On a recent morning at the Wortham Theater Center, home of Houston Grand Opera, the orchestra was playing through the intense score of Missy Mazzoli’s 2016 opera “Breaking the Waves.” Led by the conductor Patrick Summers, the players fine-tuned eerie glissando slides and dug into Mazzoli’s creaking, scratching effects.
At the same time, a few floors down, the young bass Alexandros Stavrakakis was at a coaching session, trying to find depths in the often dry Landgraf in Wagner’s “Tannhaüser.” Stavrakakis was singing his role for the first time, like the rest of the “Tannhaüser” cast — a bold move for a Wagner opera at a major company.
It was a reminder of another moment when old and new came together in Houston. In 1987, the Wortham opened with a pairing that was also a kind of manifesto: Verdi’s “Aida” and the world premiere of John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” a statement that opera’s past and present could surge toward the future in Texas.
At that point, it had been just over 30 years since Houston Grand Opera’s scrappy beginnings, but it already had a reputation for being the rare American company fully invested in fostering new American work.
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It has been an early adopter of populist innovations like above-the-stage translations and outdoor simulcasts. It has shown resilience, too: Displaced for a season when the Wortham was flooded by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the company moved to a convention center and didn’t miss a performance.
Now, at 70, it continues to be a model for the field.
With many opera companies in a doom loop of shrinkage caused by rising costs and stagnant (or worse) earnings, Houston has proved an exception. Driven by creative leadership and generous donors, its programming budget has risen steadily. By this summer, its endowment will have increased to nearly $120 million — almost double what it was five years ago.
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