compelling performances and “dazzling virtuoso singing” (Boston Globe) both on the operatic stage and in recital, Lucy is an artist whose musical curiosity is boundless. Her repertoire encompasses music from the 1600s through 2025 and just about everything in between, with more projects already in the works for 2026. I learned that she especially loves discovering and bringing to light unfamiliar gems, like those she will share with us on January 13 and 14, 2026 in Dreams and Departures.
LINDA BERNA: I would love to know how you came to pair Elizabeth Ogonek’s Blue and Green with the Schubert songs.
LUCY FITZ GIBBON: These two songs by Schubert are very special. Not only are they rarely performed, but the relationship between them is not well known either. Schubert composed them just before writing his song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin. The poetry was written by his close friend Franz von Schober. Each one is long ballad about a flower: Viola is the story of a violet who awakens too early and freezes to death, and Vergissmeinnicht tells of a forget-me-not who has a sort of sexual awakening but then is unable to reintegrate into society and winds up living alone on the banks of a river.
For me, they exemplify Schubert’s experiments in longer-form vocal writing. I was flipping through a book of Schubert songs when I first saw Viola. I kept turning the pages, but it kept going and going and going! I grew up as a violinist and when I started singing, I found it interesting that vocal pieces were so much shorter than the sonatas and concertos I had played. So I was particularly curious about these longer formats. Schubert wrote a number of ballads; they were common in the 19th century but then dropped off in favor of narrative song cycles like Die Schöne Müllerin. These two songs, which he finished in March of 1823, are a sort of culmination of the ballad form. It’s so interesting how he organized his musical material to reflect poetic structure. Each poem is in a different form and consequently Schubert’s musical treatments differ too. Viola has a refrain that returns throughout the poem, so Schubert’s musical setting of it also repeats, a kind of rondo form. Vergissmeinnicht is more through-composed and continuous, with beautiful musical moments and interesting harmonic transitions that follow the adventures of this forget-me-not.
Clearly, Schubert was proud of these songs; he included a copy of Viola in a collection of his works that he sent to his idol Beethoven. I think they’re not performed much today because they’re much longer than vocal pieces we’re used to, and range-wise they’re not comfortable for every singer. They weren’t published during Schubert’s lifetime so even then they may not have been as approachable in the domestic settings where so much of his music was heard. But I think together they create a hefty piece of music.
On recitals, odd-numbered groups of 3 or 5 songs are typical, but the Schubert songs are a diptych. And that brings me to the Elizabeth Ogonek pieces. When I received an award from the Harvard Musical Association to commission a piece, I approached Elizabeth, who is well known to Chicago audiences.
LINDA: Very well—she was in residence with the Chicago Symphony for a number of years.
LUCY: I knew that Elizabeth was really interested in literature and poetry, and in writing for the voice. We considered various poets, but she decided on Blue and Green, a set of two short story/prose poems that Virginia Woolf wrote as experiments while working toward a more impressionistic way of dealing with experiences. Each one begins with an initial visual impression that kind of melts or devolves into a series of images. You might think of them a little bit like looking at a painting as your mind muses on an object. After Elizabeth chose this two-part form, I thought it would be interesting to pair it with the two-part structure Schubert had created. And the Schubert songs, because they are about flowers and are very visually oriented, use much of the same color language, so I thought there would be an interesting textual connection as well.
LINDA: True, green for the spring and blue for the color of the forget-me-not. There are so many reasons why Schubert and Ogonek work well together, and I think one of the main ones is that both Schubert and Virginia Woolf were geniuses at entering the personal, inner world of human experience. Woolf’s wonderful texts, through these transparencies of color, offer real insight into experience and emotion.
You know, the British pianist Graham Johnson also believes that the two Schubert songs were laboratories for the longer song cycles. To me, they also represent the operatic side of Schubert—the real enactment of human drama, the rise and fall, that we find in all his music, even though we never think of Schubert as an opera composer.
LUCY: Yes, and something else I love about these pieces is seeing some of what he will try to do in the song cycles, though in the cycles, there is much more strophic writing (verses to the same music). So in Viola, you hear some of that with the recurring material, and then in Vergissmeinnicht, he transitions from one kind of material to another in a way that is really a mark of genius, to create a larger-form narrative in the way the music unfolds. There are strophic moments within but there’s a larger structure, almost like stained glass that transitions from one element to another.
LINDA: And in Viola, it’s interesting that when the material returns, it’s a little different every time as a way of portraying the emotional and psychological arc of the violet.
LUCY: Definitely! When we hear something familiar, for an audience it creates a sense of relaxation into the material that they know from before, but each time, the figuration is slightly different, so listeners are also transformed by the way that the music changes.
LINDA: I always think of Ogonek’s music as so color-oriented anyway—it’s like a prism, with the different tone colors and shades that she brings to whatever she writes. Is this something you like to do, bring unfamiliar pieces or unfamiliar aspects of composers we know? Because these songs are not “typical” Schubert.
LUCY: It’s so funny—I love plenty of the greatest hits, but musically I’ve always been interested in why certain pieces aren’t performed. Even as a teenager I would scour the university library stacks in my hometown and look for unusual things. It feels nice to be a champion for a piece that people aren’t as familiar with. I also find it helpful in my own programs to pair older and newer pieces. You know, when Schubert wrote these pieces, they were new, too. He was experimenting, trying to discover new ways of communicating ideas. I think it helps us to step into the mind of the composer and wonder, what might they have been searching for? It helps me to continue that conversation with the composer which I think we try to have whenever we’re performing any work from any time period.
