On a recent morning at the Wortham Theater Center, home of Houston Grand Opera, the orchestra was playing through the intense score of Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 opera “Breaking the Waves.” Led by the conductor Patrick Summers, the players fine-tuned eerie glissando slides and dug into Mazzoli’s creaking, scratching effects.
At the same time, a few floors down, the young bass Alexandros Stavrakakis was at a coaching session, trying to find depths in the often dry Landgraf in Wagner’s “Tannhaüser.” Stavrakakis was singing his role for the first time, like the rest of the “Tannhaüser” cast — a bold move for a Wagner opera at a major company.
It was a reminder of another moment when old and new came together in Houston. In 1987, the Wortham opened with a pairing that was also a kind of manifesto: Verdi’s “Aida” and the world premiere of John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” a statement that opera’s past and present could surge toward the future in Texas.
At that point, it had been just over 30 years since Houston Grand Opera’s scrappy beginnings, but it already had a reputation for being the rare American company fully invested in fostering new American work.
It has been an early adopter of populist innovations like above-the-stage translations and outdoor simulcasts. It has shown resilience, too: Displaced for a season when the Wortham was flooded by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the company moved to a convention center and didn’t miss a performance.
Now, at 70, it continues to be a model for the field.
With many opera companies in a doom loop of shrinkage caused by rising costs and stagnant (or worse) earnings, Houston has proved an exception. Driven by creative leadership and generous donors, its programming budget has risen steadily. By this summer, its endowment will have increased to nearly $120 million — almost double what it was five years ago.
“I’m trying to push the boundaries of self-esteem for H.G.O.,” said Khori Dastoor, 44, the company’s chief executive since 2021. “It starts with deciding and feeling that we can be leaders, instead of always comparing ourselves with bigger markets and larger institutions.”
Even a success story in opera is one of struggles: for audiences, for fresh repertory, for relevance. The larger of the Wortham’s two theaters has a capacity of about 2,400, significantly fewer seats than some major American houses, yet a standard like “La Bohème” was only 70 percent sold this winter.
Still, the company’s ticket sales are stronger than just before the pandemic. Labor relations are calm. A robust reserve fund created after Harvey has provided a cushion for experimentation.
Over a few days of rehearsals and interviews recently, the high quality of the work was clear. The orchestra has an easy rapport with Summers, the music director since the late 1990s. The chorus rehearses nights and weekends, with a group that includes teachers, doctors and lawyers as well as professional singers — but, led by Richard Bado, who has been with the company since 1984, it made a nuanced, mighty sound at the close of “Tannhaüser.”
More unusual, everyone attested to a palpable sense of stability and warmth, in a field better known for deficit cycles and fraught relations among employees and management.
“A lot of the time you don’t really recognize the good times when they’re happening,” said Dennis Whittaker, a bassist in the orchestra for almost 30 years. “But this is a good time.”
As Houston grows, its larger peers are on ever more tenuous footing. The Metropolitan Opera, still the country’s titan, has been forced to raid its endowment and trim its performance schedule.
Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera’s seasons have been slashed to roughly 40 main stage performances of six titles, around the same volume Houston has maintained for years. But because of legacy labor contracts and other overhead costs, Chicago’s annual budget is over $70 million and San Francisco’s nearly $90 million, figures that are perilously difficult to cover as productivity declines. Houston spends just $33 million for a similar output.
Without consistent sellouts, Dastoor is not looking to add more main stage productions any time soon, but she is insistent that the company does need to get bigger.
“Maintenance of the current audience will lead to failure,” she said. “The only viable path to sustainability is growth.”
After World War II, the city’s appetite for opera was whetted by touring visits from the Met, and Walter Herbert, a German conductor who had fled the Nazis, saw an opening. Houston Grand Opera was inaugurated with Strauss’s “Salome” — then still a daring choice that showed the venturesome spirit at the company’s core.
Finances were touch and go in those early years, but star singers like Jon Vickers and Beverly Sills began to appear, and in 1972 David Gockley, just 28, succeeded Herbert as general director, remaining in the position until 2005.
