About

The Company

 
 

OPERA San Antonio’s mission is to produce opera of uncompromising artistic quality and to enrich our community through educational outreach and social engagement. The company is committed to preserving and sharing opera as an art form that is relevant, inspirational, and accessible to residents and visitors of all ages and backgrounds.  The civic premise of OPERA San Antonio is that the community needs, and the citizens deserve, access to the major performing arts.

 
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Our goals

  • Presenting extraordinary artists: Established, emerging, and local talent are brought together to create a transcendent experience that engages our public and propels opera into the future.

  • Social Responsibility: We strive to broaden the impact of opera on the community by producing works in diverse venues throughout the city.  These intimate settings expand the operatic repertoire to include modern works, works that speak to the diverse communities of San Antonio, and works that provide depth to the social fabric of San Antonio.

  • Bringing grand opera to a grand city: We showcase masterpieces of the operatic canon with world-class productions at the Tobin Center.

  • Educational Outreach: Our goal is to break down stereotypes and promote opera as an accessible and relevant art form  by exploring underlying and recurring themes present in today’s society. We take great joy in cultivating a love for opera and the arts in our youth to ensure the strengthening of our city’s cultural impact in our modern age.  We achieve this through active community engagement and educational outreach.


OPERA San Antonio is reintroducing this great art to our city. We believe that San Antonio deserves great opera as a civic resource for all our citizens.
— Blair Labatt, Chairman

Why OPERA Is Extraordinary

  • Because it is performed on a unique instrument, the human voice, a special voice created through years of training and using no microphones.

  • Because the sound is a sound that literally expands our sense of hearing.

  • Because it is about people. It is a world of people in moments of deeply felt human emotion, a world of classic stories with characters.

  • Because the human voice can create emotion like no other instrument can. As the great British scholar Kenneth Clark wrote in Civilization, “What is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing, or too mysterious — these things can be sung, and can only be sung.”

  • Finally, because we believe opera is magical.