If you never loved opera before, you'll be won over by Craig Trompeter and Chase Hopkins's enthusiastic fondness for the music, the instruments, and their performers. Since its founding in 2010, Haymarket Opera has offered more than 30 productions using period instruments and historically informed staging conventions, shining a spotlight on many lesser-known but quality pieces by a wide diversity of composers, sung and played by a combination of international stars and top regional talent. The company has received glowing reviews including in the Chicago Tribune, Italy’s L’Opera, Opera News, and Early Music America. The New York Times praised Haymarket’s “finely played, carefully sung, lovingly detailed period performance.”

Haymarket takes its name from both Chicago’s Haymarket Affair of 1886, which gave focus to the worldwide labor movement, and from the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket District of London, where Handel produced his Italian operas.

Learn about how these versatile artists began in the back of a Chicago saloon and their meteoric rise to fame.