In a list of the places on Earth that require no extended rationalization for a visit, Santa Fe would be near the top.
Its touristic virtues are well known:
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Great location, great hostelries, great food, great art, great shopping — even great for lazing about or vigorous outdoor activities.
This is all on the record and attested to by Santa Fe’s regularly high ranking in surveys of travelers’ favorite destinations — which is pretty good for a dry patch in the high desert that year-round is home to fewer than 70,000 people.
So why, when I announce my annual summertime pilgrimage to this charming locale, do so many jaws still drop in bemused disbelief when I say I’m going to Santa Fe for the opera — and almost exclusively for the opera?
If I said I were going to Salzburg or Bayreuth, maybe even Glyndebourne, those long-established loci of European musical erudition, there would be knowing nods.
But when I say I’m flying to Albuquerque and driving about an hour north to some of the finest classical musical theater on the planet, for a lot of people I might as well say that I’m headed to a tatting festival in Timbuktu.
Poor unknowing squats.
Because for the past 49 years, Santa Fe Opera has been illuminating and enlivening the night out between the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains with important — and, yes, sometimes challenging — operatic achievements.
So this summer, after 1,500 performances of 135 opera productions — including 10 world premieres and 41 American premieres — the Santa Fe Opera will celebrate its 50th season. In high style and with accustomed panache.
Do you know the way . . . ?
If you really need a reason to return to Santa Fe — or, even more urgent, to go for the first time — this could be it.
The eight-week season runs June 30-Aug. 26, with a 50th anniversary gala on Aug. 12. For three weeks in late July and early August you can catch all five operas in this year’s repertoire in succession. Performance time, 9 p.m. for most of the season, grows earlier (8:30 or 8 p.m.) as days shorten and sundown advances.
A Swedish nightingale will sing the seductress Carmen. A French knockout will trill away as Pamina in “The Magic Flute.” But at the heart of the season, as almost always in Santa Fe, will be a cadre of young American singers, at least a few of whom, if history is a guide, are probably en route to the top of their rarified craft.
Santa Fe, more than almost any major American opera company, has always been known for featuring homegrown talent. Important American singers who made early starring-role stops include Frederica von Stade (“The Marriage of Figaro,” 1971), Samuel Ramey (“Carmen,” 1975), former Santa Fe Opera apprentice James Morris (“The Rake’s Progress,” 1981), Thomas Hampson (“Don Pasquale,” 1983), Dawn Upshaw (“Xerxes,” 1993) and Susan Graham (“La Traviata,” 1989).
From further afield, the company also has seen the American debut of some musical supernovas, most notably, on stage, Kiri Te Kanawa (“Figaro,” 1971) and Bryn Terfel (“Figaro,” 1991) and, in the pit, Raymond Leppard (“L’Egisto,” 1974).
The somewhat eccentric idea of opera at 7,000 feet was the brainchild of John Crosby, a young, well-to-do conductor from New York, who knew the Santa Fe area from his days at a nearby boys’ school (which was subsequently taken over by the government as part of the Los Alamos laboratory where the atomic bomb was developed during World War II).
Classics and modern
Crosby was the guiding force as general director until 2000, imposing most notably his adoration of the work of Mozart and Richard Strauss as well as new operas by American and European composers in almost unvarying annual doses. Crosby, who was succeeded as general director by Richard Gaddes, died in 2002.
Rare is the opera company on either side of the Atlantic that can list among its repertoire 13 Strauss works, which included the American premiere of “Capriccio,” “Daphne,” “The Egyptian Helen,” “Feuersnot,” “Friedenstag” and “Die Liebe der Danae.”
But Santa Fe’s approach to programming is nothing if not catholic. In the repertoire alongside two American premieres of rarities by Pier Francesco Cavalli, the 17th Century Venetian master, are six American premieres of Hans Werner Henze, a Marxian modernist.
Every now and then, there’s even a detour into operetta, including in the 1990s spirited accountings of Emmerich Kalman’s “Countess Maritza,” which you’d be hard pressed to find even in its native Vienna.
I’ll stipulate that I’ve been going to opera in Santa Fe since I was a child, with long-suffering parents, and more recently have been a financial contributor.
It can definitely grow on you. The grouping of patrons right around our current subscription seats hasn’t changed in years, with couples showing up annually from New York, Denver, Philadelphia and various spots in Texas.
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Topping it out
It was with mixed emotions that old Santa Fe devotees arrived for the 1998 season and a rebuilt theater with a completely covered audience.
The joined roof seems to cut down on the effect of sometimes chilly nighttime temperatures, but all manner of outerwear short of full-length furs is in evidence.
The present thrusting roof can be seen from the approaching highway, and a new patron might suppose a spaceship had overshot Roswell, N.M., and settled on the hilltop that crowns the opera’s 155-acre spread seven miles north of the Plaza in downtown Santa Fe.