LINDA: When you come across music that really catches your attention, how do you decide if it’s the right thing for you to perform?
LUCY: Oh, that’s so hard. It’s not just whether you have the will. You have to be realistic about what you can take on in a season, how you can fit pieces in. Sometimes a piece will be on my wish list, but it might take a long time to find the right time and place and program for it. I’m very interested in poetry, so when I consider programming a work I’m thinking not just about whether the music is beautiful or fits well in my voice, but also, is the poetry interesting to me? Putting a recital program together means putting music and poetry and stories in conversation with each other. We can bring out new aspects of a piece by putting it in different contexts. How does a piece communicate with the other works on the program, and what can we learn from putting them in dialogue with one another?
LINDA: Art song for Schubert was really community-based—he and his friends in their homes, interacting through the music he was creating, experiencing those correspondences and affinities you were just talking about. I read about your involvement with the organization Sparks and Wiry Cries, which I think fits well with the idea of an art song community.
LUCY: For the last 10 years I’ve worked for Sparks and Wiry Cries, whose mission is the promotion and performance of art song. We create space for new compositions that marry poetry and music in ways that reflect the reality of 21st century America and what it is to be human today. My role has changed over the years. Now I primarily write grants and edit for our online magazine. But I am able to be a part of crafting our upcoming seasons and the ideas that will be guiding our new projects. Sometimes those projects have touched on the past and on difficult elements of American history.
One work we helped create, Freedom on the Move, is up for a Grammy in 2026! It draws on material from an archive of advertisements of fugitive enslaved people. We worked with poet Tsitsi Ella Jaje and Chicago-based composer Shawn Okpebholo to memorialize and recontextualize the lives of these brave individuals. It’s very rewarding to help these projects come to fruition. We also hold an art song competition called Song Slam in which composers premiere art songs for a voting audience. We love that it empowers audience members to engage with art songs as they are being born into the world.
LINDA: As a teacher, do you find your students coming to you with knowledge and appreciation of the genre, or is this something that blossoms for them while they’re learning?
LUCY: If somebody asks me what I do, the shortest answer is that I’m an opera singer, because people know that opera is a thing. Few contemporary performers have careers based in concert work, and I think this speaks to the importance of what we do at Sparks and Wiry Cries. American students don’t generally know very much about art songs, though they will have studied them periodically in their training. Of course, opera is amazing and I love doing it, but my colleagues and I at Bard Conservatory, including those with big operatic careers, firmly believe that art song is incredibly important in order to be able to understand any of the larger forms, so a lot of the work we do with the students is in art song. It’s a joy to help students understand and become passionate about the depth of this repertoire and what it affords them as performers as well as offers to audiences.
LINDA: Can you speak about the things you’ve learned about musical activism over the course of your career?
LUCY: I think about that a lot. I feel extremely privileged to be able to do this with my life, both as a performer and a teacher. And I also feel that there is a duty to use this privilege for good. So, to your question earlier about why I’m interested in music that is less performed, it’s because it’s a chance to rewrite history a little bit, to argue for the inclusion of certain people, certain composers, who were for whatever reason excluded from the ability to participate in the musical dialogue of their day, and that includes today. Sometimes it has to do with their racial background, or with their gender. It’s been an enormous privilege as part of the work that I get to do to find those pieces, whether in archives or because composers have reached out to me, and to share those voices.
So I’m really excited to share this music—the Ogonek that only a handful of people have heard before, and these pieces of Schubert’s that I think are so beautiful.
LINDA: We’re so looking forward to hearing you! The conventional image of Schubert is that of a person who composed effortlessly—he wrote so much music and everything, especially song, flowed out of him so easily. Schubert isn’t often seen as a person who deliberately tried new things out of a desire to innovate, to expand the artistic atmosphere. So I think it’s important to hear what he was able to accomplish with these pieces at a time when he was considering his next steps as a composer and coming to grips with his own imminent fate.
LUCY: I absolutely feel that he was thinking about his mortality. When we review the narrative of Schubert’s life, there is a lot of conjecture about his syphilis exposure and the fact that he was hospitalized in May of 1823, just before writing Die Schöne Müllerin. But when you think about when certain markers of the disease occur, he actually would have known well before, and certainly by the time he was hospitalized, that things were pretty serious. And mortality and sexual experience play major parts in these two poems.
LINDA: I also believe he knew. Just consider the issues of bad timing—spring arriving too late or leaving too early—that figure in the poems.
LUCY: Yes! There’s a hilarious quote from the late 19th or early 20th century that I came across while researching these songs, in which the person describes listening to Viola as being “inveigled into attending a horticultural show.” Such a diss of these pieces! But I really think they were very personal to Schubert and that they are musical masterpieces.
Linda Berna
Linda Berna is President of the Board of Directors of Guarneri Hall NFP. She served as the Associate Dean and Director of the Music Conservatory at Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University, from 2001-2022. Dr. Berna earned her bachelor's and master’s degrees in Piano Performance from Roosevelt University and her PhD in Music Theory from Northwestern University. In addition to her work at Guarneri Hall, Dr. Berna serves as an accreditation evaluation team chair for the National Association of Schools of Music.
Help Us Grow
Your support empowers us to nurture musical talent and provide them with the tools and resources they need to succeed.