Gockley had vision and charisma at the right moment, with Houston’s wealth exploding as the oil industry boomed. In 1974, the company produced Thomas Pasatieri’s “The Seagull,” its first commissioned work of dozens to date. Over the next few years it gave the first fully professional performances of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” and a landmark version of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” with both productions transferring to Broadway.
The company formed a close relationship with the composer Carlisle Floyd, who helped found its young artist program. Gockley brought in some audacious interpretations of the classics, as well as musical theater that made sense alongside Verdi; in 1984, Houston was the first opera house to present Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.” Few other big companies would have had the patience and flexibility to germinate Meredith Monk’s unconventional “Atlas.”
The opening of the Wortham brought gleaming facilities, including an 1,100-seat second theater for more intimate pieces. When the Houston Symphony, which had collaborated with the opera since its founding, wanted to move on, Summers was hired to build a house orchestra.
After shaping an ensemble up for the challenge of scores like Wagner’s “Ring” and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s “The Passenger,” which toured to New York in 2014, Summers will step down as artistic and music director after next season.
“I admire Khori immensely,” he said, “and I wanted to stay long enough into her tenure to give her continuity. Now it feels like a natural stopping point.”
Finding his replacement is a priority for Dastoor, who trained as a soprano and attended “Tannhaüser” rehearsal with an open score in her lap, tapping out the piano part on the pages with her fingers. She came to Houston from Opera San José in California, which she led after a period working for the Packard Humanities Institute, a large family foundation that gave her insight into the mind-set of wealthy donors.
She has already shown skill at fund-raising: In 2023, a $22 million gift from Sarah and Ernest Butler was the largest in the company’s history. But the city’s donor base has long been said to be unusually committed.
“It’s a very Houston thing: ‘It has to be the best, and if it is, I will support you,’” Bado said. “So the support has not waned.”
Claire Liu, the chair of the company’s board, said: “Houston started as a really entrepreneurial environment, full of handshake deals. So people trust each other; people help each other. You have an incredibly philanthropic community. They want the city to be successful.”
Where will all that growth go, if not into main stage offerings? Marc Scorca, the chief executive of Opera America, a trade group, said that Houston, like its peers, needs “to show artistic and civic value outside the walls of the opera house, the opera bubble.” Under Gockley’s successor, Anthony Freud, the company invested in works that emerged from the community, like a mariachi opera and an oratorio based on interviews with immigrants in the Houston area.
Dastoor successfully tried out a Family Day performance this fall, and recently brought child-friendly work to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which attracts huge crowds. Forays like this outside the Wortham, already a focus of the company’s education and community partnerships, are expected to be an ever greater part of operations.
“If we’re going to 70, 80, 100 venues every season,” Dastoor said, “doing hundreds of events, that all informs the main stage. It isn’t on the side.”
Dastoor doesn’t rest on the company’s laurels or dismiss the obstacles it faces. “We don’t want to play to half-empty houses,” she said. “We want to find a sweet spot, to grow with the community and see what they respond to.”
The result, as everywhere in opera, is a mixture of chestnuts and riskier fare. Next season leans on “Porgy and Bess,” an audience favorite that will get nine performances, and runs of the stalwarts “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Barber of Seville.”
But there will also be Robert Wilson’s enigmatic staging of Handel’s “Messiah,” the company’s first production of Puccini’s “Il Trittico” and a revised version of Kevin Puts’s “Silent Night” that will travel to the Met. The young artist program, the Butler Studio, will put on Carlisle Floyd’s masterpiece, “Of Mice and Men,” in the Wortham’s smaller space; using that smaller theater more often is an aim for the coming years.
A major fund-raising campaign is in its early stages, of a size that Dastoor hopes will ensure the company’s freedom from year-after-year anxieties, once and for all.
“We could get off this hamster wheel,” she said. “My legacy, I hope, will be building an audience for opera in a modern American city.”
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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