by Since we opened ASL-Opera.com in September 2023, one question has arrived more often than any other: how rare is it, exactly, for an opera company to present a foreign-language title in American Sign Language? The question deserves a documented answer, and this fall Chicago supplies the occasion. Lyric Opera of Chicago opens its 2026-27 season with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, October 10 through November 1, 2026, in the Robert Falls production, Enrique Mazzola conducting, Christian Van Horn in the title role, the capstone of the company’s Mozart and Da Ponte trilogy. Inside that run sits something the season coverage barely mentions: a designated ASL performance on Sunday, October 18, at 2 p.m., which the company’s own production page marks on its ticketing calendar and describes plainly, all dialogue and lyrics translated into American Sign Language by “two certified interpreters located near the stage,” with select seats reserved for the sightlines a signed performance demands. Lyric has loaded the same matinee with its other access services, audio description and the haptic SoundShirt, a garment that lets the wearer feel the orchestra on the skin in real time. An Italian opera from 1787, interpreted live in ASL, on a major American mainstage, sold inside the regular season. In a healthy art form that sentence would read as routine. In the American record it reads as an event, and the distance between routine and event is the subject of this article.
What the Record Actually Shows
Start with the defense every opera administrator reaches for first: the house already projects English surtitles, so why would the Deaf need anything more? We answered that question in our 2023 letter to the Metropolitan Opera, and the answer has lost nothing in three years. ASL is a language, with its own grammar and syntax descended from the French sign language Laurent Clerc carried across the Atlantic to co-found America’s first permanent school for the Deaf in 1817, and captions in English serve people who read English. Many Deaf people, particularly the foreign-born Deaf who arrive in this country without literacy in any written language, hold ASL as their first fluent tongue, so a caption board offers them a second foreign language stacked on top of a first. A foreign-language opera then runs the stack three layers deep: the Italian of Da Ponte, the English of the title board, and the visual language the audience actually lives in. Interpretation collapses those layers into one channel built for the eye, and interpretation of opera asks for something beyond conversational fluency, because nobody speaks Don Giovanni. The interpreter has to sing it, with face, torso, hands, and space carrying what the orchestra and the vibrato carry for the Hearing, and that is a performance discipline of its own, which is why we named our project High Art interpretation and why Janna has performed arias sung by Callas, Pavarotti, Garanca, and Damrau as proof of the concept.
Now the record, as far as it can be verified, because the honest scholarly answer to the rarity question begins with an admission about the archive. Broadway musicals have been interpreted in ASL since 1980, a service the Theatre Development Fund built into the commercial theater as standard practice, which means the spoken stage solved this problem two full generations ago. Opera lagged behind by design. A friend of ours carries a memory of New York City Opera offering interpreted performances in the 1980s, in the Beverly Sills era, and we have never been able to move that memory from recollection to record, which tells you something about how these performances were treated even when they happened: unarchived, unmarketed, unremembered. The first fully documented case we have found of a foreign-language opera staged with sign language belongs to France. In 2019, the Opéra Orchestre National de Montpellier presented Donizetti’s Don Pasquale with French Sign Language performers Katia Abbou and Vincent Bexiga integrated into the staging itself, billed as the first opera adapted and staged in LSF, an Italian comedy carried into a signed language as part of the production rather than beside it. Readers of the Lyric announcement will enjoy the coincidence: the company’s November title this season, opening eleven days after Don Giovanni closes, is Don Pasquale.
The American landmark arrived three years later, and it arrived in a concert hall rather than an opera house. In April 2022, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Deaf West Theatre premiered a semi-staged Fidelio at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gustavo Dudamel conducting, co-directed by Alberto Arvelo and Joaquín Solano, with the Deaf performers of Venezuela’s Coro de Manos Blancas. Every role was doubled, a Deaf actor and a Hearing singer sharing each character, the opera sung in its original German while the recitatives were signed outright, and the Los Angeles Times called the result an “outright breakthrough for opera.” The production returned to Disney Hall in May 2024 and then toured to Barcelona, Paris, and London, the first European tour in the history of Deaf West, the Tony-winning company, founded in 1991, that gave Broadway its signed Big River and Spring Awakening. The choice of title was the point. Beethoven wrote one opera, and by its 1805 premiere he was losing the ability to hear it, so the first grand opera built for Deaf and Hearing audiences together was the one its own composer received the way a Deaf audience does. That production proved integration; a Deaf artist can stand at the center of the repertory, in German, at the highest musical level in the country.
Interpretation and integration are different rungs of the same ladder, and the ladder is worth naming, because the rarity question turns on it. The bottom rung is the caption board, which serves the Hearing. One rung up sits the interpreted performance, artists at the side of the stage carrying the work into ASL while the production proceeds untouched, the Broadway model since 1980. Integration occupies the third rung, the Montpellier and Fidelio model, where Deaf performers stand inside the staging itself. And the fourth rung, the one we keep building toward, is Deaf-led interpretation as an art form of its own, trained and billed as performance. What Lyric has scheduled is the second rung applied to a foreign-language title inside a marketed subscription season, with reserved sightline seating, and after three years of looking we can locate no earlier instance of a major American opera company doing that. We would be glad to be corrected, and the difficulty of correcting us is itself the finding. Access performances live in the logistics file, never in the repertory record, so an art form that archives every prompt book and cast sheet cannot tell you when, or whether, it ever sang for the Deaf. When the archive of a four-hundred-year-old art holds one thin folder on an entire language community, the folder is the verdict.
Chicago Is Piloting What New York Declined to Test
We brought all of this to the Metropolitan Opera in the summer of 2023: an open letter in June, a meeting inside the house on July 11, a three-part proposal covering interpreted performances, audience education, and a High Art interpreter training program on the Met stage. Our meeting was warm, the follow-up never came, and we wrote the obituary for that institutional imagination this February. The contrast now writes itself. The company that could not find its way to a pilot is selling its Chagall murals; the company in Chicago put the pilot on the season calendar and reserved the seats. Opera keeps insisting it needs new audiences; we have written before about opera’s standing in mainstream American culture, and the audience the art form says it cannot find is already waiting, locked out by nothing grander than habit.
So here is our counsel to Chicago, offered in public because we work in public. Translate from the Italian, never from the surtitles, because an interpretation of a translation is a photocopy of a photocopy. Put Deaf professionals inside the process, on the translation team and in the rehearsal room, with time in the house to set placement, lighting, and sightlines, since an unlit interpreter is a silenced one. Trust role shifting; a skilled interpreter sets each character in space and carries an ensemble, and one interpreter can carry a thousand voices. Prepare the audience, because a first opera is a first opera in any language, and a short signed introduction to the story costs nothing and pays in comprehension. And hold the standard Janna has taught interpreters for decades: “You have to do what’s best for the Deaf person, not what’s easiest for the Hearing.” Companies that meet that standard will find what Broadway found in 1980, that the accommodation is a stage discipline, and the discipline creates its own audience.
Mozart finished Don Giovanni in 1787. Beethoven premiered Fidelio in 1805 while going deaf, and it took until 2022 for an American stage to hand his opera back to the people who receive it as he did. This October, in Chicago, an Italian masterpiece will be signed on a major American mainstage as a listed and ticketed part of the season, seats held for the eyes that need them, and the hands will do what the hands have always been ready to do. Our new book, Back to Willowbrook, publishing this month, documents how disability rights in America get won slowly and lost fast; a great opera company choosing, on its own initiative, to open the mainstage to the Deaf is the rare entry that runs in the winning column. The Deaf have been ready to sing Mozart for two centuries. Chicago finally set the date, and we will be watching.
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