Santa Fe Opera Continues to Draw Performers From Across the Globe

In 1956, in the high desert just north of Santa Fe, N.M., a young New York conductor had a vision to build an outdoor opera house. Many scoffed at such an idea in the Southwest, but John Crosby persisted. He had fallen in love with opera as a young man attending the Metropolitan Opera.

Nearly 70 years later, the Santa Fe Opera, which opens its annual two-month season on June 27, attracts singers, directors, stage designers and conductors from across the globe. In many ways it has a sort of operatic pipeline to New York and the Metropolitan Opera.

“There’s this wonderful legacy of artists who have had their debut here and gone onto the Met and other houses,” Robert K. Meya, general director of the Santa Fe Opera, said during a recent phone interview. “And John Crosby’s vision was very tied to the Metropolitan Opera. He first heard Richard Strauss at the Met, and he moved very quickly to bring many of Strauss’s first operas to Santa Fe years later.”

That early vision of championing Strauss’s lesser-known works defined the company — six of his operas had their professional U.S. debuts in Santa Fe, including “Capriccio” in 1958 and “Intermezzo” in 1984 — in the decades after his death in 1949.

Crosby’s vision to stage a world premiere or a U.S. premiere almost every season among its five annual productions has also distinguished the company.