Marc Scora (credit: Jc Olivera Photography)

If you want an aerial view of the US opera scene, Marc Scorca is your man. For the last 35 years, he has served as president and CEO of Opera America – a membership organisation comprised of more than 600 opera companies, educational institutions and other opera adjacent entities – but has recently announced his retirement. What better time, then, to find out what he sees from his perch.

I met up with Scorca on a warm March afternoon in the library of the National Opera Center, a well-0rganised nest of offices and rehearsal rooms plus a compact concert hall tucked away in an office building on Seventh Avenue in New York City. The facility, which opened in 2012, is but one of Scorca’s myriad achievements at Opera America.

‘You’re right, I do have a bird’s eye view,’ he says when I ask what’s the most striking development he sees from his unique perspective. ‘I sometimes tell people that I touch opera with oven mitts on, as I don’t quite feel the heat of the opera company but I’m still holding on to it. So, I’d say the single greatest development is the emergence of a diverse and rich American opera repertoire.

‘When I began at Opera America in 1990, productions of new American opera were a rare thing. People would sit up and take note when it was an American opera. And frequently they sat up, took note and ran because it was not something they were accustomed to, so it was a great risk to produce an American opera at that time. It was my predecessors – David Gottlieb, David DiChiera and Martin Kagan – who came to the conceptual decision to raise money from the private sector and from foundations, and to make grants to opera companies. We wanted to offset the increased expenses – commissioning fees and extra rehearsal time, for example – and also offset what at the time would have been decreased box office revenues. We hoped our companies would be more interested in doing new work if it were more economically neutral.’

Since the granting began, nearly four decades ago, Opera America has provided companies with around $25 million to support the creation and production of American opera. ‘We did not want to give money to individual composers and librettists,’ Scorca says, ‘because writing an opera over a period of years and then not having it produced was not something we wanted to encourage. We wanted to fund opera companies that had already made a commitment to doing the work. That was our granting philosophy. And we used our magazine, annual conferences and every one of the levers we had to promote the viability, the desirability and the excitement of producing new opera. That excitement slowly caught on, and we’ve never stopped banging the drum for it. And this year, the vast majority of our opera companies are producing either new or existing American opera.’

I ask Scorca what he says to those who complain that precious few of the new operas are masterpieces. ‘I have a whole recit, aria and cabaletta about that,’ he answers with a wry smile. ‘One example I use is: I was flying home yesterday and checked the screen on the back of the seat in front of me to see if there was any movie I wanted to watch. I probably scrolled through 100 options and had only heard of two or three. But out of that flow comes a film that’s really good, and every so often one makes it on to the list of the Best 100 Films Ever Made. Similarly, when I was in college, I read that in Europe in the 1780s, 1,000 operas a year were premiered. I began to catalogue them, and while I never got to 1,000, I easily could have. That’s the environment out of which you get the occasional Marriage of Figaro of 1786. We have to have this creative churn for us to have a vibrant art form.’

Were there any major turning points, I wonder, suggesting as possibilities John Adams’s Nixon in China (1987) and John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, which the Metropolitan Opera produced in 1991 with a cast that included Teresa Stratas and Marilyn Horne. ‘What’s interesting about Nixon in China – a landmark piece, absolutely, with huge visibility across the country and around the world – is that after the premiere production it went to sleep for a while until Opera Theater of St Louis put on a really wonderful production directed by Jim Robinson, and that went out to about a dozen other companies. And, absolutely, Ghosts of Versailles is another one I’d mention. That the Met – the landmark mothership, if you will – was also getting into new work, signalled that this was a way forward.

‘It’s interesting talking about works that go to sleep and are later revived. When I was a youngster going to the Met in the late ’70s and ’80s, I saw Leontyne Price in Il trovatore and Jon Vickers in Peter Grimes, but when it came to new work at the New York City Opera, well, it might as well have been Marc Scorca and his mother. And I’d say the general feeling was, more or less, “If that’s the cast, I really don’t want to see it.”’ Then, later into the 1990s you had Renée Fleming singing Carlisle Floyd’s Susanna everywhere – and that’s from 1957, so not a new work, but suddenly an American opera with a major star was moving to the big theatres. And you had Dead Man Walking with Susan Graham and Flicka, and Dangerous Liaisons with Flicka and Conrad Sousa. Then you get to Little Women – and Mark Adamo and Jake Heggie are both terrific personal ambassadors for opera as well as creators of works that people wanted to see. So it’s been gradual, yes, but having these major artists getting into the act and having very successful works that are connected to the world around us and the ball just accelerated down that hill.’

Marc A Scorca at an Opera America event in the 1990s 

And what about the effects of the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements? ‘I’ve talked about all the grants we’ve made over the years to support new work, and about 15 years ago we realised that from all that granting only five per cent of the works were by women. Thanks to the Virginia B Toulmin Foundation, we now have a programme that supports discovery and commissioning grants, and today, as a result, fully 50 per cent of the operas coming through the application pipeline are by women. And we have a similar programme for composers and librettists of colour.

‘You know, opera is a way to connect with the world around us, so we’ve made a concerted effort to enrich opera by elevating the voices of people who had not been fully represented on stage. And I think the success of many of these works results from this richness. What all people want is to see a reflection of their own life experiences and the talents of their brothers and sisters on our stages. We hope everyone who comes into the opera house will find joy in seeing Carmen or La bohème, but more people come to see a work when they feel it will connect to them in some fashion. The more we’re able to bring new audiences into the artform, the more likely we are to bring an energy with that – an energy that enlivens the entire industry.’

This featured originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Opera Now – Subscribe today!