In the ballroom of the Peabody Hotel in Mem­phis, silenced phones began to chirp during the opening session of Opera Conference 2025. As if the typical whirl and bustle of a national conference weren’t enough, high winds and storms spurred local author­ities to declare a tornado watch just as leaders in the field launched into discus­sions of the future of the field.

Brainstorm indeed.

The tornado watch passed without incident, but it’s not hard to draw parallels between that storm and the challenges facing the opera field in recent years, which include erratic attendance in the post-pandemic years, declining subscriptions, and shifting patterns of philan­thropy. Panelists at the conference’s opening session, a range of artists and admin­istrators, approached these with measured optimism, considered urgency, and unbridled creativity, propos­ing a variety of solutions.

“You can tell people, ‘We’re going to run out of oil in 50 years,’ but that doesn’t feel like a near enough cri­sis to motivate people,” says Michael Hidetoshi Mori, general director and artistic director of Tapestry Opera in Toronto.

He continues: “For us, the last generation that grew up listening to records on the radio is dying, and the sta­tistics show that they are the biggest donors to opera com­panies, because they built their association with opera through very formative expe­riences as children. Plus, over the last 30 years, we have seen attrition of one to five percent of our audiences each year. We can’t assume our business model is going to continue to operate as it does now. It may not feel like a real crisis, yet, but we must act now.”

Mori’s and others’ calls to action generally fell into one of three broad topics: first, addressing declining edu­cation about opera; second, acknowledging and attend­ing to internal and external communications issues; and third, adjusting the busi­ness model to borrow ideas from the art form’s cous­ins in the Broadway and orchestral spheres. In indi­vidual interviews with Opera America Magazine, the panel­ists discussed emphasizing local artists, creating art that reflects artists’ personal values, developing better internal communications practices at companies, and a renewed commitment to new works as essential ingredi­ents for the opera field in the decades to come.

Semantic shift

“Opera has an access problem and a PR problem,” says con­ductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, music director of Chicago Opera Theater and a staunch advocate for new opera. In the lobby of the Peabody, a mechanical piano plucked out old Great American Songbook tunes with a light twang. Con­versations with some of the hotel’s non-conference-attending guests confirmed that many still see opera as an elite art form, a perception backed by public research in recent years.

“The number of people I meet who are quite educated or have a marginal connec­tion to music and have never been to an opera is simply astounding,” Yankovskaya continues. “There are so many people who don’t under­stand the power of this art form simply because they’ve never experienced it.” She argues that as music edu­cation dwindles in schools, opera companies themselves need to shoulder more of the burden to inspire and edu­cate children. And while Yankovskaya acknowledges that many companies are seeing success in creating digital and in-person educa­tion programs, she says that in her capacity as guest con­ductor, she sees potential for more integration between the education and artistic depart­ments at opera companies.

In fact, she says that silos are stifling essential work companies need to take on in the years to come. “When I travel to different compa­nies, I make a point of saying, I’m happy to be involved in any kinds of school initiatives that you do,” she says, noting that educational partnerships take time to develop and need to be prioritized as a core company activity.

Other speakers asserted that the vocabulary art­ists and staff use to discuss opera with each other and the public can be impen­etrable, or at least, not clearly convey information about the art form. “It mat­ters how you talk to donors to make them aware of the larger reality of what they’re investing in. It matters how you talk to the staff about how they are representatives of the art form off stage,” says singer Davóne Tines.

“My instinct when I was younger was to use those jargony terms when I talked about opera,” says E. Loren Meeker, general and artistic director at OPERA San Anto­nio and a board member of OPERA America. “But now I think we have to take the opposite approach. We need to stop gatekeeping and start creating opportunities for folks to just learn. We need to make that an exciting and joy­ful process.”

New revenue

Opera has always sub­sisted on donations as well as ticket sales, but as com­poser David T. Little points out, rising costs are increas­ing reliance on donations, especially as ticket revenue accounts for less and less of company budgets.

Instead of exhausting donors or increasing ticket prices, Little proposes that companies identify new revenue streams, including for-profit enterprises, to help fund the artistic side of the business. Little cites the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Hollywood Bowl as a way for a nonprofit to earn revenue (actually, many orchestras have a pops series that helps subsidize their classical series), as well as Detroit Opera’s parking garage operation.

“This isn’t new in a way. It’s a little like singers and artists working day jobs to support their creative work,” says Little. Some opera com­panies are pivoting to perform more Broadway repertoire with operatic flair like West Side Story and Sweeney Todd during their seasons, but they have not yet created separate series. It’s also worth not­ing that these productions are not “profitable” either, though they tend to earn more ticket revenue than traditional operas at times. “We can’t, as an industry, operate from a place where we are programming based on fear,” Little says. “I think we need to start thinking very quickly about models that exist in other art forms that can thrive in the world we already inhabit.”

Outside of increasing revenue, Yankovskaya proposes that a way to reduce costs is by tapping and developing local artistic communities. Many companies around the country have early-career residencies for singers, but Yankovskaya suggests taking this idea a step further and signing artists for multi-year contracts. Such a move could reduce travel and housing costs and help build a local following for individual artists rather than relying on an “outdated” practice of flying artists from other cities to perform every role. “When I got to Chicago Opera Theater, now almost a decade ago, the company wasn’t hiring local singers at all,” Yankovskaya says.

Today, the company makes a point of hiring local when possible: “I just started doing local auditions every year. In this country, we have this extreme bias that the local is never good enough, and we always want something exotic. This must change.”

There is no single solution to weathering the storm facing opera — and the arts as a whole — in the coming years. Pushing the field into its next generation will take creativity, drive, and urgency, but leaders remain convinced that opera will remain a vibrant part of North America’s creative economy. Tapestry Opera’s Michael Hidetoshi Mori concludes with a final pitch for continued investment in new work at opera companies, which he insists must become a more significant part of companies’ seasons in the years and decades to come. “We need a diversified product ... wow, I’m talking like a business person,” he says, laughing.

“When I became a leader of a company, all of my aspirations were artistic and visionary. And then, I slowly realized we are investing much more in upholding what already exists instead of in our future, which must include programming new operas. We can’t only prioritize upholding what already exists.”