Save the City Opera

New York City Opera, which was founded 70 years ago to bring opera to the masses, will be forced to cancel most of its current season and all of its next season if it fails to raise $20 million by year’s end, company officials say.

The cash crisis that City Opera is trying to overcome threatens the very survival of a company that has made opera accessible and cultivated important singers over the years, including Beverly Sills, Plácido Domingo and Renée Fleming. And it raises the question of whether New York will again be able to count itself among cultural capitals like Berlin and London that can support more than one major opera company.

“The company’s been living on the edge and hand-to-mouth for a number of years, and we’ve gotten through our own share of financial troubles,” George Steel, the company’s general manager and artistic director, said in a telephone interview last week. “We’ve had balanced budgets for the last two years, and we’ve been doing, I think, incredible work onstage. But we can’t forge ahead without a significant infusion of capital.”

The company’s $20 million fund-raising goal is nearly twice the $11.5 million it reported raising last year. And it is more than the troupe was able to raise in better times, before the recession, and before its squeezed finances forced it to abandon its old home in Lincoln Center, where it used to give more than 100 performances a season. The company has led a nomadic existence since leaving Lincoln Center in 2011, performing fewer than 20 times a year, often to critical praise, at theaters around the city. City Opera has tried to tap as it works to reinvent itself, the company will seek to raise $1 million of the $7 million it needs to raise by the end of the month through an online Kickstarter campaign.
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