Over its 95-year history, Chautauqua Opera Company has staged nearly 500 productions featuring over 150 titles from the opera canon. Through this significant American cultural institution, generations of Chautauqua have experienced opera for the first time in both Norton Hall and the Amphitheater, and hundreds of opera singers have recognized the 50-year-old Young Artist Program as a career-defining and career-boosting opportunity.
Chautauqua Institution’s resident company is the fourth-oldest opera company in the United States, only preceded by the New Orleans Opera, Cincinnati Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera Company. Through those 95 years, it has navigated and withstood various challenges, including in 2020, when the company innovatively delivered a nine-week virtual season during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In its history, Chautauqua Opera has presented an eclectic mix of repertoire, including beloved classics like Tosca and La Traviata. Flotow’s Martha opened the company’s inaugural season, and Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, the opera that launched the career of one of America’s premier 20th-century composers, received its first professional production at Chautauqua. Mark Adamo’s Little Women, which premiered in 1998, was produced at Chautauqua just four years later. More recently, contemporary works have been showcased, tying into the Institution’s thematic programming to show how socially relevant issues and stories can be given compelling presentations through opera.
This approach has provided critical opportunities for artists to perform various roles and offered audiences a diverse range of operatic experiences that are typically only available in major cities.
Since its inception, Chautauqua Opera has been fully supported by the Institution’s annual budget. However, a new challenge presented itself in 2023, when the Institution requested a new model for the company, one which operated only on philanthropy (endowments, grants, annual giving) and ticket revenue. This came after an analysis of all program areas, said Vice President of Performing and Visual Arts Laura Savia, and resulted in several “difficult and permanent budget cuts, perhaps most significantly to Chautauqua Opera Company.” Chautauqua Opera’s budget was reduced by two-thirds, which represented the most significant cuts relative to a program’s size.
“This was in a year when opera companies around the world were struggling to recover fully from COVID, and many announced reductions or closures,” Savia said. “In this context, we proposed a vision to reinvent the company as an opera incubator, moving to workshops for new operas with no full productions.”
The news was met with an outpouring of community support, spearheaded by the community-led Chautauqua Opera Guild and supported by Chautauqua Opera artists and alumni. The result was a successful funding drive, enabling not just 2024’s triple-bill of chamber operas, Love and Longing by the Lake, which itself included two world premieres celebrating the Institution’s sesquicentennial, but the full production of Hansel and Gretal at 7:30 p.m. July 24, 2024, in the Amphitheater.
“I’ve never experienced a more striking or inspiring example of a community supporting the arts than the Chautauqua Opera Guild’s recent and current fundraising endeavors,” Savia said. “The groundswell of support from the Guild, and by extension from the Chautauqua community and even the national opera community, has been galvanizing.”
The Guild’s work isn’t done, however. The community group announced this summer that it was undertaking a $3 million endowment campaign. If met, that goal will ensure Chautauqua Opera can continue producing at least one fully staged opera each season, in addition to new opera workshops — both preserving Chautauqua Opera’s legacy and positioning it as a leader in developing new works and training young artists.
As Chautauqua Opera honors 95 years, the Opera Guild itself is honoring its own legacy: 50 years of community support, through time and treasure alike. The endowment effort, said Opera Guild President Judith Claire, will make “opera performance sustainable in perpetuity.” She noted the campaign’s urgency and importance: “We need everyone’s support to reach this goal. Our Chautauqua Opera Company is the oldest summer opera company in the nation, and the fourth-oldest opera company overall — what a legacy to keep vigorous for us and future generations.”
For Chautauqua Opera General and Artistic Director Steven Osgood, it’s “impossible to overstate” how profoundly things changed for the company over the past year, and it’s only because of the Guild’s fundraising that “we can plan a 2025 season which carries forward our company’s 95-year legacy of presenting fully produced operas on our stages.”
In the future, Osgood said, Chautauqua Opera will offer young opera singers the opportunity for lead roles in canonical works, “while collaborating with today’s most exciting living composers and librettists in the workshop and development of their newest operas. We will continue to be one of the foremost incubators of the next generation of vocalists and play a new and pivotal role in the incubation of new works.”
Osgood is a key piece of this puzzle, said Senior Vice President and Chief Program Officer Deborah Sunya Moore. Ten years ago, the Institution first began the search for Jay Lesenger’s successor. Lesenger had served as general and artistic director of Chautauqua Opera for nearly 20 years, and was the company’s longest-serving general director. Now, Moore sees that search as “The Search for Steve.”
“Steve spoke of the golden age of opera being present day,” she said. “I have even greater confidence now than 10 years ago about Chautauqua’s ability to nurture young artists, birth new work, and foster relationships with creatives that lift the field through collaboration and incubation.”
Osgood’s leadership, Moore said, focuses not just on opera as an artform for stage, but “as a means to convene conversation, gather community, support young artists, grow understanding and express our most needed stories of being human.”
“I would suggest that Chautauqua is helping create a new definition of grand opera,” Moore said. “It allows us to tell stories through songs written, sung and heard by all of us who gather — in ways that will continue to surprise and delight.”
