What is different about Opera Theater?

"Opera Theater of Pittsburgh makes an essential contribution to local cultural life… its tradition is untraditional in its commitment to new and American operas. Its productions feature the unbeatable combination of intelligent innovation with firm grounding in the musical and dramatic essence of the works it presents.”

-Pittsburgh Tribune Review

“Opera Theater’s adventuresome programming is a vital addition to the city’s cultural life…” 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette-

Opera Theater crosses boundaries. Opera Theater reaches out across traditional lines of demarcation in the arts, presenting works which engage diverse, new and younger audiences, bringing in supporters of music, theater, dance and the visual arts.  Recent boundary-breaking initiatives include a Fusion Festival of American-Asian works at the Andy Warhol Museum with the world premiere of RedDust, a multi-media opera by Mathew Rosenblum, and The Sound of a Voice by Philip Glass and David Henry Hwang. This production tours to the Royal Opera Covent Garden in 2008, making Opera Theater the first American opera company ever to have been invited to tour to London's famous opera house.  Other major initiatives have included the Pittsburgh Ring, two complete cycles of Wagner’s great operas in collaboration with Long Beach Opera using Jonathan Dove’s reorchestration.  Recent American operas include Just Above My Head, a world premiere Jazzopera by Nathan Davis; operatic versions of classic American plays, such as Hoiby’s Summer and Smoke and Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge; new works, such as Limbus, a sung and danced jazz/folk opera with mechanized sculptures; and reinterpreted operatic classics, such as Bluebeard’s Castle, performed in a National Guard Armory, and The Magic Flute in the
Masonic Center. 

Jonathan Eaton, Opera Theater’s current General and Artistic director, joined the company in 1999.  An internationally renowned stage director, Eaton continues Opera Theater’s mission of creating new works, reinterpreting older works in new ways, building diversity in programming and casting, supporting emerging talent, and broadening audiences through outreach and education to bring people from diverse backgrounds together and involve them in experiences that have meaning and impact.

Founded in 1978 by noted mezzo soprano Mildred Miller Posvar, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh has a thirty year tradition of presenting innovative opera for imaginative audiences.