When Ned Canty became general director of Opera Memphis in January 2011, the company was in trouble. Founded in 1958 by local citizens inspired by the Metropolitan Opera, which visited the city regularly from 1946 through 1984 as part of its annual tour, it was unable to support its traditional template of three expensive, large-scale productions a year in the 2,300-seat Orpheum Theatre. Rather than despair, Canty saw the company’s struggle for funding and a mainstage audience as an opportunity: “You have to ask the hard question — is the way we are doing this best for the cause of opera in Memphis?” he says. “For me, the answer was no.”

Enter Daniel Anglin, a young IT executive, once a member of the company’s chorus, who was recruited to the opera board in 2011. With the aid of financial models created by Anglin, Canty persuaded the board that performing in smaller theaters while at the same time radically expanding the company’s civic practice activity was not just the route to sustainability, but the way, as he puts it, to “put ‘Memphis’ back in Opera Memphis.”

Today, the company is thriving, with a $1.5 million budget and a broad spectrum of work that reaches every zip code in the “Home of Blues, Soul, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

Other opera companies around the country have faced similar perils and come to the conclusion that committed civic practice can be a route to institutional sustainability. Widening their reach beyond mainstage performances has resulted in strengthened relationships with many new areas of their communities, as well as giving them credibility with elected officials and funders. Memphis, where OPERA America will hold its annual conference in May, provides a dramatically successful example of this adaptation, demonstrating how it is possible for an opera company to rethink — and remake — itself from the ground up.

Company makeover

In the process of reinventing itself, Opera Memphis has reduced its annual budget and relocated its headquarters. The company still performs a regular schedule of operas, but in smaller, more cost-effective theaters. This year’s lineup includes The Rake’s Progress, Carmen, and La Calisto, which takes place during the conference. The company also collaborates on performances with the Memphis Symphony and presents several small-scale programs of music and one-act operas at its headquarters. Its experiments include a multi-opera festival, which was offered for several seasons in its spring slot.

Civic practice activities receive equal care and attention. One of the company’s most visible initiatives is 30 Days of Opera, launched in September 2012, and now an annual September event. Free daily activities at locations all over “Grind City” range from a pop-up aria at a traffic intersection to a full-scale outdoor concert. For Canty, the most important aspect of 30 Days and indeed all of Opera Memphis’s non-traditional work is that “We treat it incredibly seriously. We want to be sure that five kids in a library are getting the experience they deserve, not a siloed event to provide a photo for our fundraising materials.”

To do that effectively, the company has built relationships with many Memphis cultural organizations. One of the longest is with Stax Music Academy, an afterschool and summer music institute named for the famous 1960s–70s soul record label Stax Records, in the Soulsville neighborhood. That partnership began during Canty’s first year with an offer of free opera tickets to any Stax student who wanted to come; that same season, Stax students performed as the Die Fledermaus party entertainment. (“I’m still pretty sure that ours is the only Fledermaus to ever feature an a capella mash-up of ‘Balm in Gilead’ and the theme from Shaft,” Canty says.) Opera Memphis helps with classical training for the school’s voice students through visits by its resident artists and a dedicated voice teacher. The company also includes Stax students in its chorus — in January 2023, 10 Stax students were part of the “Te Deum” in Tosca — and offers free coachings for college audition repertory, and links them to other experiences in the professional music world. In one high-profile example, a Stax student auditioned for Fire Shut Up in My Bones at the Metropolitan Opera in 2021 and was engaged to cover the role of Char’es-Baby; two seasons later, his younger brother, also a Stax student, played Young Malcolm in the Met’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.

Other company projects include work in amateur choral music, such as a collaboration with the Memphis organization Creative Aging for weekly singing classes open to anyone over 65, and the launch of a military chorus with the veterans who performed in Opera Memphis’ successful commissioned work The Falling and the Rising. The company has an ongoing partnership with Cazateatro, a Latino bilingual theater company, and Dixon Gallery and Gardens for an annual Spanish-language Christmas Fiesta. Rachel Knox, a leading convener for cultural advocacy in Memphis and a senior program officer at the Hyde Family Foundation — which includes a focus on arts and culture in its mission to “build a better Memphis” — cites this event as “a great example of a project embracing all facets of Memphis culture, with Opera Memphis using their visibility and their brand in the community to shed light on great work that people might not know about.”

