By Maria Nockin [Opera Today, 20 March 2014]

After forty-nine years of delivering fine performances, usually with outstanding casts, San Diego Opera will shut down permanently on June 30, 2014. The population of the city has changed markedly and the opera has had increasingly greater difficulty attracting donations. As with most opera companies, ticket sales for the company’s performances could only cover half the cost of its productions.

The rest of the money had to be made up by donations and they simply were not forthcoming. The opera’s board of directors, many of them large donors, voted thirty-three to one in favor of discontinuing operations. We can only hope that eventually another company will bring opera to San Diegans.

[Elsewhere . . . ]