Liz Delillo
Staff Writer
The Chautauqua Opera Guild’s annual picnic took place Friday afternoon outside Norton Hall. While Guild president Deanna Johnson, board member Cynthia Norton and Chautauqua Opera Company General and Artistic Director Steven Osgood spoke about future plans and fundraising initiatives, picnic-going members were also treated to a performance from Studio Artist Joel Clemens.
The Guild was founded in 1974 to promote and support opera at Chautauqua. After Chautauqua Opera lost two-thirds of its funding in 2023, the Guild led the flood of community support that followed and later announced a $3 million endowment campaign.
“Thank you to all of you who donated and were pledged towards that goal; we know everyone here are friends of ours, and we still have a ways to go to meet our goal. Until the endowment is fully funded, we will be running two different funding efforts,” Johnson said. “The fundraising efforts, the first and foremost, is to fund the endowment with donations from fans like you; the second, and just as important, is to raise the money for the fund for the 2026 season.”
Johnson celebrated that the Guild raised $1.2 million in the first year of their endowment campaign and highlighted what community support can accomplish for opera at Chautauqua.
“Because of your memberships, the Guild is able to make a leading gift of $50,000 towards next season’s productions,” Johnson said. “One of the examples of the Guild’s impact on opera that we are excited about is the performance of Ida by Lamplight, which will be presented on Aug. 8.”
Osgood shared Johnson’s excitement over the commissioning and presentation of Ida by Lamplight.
“Ida by Lamplight in particular is something that has been grown by us, by you, since the very get-go,” Osgood said. “In 2016, because of a dedicated gift from a Guild member, I was able to bring Jerre Dye here, who was the librettist for the piece, who started collecting the story that turned into the libretto that captures, somehow magically, the 151-year history of Chautauqua Institution.”
Going further into Chautauqua’s history, Norton discussed the construction and architecture of Norton Hall. Her great-grandmother Lucy Coit Fanning donated the building to honor her husband Oliver Willcox Norton and her daughter Ruth. Their son Ralph, a trustee of the Institution, oversaw the project’s design.
“It was meant to be monochronistic concrete, the exterior finish of which was what you saw when they took away the form,” Norton said. “It’s now been slathered with coats of paint, which are just putting it and hiding it away, in my view, so try to maybe imagine it however that might have been and how groundbreaking it was in 1929.”
Removing the paint without damaging the original texture of the poured concrete is an important initiative for Norton.
“One of the many things that I marveled at when I looked out at Norton Hall on (July II, in the workshop presentation of Lincoln in the Bardo) was that I knew all along … I knew that what we put on the stage was going to be vital and exciting — just like you found out once we started it. But had the Institution not joined us in so many ways to build the cross-platform collaboration by getting towards George Saunders to come here, to building all of the activities (and) to having the Lincoln project here,” Osgood said. “It was the kind of critical mass of activity that my colleagues, and other festivals, and at other small opera companies could just dream of.”