Two-way street

For Canty, the objective is to be an integral part of the arts and cultural ecosystem in Memphis that makes the city better. “You are an organization doing amazing work that overlaps with our mission — what resources do we have that you don’t that we could share without breaking the bank or hurting our mission?” Organizations are encouraged to call on Opera Memphis — whether the need is for a light-hearted, palate-cleansing skit for a social service organization’s fundraiser, use of rehearsal space, or printing services.

Memphis is what Canty calls a “Goldilocks-sized” city, its manageable size facilitating communication and collaboration among different-sized groups. “You’re never more than one degree away from anyone at any other organization,” he says. “I could get on the phone with any arts leader in town if I really needed to.” One avenue for this is the Memphis Cultural Coalition, started in 2016 by Brett Batterson, head of Memphis’ Orpheum Theatre, to bring together directors of all the city’s arts groups for monthly conversations. Part of its mission is strength in numbers; a side advantage is the development of an informal bartering system, as when Opera Memphis lent a small theater company Elizabethan costumes for a show, and its executive director, an actor, played Toby in their production of The Medium.

Arts and culture have recently received a new boost in Memphis. Under its new mayor, Paul Young, elected in 2024, Memphis created an Office of Creative and Cultural Economy. Hyde’s Rachel Knox, who worked on the establishment of the office and helped raise private funding for its first year, sees it as essential. “It’s long overdue, considering the outsize influence that Memphis has always had on music,” Knox says. “Memphis is one of the few cities with a population of over 500,000 that didn’t have [an arts and culture department within the city government]. I hope that it will help us be able to better resource for our cultural organizations and creative enterprises and give us opportunities to showcase all the work that is happening here.” The office’s three-fold strategy will include financial investment, the creation of artist-friendly policy, and communications.

New on the block

In pursuing its strategy of becoming a community citizen, Opera Memphis has changed structurally. In addition to performing in smaller theaters, several years ago the company sold its large headquarters on the east side of the city and moved to a smaller space in a more central, walkable neighborhood. “It was a beautiful building, but we didn’t really need it,” says board member Anglin. A fund made up of the proceeds from the sale of the building is one of seven that now provide annual support for Opera Memphis’ current operations. The company’s transformation has also worked out financially in other ways. “Given how small a percentage ticket sales represent in opera company budgets, civic practice activities are the only reason we have been able to thrive,” Anglin says. “Some of these things have paid for themselves through investment from the community. We’ve made money on 30 Days of Opera!” Funders outside Memphis — including the NEA — have likewise proved eager to support company initiatives.

The Hyde Family Foundation has also taken a new interest in Opera Memphis. “When I started at the foundation in 2017, we were looking for the next generation of institutions deserving startup support and seeing how our legacy institutions could evolve and not do the status quo,” says Knox. “Under Ned’s leadership, Opera Memphis has been exceptionally thoughtful about how institutions can honor their history and legacy, and at the same time bring in new communities and stay relevant.”

Hyde’s first grant was for a production of La bohème set on Beale Street in 1915, with an all-Black cast. Twice postponed due to the pandemic, the show was finally presented in May 2024, the culmination of many years of conversations with members of the Black community. It was directed by Dennis Whitehead Darling, who, in 2018, was the company’s inaugural McCleave Fellow, a project designed to advance the careers of stage and music directors of color. (Two OPERA America Innovation Grants, in 2017 and 2018, helped support the McCleave project.) The production’s chorus was a collaboration between the company and the Memphis Black Arts Alliance, plus some students from Stax.

The ripples from that successful show are still making themselves felt. “We could see it in our chorus auditions for this season — there were many new people whose friends had been in the Bohème chorus,” Canty says. “And it’s not just the new audience and new artists, but volunteers! Having this fresh new group of exciting folks, willing to scan tickets and welcome people — that’s an unexpected benefit.”

What elements of Opera Memphis’ turnaround are replicable by others? Says Anglin, who has served as treasurer and chair of the company’s board, “All of them, but don’t emulate the conclusions, emulate the process. We looked around Memphis to see what we could connect with in our community. From that, we decided what to program and what to do. Not everything is a success, and that’s OK. You learn from it, reformulate it, and try again.” Anglin sees adaptability as key. “You are learning and evolving. You may love something, but if it’s not clicking, maybe take the pieces you love forward to what’s next.”

And the work continues. Canty says, “I tell the board often, it took American opera decades and decades to teach Americans that opera was only for rich, elite people. We won’t change that overnight. We won’t change it by one pop-up on Beale Street. It’s the work of decades.”