Grady alum John Dixon always thought he would see his childhood friend, John Irvin, on stage telling jokes, not dressed up in costume singing at the Chicago Lyric Opera.

“[Irvin’s opera career] blew me away when I found out about it because when we were friends, we both wanted to be comedians,” Dixon said. “We were always making jokes. I had started this improv troupe at Grady when I was in eleventh grade and he was one of the four people in it. Our friendship was definitely based around comedy.”

Despite his success in the world of opera, Irvin, class of 2003, did not become interested in opera until after he graduated from college and his wife, Linda Irvin, pushed him to try it.

“I wasn’t familiar with opera until I started school at Georgia Perimeter College a couple years after I graduated from college,” John Irvin said. “I started [singing] as an elective at GPC and my wife heard me sing and encouraged me to start pursuing voice so I just kind of took her up on it to see if I liked it and lo and behold, it became my career.”

Linda Irvin, who sat right in front of John Irvin during that chorus elective, remembers that day well. Their chorus teacher was getting very frustrated and asked someone to just give the piece a go.

“And [John Irvin] gave it a big try and everybody just turned around and looked at him and we were like, ‘You need to sing,’” She said.

Stone Irvin, John Irvin’s brother, is also very impressed by his older brother’s voice.

“I don’t know much about technical opera skill, but I am always blown away when I get to see him perform again or hear him perform again when he comes back home for the holidays,”  He said. “Because it seems to me that he is always growing and his voice seems really rich.”

While at Mary Lin Elementary School, Irvin played the clarinet and picked up the saxophone. In addition, he played the piano and continued to take private lessons throughout high school.

Despite his musical background and current profession, John Irvin did not participate in any musicals during high school. He performed in his first opera while at Georgia State University, to where he transferred from GPC and where he finished his bachelor degree in musical performance with an emphasis on vocals.

“The first show I performed in was Candide at GSU and I played a couple of different parts,” Irvin said. “One was a major singing part, the Governor.That was first big foray into a major opera. It was really fun because we had a really great director then, and the costumes were wacky, and the story is a strange and wacky story based on the Voltaire novel.”

Irvin graduated from GSU in 2010 and received a Professional Certificate from Boston University’s Opera Institute in 2012, and has performed with many different groups including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Irvin, however, said that his favorite place to perform was in Sante Fe, where he was an apprentice in 2011 with the Santa Fe Opera.

“I really enjoyed working at the Santa Fe Opera because it is a beautiful city and New Mexico is such a beautiful part of the country, and the way the opera house is designed, it is actually outdoors,” Irvin said. “There is a giant proscenium that opens up into a view of the desert behind the opera house.”

Irvin remembers the night they opened Faust, an opera dealing with a man who trades his soul to the devil for youth, at the Sante Fe Opera house.

“[It was] one of the big culminations of a giant wildfire that had been going on there for the larger part of the summer … so the [opera] opened up with a scene of the desert burning in the background which was really eerie but also really fitting,” Irvin said. “I’m glad we actually got to perform that night because there was so much smoke, we were worried we were not going to be able to perform outside.”

Irvin is currently a member of the Chicago Lyric Opera, where he is preparing himself for the role of the officer in their production of The Barber of Seville. Irvin said that his daily schedule depends on whether the Lyric Opera is in the summer season or the main season, which is in the fall and spring. During the main season, Irvin takes part in the rehearsals for the operas the company puts on, but in the summer takes part in a young artists’ workshop.

“We put on a production of an opera that features all the young artists and we coach with a variety of music staff,” Irvin said. “usually with guest artists who are known internationally who come to do workshops with us on our own repertoire and on the season repertoire later on. Typically, we end up doing operas that we are planning on doing a couple seasons away or that we are actually doing in the season.”

Voice lessons are a big part of the summer program too.

“We do technical exercises and make sure our voices in shape because you have to keep your voice in shape so that you can sing the operas that are coming up,” Irvin said. “You always have really different passages and difficult passages.”

After singing opera for five years, Irvin said that he has come to appreciate opera for its combination of the different aspects of theater.

“You have singing, the orchestral aspect, language and theater, and it’s all wrapped up into one thing so I can satisfy my desire to do just so many different aspects of art … it includes visual art too, of course, with costumes and set,” Irvin said. “It combines everything into one.”