Klaus Georg’s Two Stages: A Mundelein Classroom and Lyric Opera

The crowd’s thundering applause becomes a faded memory when Loyola professor Klaus Georg steps into his Mundelein classroom on Tuesday mornings to teach his voice class for beginners. 

For Georg, a lecturer in music and coordinator of vocal performance at Loyola, a typical 5-to-9 p.m. routine includes dawning a colonial officer costume and entering into a world of forbidden love and war for Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Aida.”

“Being in the middle of that is an experience that is very difficult to describe because it’s simultaneously overwhelmingly loud but also it’s all in harmony” Georg said. “When you pack together for one of these big choruses there’s this kind of power in numbers that really transports you.” 

When Georg auditions in the fall for a new season at the opera, he is unsure which operas he will be cast in. As a tenor of the supplementary chorus for over ten years, Klaus is brought in for big shows such as “Aida.” 

Composed by Giuseppe Verdi in 1870, “Aida” tells an intimate story of a messy love triangle between the Pharaoh of Egypt’s daughter, an Egyptian soldier and an Ethiopian prisoner. An opera staged against a backdrop of a war in ancient Egypt, audiences watch characters struggle to choose between loyalty to their desires or their people. 

“I think that’s what makes it good art,” Georg said. “If you get at those conflicts and tell those stories of real human beings, then it doesn’t matter what time period you’re in because the story still stands.”

While a life in the spotlight offers bucket list career moments like being able to sing alongside Grammy-winning artists on revered stages like Carnegie Hall, Georg found there was still something missing. 

“I personally don’t have this intrinsic need to be onstage and to perform like some people,” Georg said. “I enjoy it, but it is not my primary motivation. I love teaching even more than performing.”

Teaching young adults how to sing wasn’t a part of Georg’s career plan — he originally went to college to become a mathematician like his father. He was originally convinced learning to sing opera would be nothing more than a side hobby until a friend offered him a couple of opera CDs his first-year of college. One of the discs was a copy of Puccini’s “Turandot,” the same opera that Georg used to hear his aunt, an opera singer in Rome, sing when growing up.

“When I was a kid, we went to some of her shows, and occasionally she would be practicing in the summers when we were visiting my grandma’s house and I’d be hiding out in the room listening to her practice and kind of alternating between thinking it was pretty cool and making fun of it,” Georg said.

Going from being a singer in his middle school choir to having a Doctor of Musical Arts from Northwestern University, Georg said he has taken on the role of helping students at Loyola find their own way in the music world.

“I love to see that kind of look on students’ faces when they make a sound they didn’t realize they could make or when they finally figure out how to properly support their voices,” Georg said. 

The human ability to connect through music is something Georg said he has seen while singing in groups of 100 people on stage and in one-on-one moments with students looking to find their voice. While performing the triumphal scene in “Aida,” Georg said his voice converges with his colleagues and the orchestra crescendoing to create a feeling that transcends music and leaves him feeling like he “can’t believe I’m in the middle of this.”

“Music connects you to others, both in the present and the past,” Georg said. “With few exceptions, it’s a collaborative art form. You connect to other people, learn from them and establish deep relationships.” 

Whether it’s in front of over 3,000 spectators at the Lyric Opera of Chicago or in a classroom in Mundelein, music has a way of bringing people closer together, according to Georg.

The opera’s curtains will open March 9 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago with the original Italian score with minor changes in translation to more generic words in hopes of making the story more relatable to a larger audience, according to Georg.

“Music connects us to humanity,” Georg said. “I like to imagine that if every person in the world was part of a choir or orchestra we’d have a whole lot less war.”

Featured image by Megan Dunn / The Phoenix