Most people know the latter company, founded in the 1940s at the suggestion of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, as an adventurous organization whose two-fold mission is to present opera at prices accessible to all audiences and to find new singers and works and give them their first public exposure. The artist most identified with City Opera is certainly Beverly Sills. Sills later became the General Director of City Opera for ten years and is now the Chairman of the Board of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Fewer people, even serious opera lovers, know about Glimmerglass Opera, but it is an organization that, since its inception in 1975, has quietly established itself as one of the most important regional opera companies in North America, one that has attracted international acclaim.
Most opera companies begin in predictable ways.
One is when a group of wealthy patrons or city fathers and mothers decide their community would benefit from an opera company. Money is raised, a few internal power struggles tend to produce leaders, and gradually the company will produce opera productions of middling quality. If they find a lot of community support and the company is well-run, the quality of these productions may improve. This does not negate their greatness as operas, but it does mean that most audiences see a limited range of works. In European countries, many opera companies were founded by royal families, and operas were written, funded, and staged at the pleasure of a king.