OPERA THEATER
Founded in 1946 in Boston--where it was quickly acclaimed as "the most important musical enterprise begun here since the founding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra sixty-five years ago" --Opera Theater has been writing history ever since, demonstrating with spectacular success that the lyric masterpieces of Mozart and Puccini can be convincing and absorbing drama, subtle or rollicking comedy, rather than mere boring displays of vocal pyrotechnics…that their texts, intelligently translated into English and intelligibly set forth by performers as thoroughly schooled in dramatic nuance as in the emission of pearly tone, can make sense to the 20th Century American public...that their leading roles can be assumed with irreproachable vocalism and musicianship by good-looking young people who comport overstuffed sofas or clumsy windmills gyrating in space. Opera Theater, in fact, brings to reality for the first time the ideal which its name implies and which its founder, Boris Goldovsky has so long and notably championed-the perfect integration of musical and dramatic elements whereby great opera becomes, for the least opera-minded member of a vast new public, great theater as well.
While eschewing the star system as a matter of artistic policy, Opera Theater is justly proud of its record of star-making and has brought to the fore many of the most important young American singing-actors now on the rosters of the Metropolitan Opera Association and of the other great lyric theaters of the world. The opera workshops of a number of leading conservatories and universities across the United States are likewise headed by young men and women trained by Opera Theater. The Company’s consistently sold-out seasons have also varies such basic repertoires as Carmen, The Marriage of Figaro, La Boheme and Rigoletto with works by acknowledged master like Mozart's Idomeneo, Berlioz' The Trojans and Britten's Albert Herring, which it revived after 120 years. The intensive Goldovsky musicological researches moreover, have led to the restoration in Opera Theater performances of original scenes, passages and stage effects lost through generations of indifferent productions.