On Nov. 1, San Diego Opera will kick off its 60th anniversary with “La bohème,” the same Puccini opera that officially launched the company on May 5, 1965, at the San Diego Civic Theatre.
But nostalgia for old times is not the only focus of company General Director David Bennett and the company’s board of director’s attention these days. They have bigger plans.
On the eve of San Diego Opera’s 50th season a decade ago, the company survived a near-shutdown and it subsequently downsized operations. Then came the pandemic in 2020, which has had long-term effects on all American opera companies, in terms of reduced ticket sales and donations and rising production expenses.
San Diego Opera officials are realistic about the challenges facing the company moving forward, but they have just published an ambitious five-year strategic business plan that aims to lay a roadmap for realistic and achievable growth.
How ambitious? It will require raising an additional $10.5 million over the next five years to fund the expansion of live performances; the re-establishment of the resident artist program; the commissioning of new operas; the reimagining of its audience engagement programs, and more.
Bennett, who will mark his 10th anniversary as the company’s leader next June, believes it’s achievable.
“We are seeing growth in regular donors who are coming forward and important donors who have stayed with us for a long time. Our audience is coming back and we’re feeling very confident. But it’s difficult,” Bennett said. “The key to success is to have a richer and more robust relationship with your community which leads to greater philanthropy. We may never be back to the level it was … but the key is … having people understand the importance of what we do and build support.”
As this landmark season approached, San Diego Opera last year commissioned a study to look into how community leaders perceived the company. The results of the study were used to develop the strategic plan.
“There was a lot to be proud of, the reputation for producing at a high level of artistic excellence, but also the sense that post-COVID our footprint is a little too small,” Bennett said. “Yes we want to be doing grand opera at the Civic Theatre, but we want to go back to doing the chamber operas we brought to San Diego in the past decade. We also want to expand our engagement. We want to preserve what we’ve done with great excellence and prepare ourselves for a strong future.”
The five-year plan
The company’s four-pronged strategic business plan is mapped out from the current 2024-25 season through the 2028-29 season, with measured goals for each year.
Some of the goals for year one have already been met, including the expansion of performances per production at the Civic from two to three, and the recent hiring of two department director: Bernardo Bermudez, co-founder of San Diego’s Opera4Kids and a professional tenor, is the company’s new director of learning and engagement, and Ed Hofmeister, formerly of Miami’s Florida Grand Opera and San Diego’s Old Globe, is the new director of marketing and communications. The search for a new director of finance and operations is now under way.
Artistic innovation
The plan’s first goal area is focused on artistic innovation. Over the next five seasons, the company plans to enhance its use of projections as a cost-efficient storytelling tool; bring back its chamber opera series; and look into the feasibility of co-productions with other San Diego arts organizations, including the Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse and San Diego Symphony.
The plan’s second goal area is the commissioning of new operas that would be produced by other companies nationwide. This not only expands the American operatic canon, but also helps raise the profile of San Diego Opera as a generator of new works.
San Diego Opera’s world premiere co-commission of Gabriela Lena Frank and Nilo Cruz’s “El último sueño de Frida y Diego,” presented here in 2022, has been presented around the country and will be staged by New York’s Metropolitan Opera during its 2025-26 season.
Bennett said the company’s goal will be to commission a new opera roughly every other year with development and production taking place within a two- to three-year cycle.
“We want to be seen as a leader in taking the care to develop new work, to shepherd it and expand the canon of opera,” he said.
Young artists program
Goal No. 3 is to re-establish the company’s resident artist program.
For a few decades, San Diego Opera had a paid ensemble of early-career opera singers who performed live concerts and shortened operas for student and community audiences around the county. The singers also performed small roles in mainstage operas. The program was funded by an arts foundation, but when that external funding ran out several years ago, the program was discontinued.
Rebuilding the program will take time. This season, fundraising has begun and the company will establish the Forbes Prize, a vocal competition for young professional singers named after former San Diego Opera staff member Jim Forbes. It will offer both a cash prize and an onstage role in a mainstage production.
Next season an administrator will be hired for the resident artist program and the goal is to have the program up and running during the 2026-27 season.
“Part of it is similar to our aspirations for the commissioning goal,” Bennett said. “We want to be sure we’re part of building the future of opera (as) a place that preparers young singers and helps prepare them for a long a fruitful career.”
Bennett said San Diego Opera has a long and rich history of serving as a launching pad for young artists on their way up, including Plácido Domingo in 1966 (“Faust”), Luciano Pavarotti in 1980 (“La bohème”) and Renée Fleming in “Eugene Onegin” (1994).
San Diego Opera is also one of the first American opera companies to have a woman resident conductor, Karen Keltner, who retired in 2014 after 35 years with the company.
Bennett said there are also many former San Diego Opera staff members, including directors, assistant choreographers and stage managers, who have moved on to leadership positions with other companies.
Audience engagement
Goal No. 4 is to increase the impact of the learning and engagement programs.
Bermudez, the department’s newly appointed director, will focus in future years on evolving the Words and Music school-based performance program; expanding the Student Night at the Opera program; creating a program for opera educators for free pre-opera lectures; launching an adult learning program; developing a program to encourage careers in offstage roles with San Diego Opera; and launching the California Voices program for new operas that represent the state’s diverse population.
By the 2026-27 season, the engagement program will grow to include its first California Voices opera commission.
To make all of these plans come to fruition, the company has recently embarked on its five-year philanthropy plan, overseen by Chief Philanthropy Officer Llewellyn Crain, who joined San Diego Opera last year after serving for seven years as director of philanthropy for the Old Globe, and five years before that in a similar position with the Kansas City Symphony.
