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Company
History
Glimmerglass Opera came into being through the efforts of local
Cooperstown residents — musicians, artists, educators and
lovers of the art form — who hoped to bring opera to
their community. As the founders wrote in the first season's program,
"Cooperstown was chosen because of its glorious natural beauty
and its important place in the heritage of America. We believe
strongly that a performing arts festival belongs here; that the
area is right for it, and that it is right for the area."
The
newly-founded company presented its first season in the summer
of 1975, when four performances of La Bohème were
staged in the auditorium of the Cooperstown High School before
a cumulative audience of 1,200 local residents. In the years since,
Glimmerglass has grown to international stature and now offers
more than 40 performances of four operas, all in new productions, each season.
The community continues its support through local members of the
Glimmerglass Opera Chorus, supernumeraries and the Glimmerglass
Opera Guild, a volunteer group that assists the company with
numerous fund-raisers and special events.
Operas
have been performed in repertory since 1990. For the first 17 seasons all operas were sung
in English; since 1992 they have, with some exceptions, been performed
in their original language with projected English titles.
The
company's acclaimed Alice Busch Opera Theater, which opened in
June 1987, is located along the shores of Otsego Lake, the "Glimmerglass"
of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, on 43
acres of farmland donated by the late Glimmerglass board chairman
emeritus, Tom Goodyear, and his mother, Jeanette Bissell Goodyear.
The intimate 900-seat theater — the first American hall built
specifically for opera in the twenty years following the opening
of the new Metropolitan Opera house in 1966 — was designed
by Hugh Hardy of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates with acoustics
by Peter George Associates. Unusual sliding walls, which allow
the audience to enjoy fresh air and views of the surrounding countryside
prior to performances and during intermissions, are a unique feature
of the theater.
Since
its inauguration the Alice Busch Opera Theater has been home to
more than 50 different productions, including the world premiere
of A Question of Taste, commissioned from William Schuman
(1989), the American premiere of Mozart's Il Re Pastore
(1991), and, in 1993, the world-premiere production of David Carlson's
The Midnight Angel, co-commissioned and co-produced by
Glimmerglass with the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Sacramento
Opera. The 1999 Festival Season featured the world premiere of
Central Park, three one-act operas performed as a single
work, with scores by Robert Beaser, Deborah Drattell, and Michael
Torke to librettos by Terrence McNally, Wendy Wasserstein, and
A.R. Gurney. The triptych was jointly commissioned by Glimmerglass
Opera, New York City Opera, and Thirteen/WNET's Great Performances,
which telecast it on PBS in January 2000, subsequently receiving
an Emmy nomination.
Glimmerglass
Opera has attracted superior directors, designers and conductors,
as well as accomplished performers from around the world. Jonathan
Miller, Mark Lamos, Martha Clarke, Francesca Zambello, Simon Callow,
Robert Wierzel, Michael Yeargan, David Daniels, Christine Goerke
and Lauren Flanigan are among the directors, designers, and singers
whose work has been seen and heard at Glimmerglass.
The
Young American Artists Program, established in 1988, brings exceptional
singers in the first stages of their professional careers to study
and perform in the creative and demanding atmosphere of Glimmerglass.
These young artists, many of whom hold degrees from prominent
conservatories, are chosen annually from hundreds of applicants
from throughout the United States. Each summer members of the
Young American Artists Program will appear in a mainstage production
and give a solo song recital in Cooperstown or Cherry Valley.
Glimmerglass
Opera has also played an increasingly prominent role in the musical
life of New York City. In January 1996 its acclaimed production
of Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea was presented
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in five sold-out performances,
and that same year the company's ties to New York City were further
strengthened when Paul Kellogg, General Director of Glimmerglass
Opera for seventeen years, was named General and Artistic Director
of New York City Opera. With Kellogg as Artistic Director
at Glimmerglass, the two companies established an informal
partnership in which Glimmerglass productions joined the
New York City Opera repertory.
Co-productions
with New York City Opera are created at Glimmerglass and have
their first performances here, and all decisions about repertory,
casting, directors and designers are taken with Glimmerglass
Opera's artistic mission and festival requirements as first considerations.
Consequently, as Newsday recently noted, "Glimmerglass
has become the source of a river of ideas that flows toward Manhattan."
Collaborations with other companies, which have included Boston
Lyric Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Opera North, UK, and Houston
Grand Opera, will continue as well.
Glimmerglass
has been fortunate in the recognition it has received from important
sources of funding. They include the National Endowment for the
Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, Corning Incorporated, Philip Morris Companies, Inc.,
The Virgil Thomson Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music,
The Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust, The Clark Foundation,
The Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation, The International Music
and Art Foundation, The Alice Busch Gronewaldt Foundation, The
Woodcock Foundation, The Pacificus Foundation, and The Florence
Gould Foundation.
The
unspoiled beauty of upstate New York's rural landscape provides
what The Sunday Times of London has called "the most
magical of settings" for Glimmerglass performances. The Glimmerglass
experience — an informal picnic with friends on the grounds
of the Alice Busch Opera Theater, a leisurely stroll along the
lake, champagne under the bright summer stars, and music/theater
of international reputation — is unique in the realm of opera. |
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