Opera Philadelphia is putting its big Festival O on hold

Opera Philadelphia is putting its much-celebrated Festival O on hold.

The company — challenged by faltering attendance, a contracting budget, and increased operating costs — on Tuesday announced a 2024-25 season consisting of three productions at the Academy of Music, including the American premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s The Listeners.

But absent from the schedule is Festival O, which normally opens the fall season. The festival, which has built Opera Philadelphia’s reputation as one of the most innovative in the U.S., is on hiatus while the company rethinks its future, leaders said.

“It worked for a time, and then COVID happened and it’s not working the way it once did,” said Opera Philadelphia general director and president David B. Devan, who is slated to step down as general director and president May 31. “We need to think about something that might work better.”

In 2017, the Opera Philadelphia reorganized its season around the new festival format, seeking $75 million in donations to underwrite it over five years. Leaders, however, were able to raise only $61.4 million in six years.

In addition, post-COVID-19 audiences didn’t return in the numbers expected. In 2019, about 12,000 tickets were distributed for the O19 festival, but for the 2022 festival, the number dipped to 6,970, and in 2023 only reached 7,600 — or 59% of seats filled.

Next season is Opera Philadelphia’s 50th, and in a sneak peek announcement a year ago, the company said that O24 would include The Listeners as well as the world premiere of Woman with Eyes Closed by composer Jennifer Higdon and librettist Jerre Dye.

Now, there won’t be an O24, and Higdon’s work will be premiered elsewhere in the spring of 2025 and performed here in a season as-yet undetermined.

One possibility for the festival’s future is to move it to another time slot, which might allow more time to build excitement.

“September has proven a tough sell locally,” said Frank Luzi, the company vice president who handles marketing.

“We need time to develop the audience to get better numbers,” said Devan.

For 2024-25, this means the festival might happen later on the calendar, or it could remain on hiatus for the entire season. Another prospect is that the festival would be scrapped altogether. Devan doesn’t believe that a permanent cancellation is coming, though he acknowledges that his successor — yet to be named — will ultimately be charged with determining the future of the festival.

Opera company board chairman Stephen K. Klasko declined through a spokesperson to speak about the festival’s fate.

As announced so far, the Opera Philadelphia 2024-25 season brings the U.S. premiere of The Listeners to the Academy on Sept. 25, 27, and 29. With music by Mazzoli and a libretto by Royce Vavrek, the opera, based on an original story by Canadian author and playwright Jordan Tannahill, “examines the lengths to which we, as Americans, are willing to go to find a sense of place and purpose, and the way in which confident, charming leaders can exploit these needs to their own ends,” says an opera company description.

The Anonymous Lover, postponed from this season for budgetary reasons, will get its company premiere under the baton of Kalena Bovell at the Academy on Jan. 31 and Feb. 2. The 1780 opera is by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the Mozart contemporary whose works, long neglected, are now in a period of reexamination. The Anonymous Lover is the sole complete surviving opera by Saint-Georges, the Guadeloupe-born son of a white plantation owner and a woman he enslaved. His life was inspiration for the recent film Chevalier.

The third Academy opera is Mozart’s Don Giovanni in a new production by Cincinnati Opera, which runs April 25 and 27 and May 2 and 4, 2025. The cast was chosen as a continuation of Opera Philadelphia’s practice of “using Mozart as a means for advancing careers of emerging singers, and that is something we believe in and Corrado really believes in,” says Devan, referring to music director Corrado Rovaris.

The rethinking of the festival comes on the heels of cuts announced six months ago. In August, the company reduced its staff by about 16%, developed a smaller scale for Festival O, and trimmed the budget by about 20% to $11 million, a level Devan had called “short-term sustainable.”

Now the annual budget has been cut again, to $10 million for the coming season.

A budget of that size will spur “challenges and choices,” said Luzi, “since we haven’t had a budget that small since 2012-2013, and everything is now significantly more expensive.”

Opera Philadelphia is hardly alone among U.S. companies struggling to find a viable post-COVID artistic and business model. Los Angeles Opera has pulled its world premiere of Mason Bates’ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay this fall because of finances, the AP reported. And the mighty Metropolitan Opera has cut back on the number of productions and is eating into its endowment to stay afloat. The group revealed in January that it was taking $40 million from endowment to fund operations this season — on top of the $30 million tapped from the endowment last season, according to the New York Times.

Even with the future of Philadelphia’s opera company in flux, the troupe will continue to adhere to five priorities — “whether I’m here or there’s a new person here,” Devan said.

First is a balance of new work and repertoire from the canon; second, the continuation of community programs, like community concerts and a vocational training program; third, a commitment to the use of the opera’s own orchestra and chorus; fourth, engaging emerging artists; and, fifth, “equity and inclusion in everything we do,” he said.

What is unclear is who Opera Philadelphia’s audience and potential audience are, and what they want. The company, which has long used extensive market research and other studies to help guide many of its decisions, suddenly finds itself unsure of the ways in which the post-COVID audience differs from the pre-COVID one.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” says Devan, who started as Opera Philadelphia’s managing director in 2006 before rising to general director in 2011. “I know they’re behaving differently — that’s all I know. I’ve talked to a couple of researchers that have said, ‘don’t bother doing research, because the customers themselves don’t know.’”

Opera and most live theater are “facing some conditions that were unforeseen,” he said.

In addition to the shifts in audience, “philanthropy has changed. I mean, nobody’s getting any poorer,” he said, referring to funders, “but they’re certainly getting more nervous and less willing to commit to multiyear commitments across the entire philanthropic world. Costs have escalated beyond anyone’s expectation.”

All these factors contributed to Devan’s decision to step down, he said, “because I came with a vision for a world that was slightly different. I think an evolutionary future for Opera Philadelphia would be well-served by a different point of view.”

Subscriptions and season ticket packages for 2024-25: operaphila.org, 215-732-8400; single tickets go on sale June 25. The next production in the 2023-24 season is Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” April 26-May 5.