Bennett said he’s “cautiously optimistic” about meeting future fundraising goals. The growth of the company’s endowment is one indicator of past philanthropic success. Over the past 10 years, it has grown from $4 million to $10 million.
“New donors are coming to us who are quite generous and the majority of donors who were here when I arrived in 2015 are still with us,” he said. “This campaign is aspirational but rooted in goals that I feel will make the opera have a deeper impact that I know our donors want.”
SAN DIEGO OPERA HISTORIC TIMELINE
1950 – The San Diego Opera Guild is formed as a presenting group to sold tickets for touring opera productions by San Francisco Opera and other companies.
1965 – San Diego Opera is officially founded by the San Diego Opera Guild with Walter Herbert as its first artistic director. Its first production was Giacomo Puccini’s “La bohème” at the newly opened San Diego Civic Theatre. Initially all of the operas were sung in English rather than their original languages.
1966 – A young Plácido Domingo, substituting for an indisposed tenor in Gounod’s “Faust,” sang the role in its original French while the rest of the cast sang in English.
1970 – Opera superstar Beverly Sills plays Olympia, Giulietta, Antonia, and Stella in Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann.” She would return in 1974 to star in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” and in 1980 to co-star with Joan Sutherland in “Die Fledermaus.”
1975 – Following the death of Walter Herbert, Argentine stage director Tito Capobianco takes over as general director, leading a period of rapid expansion through 1983.
1976 – Capobianco introduces the summer Verdi Festival, which featured two operas by Giuseppe Verdi presented eight times before folding in 1985.
1980 – Tenor Luciano Pavarotti stars as Rodolfo in “La bohème.” In October 1992, San Diego Opera co-sponsored Pavarotti’s return to San Diego in a recital at the San Diego Sports Arena.
1981 – Conductor Karen Keltner makes her company debut as maestro for Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges.”
1983 – Capobianco resigns in a messy public dispute with the board over rising costs and declining ticket sales. Ian Campbell is hired as general and artistic director and CEO. His leadership is remembered for producing operas with international casts and decades of balanced budgets. But growing financial problems would lead to the company’s sudden and unexpected near-shutdown in 2014.
1985 – Italian bass Ferruccio Furlenatto makes his debut in the U.S. premiere of Verdi’s “Oberto,” launching a relationship with the company of more than 30 years. In 2016, he would donate his services in a fundraising recital for the company.
1994 – Daniel Catán’s opera “Rappaccini’s Daughter” makes its U.S. debut, making the first time a professional opera company had produced an opera by a Mexican composer.
1995 – Soprano Renée Fleming makes her company debut as Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” followed by an appearance in “Rusalka” in 1995.
1995 – Patricia Racette makes her company debut as Mimi in “La bohème.” She would return over the years for three more roles and a recital.
1997 – “The Conquistador,” Myron Fink’s opera about the Spanish persecution of refugee Jews in 16th-century colonial Mexico, makes its world premiere with San Diego Opera.
2001 – British designer and part-time San Diegan Zandra Rhodes creates the production design for “The Magic Flute.” She went on to design “The Pearl Fishers” in 2004 and “Aida” in 2012.
2007 – La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff directs the company’s first production of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” starring Franz Hawlata.
2012 – Jake Heggie’s “Moby-Dick,” featuring a sharply raked stage and visually stunning seascape projections, makes its West Coast premiere at the Civic.
.2013 – The company produces its first mariachi opera, José “Pepe” Martinez’s “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of the Moon).” The company would go on to produce two more mariachi operas, one by “Pepe” in 2016 and one his son, Javier, in 2023. All three featured librettos by Leonard Foglia.
2014 – An all-star cast of singers perform a season-closing production of Verdi’s “Requiem,” which took on significant meaning with the shocking announcement the company would soon shut down due to financial problems previously undisclosed to the public.
2014 – San Diego Opera employees and a small group of rebel board members fight an uphill battle to rescue the company from closure. More than a dozen board members resign in protest and Campbell leaves the company. By the end of the summer — with help from a $1 million donation from new board president Carol Lazier and $2.1 million raised in a global crowd-funding campaign — the company is saved.
2014 – On Sept. 5, singers Ailyn Pérez and Stephen Costello perform a recital to mark the company’s rescue and its 50th anniversary season, which is reduced in size as part of the company’s new fiscal conservatism.
2015 – In June, David Bennett, formerly of Gotham Chamber Opera in New York, takes on the role of general director of San Diego Opera.
2016 – The Detour series of non-traditional and chamber operas kicks off with “Soldier Songs” and “The Tragedy oft Carmen,” both presented at the Balboa Theatre.
2019 – Soprano Michelle Bradley makes her company and U.S. debut in the title role of “Aida.”
2020 – San Diego Opera is the first professional opera company in the US to produce before a live audience during the pandemic, with a drive-in “La bohème” in the parking lot of Pechanga Arena in San Diego’s Midway District.
2022 – San Diego Opera returns to the Civic Theatre following the lifting of indoor-gathering restrictions post-pandemic, but season budgets have been reduced.
2022 – San Diego presents the world premiere of Gabriela Lena Frank and Nilo Cruz’s co-commissioned Spanish-language opera “El último sueño de Frida y Diego.” The opera about Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera will make its Metropolitan Opera debut in the New York company’s 2025-26 season.
2024 – San Diego Opera celebrates the launch of 60th season with announcement of five-year strategic business plan.
