Dressed in frills, feathers, glitter, and tulle, a red-tailed hawk, a northern flicker, a crow, and a mourning dove sang arias. Chasing their rapturous tune, two boys and their father wound through Leach Botanical Garden on a balmy day in June, and a reedy accordion led the way. Renegade Opera’s Bird Songs of Opera, an outdoor recital that mimics Oregon birds, migrates around Portland and brings opera to new audiences in unexpected places, whether it be families picnicking at Camp Rivendale or tourists sipping pinot at Raptor Ridge. The company is part of a broader effort to transform and maintain the 400-year-old art form. Those feathered tenors and sopranos sang many in the audience their first libretto.

Perceptions of opera as a pastime of the rich persist, and they’re not baseless. Opera has its roots in the monarchic courts of seventeenth-century Italy. In the Gilded Age, American opera houses became social battlegrounds for New York’s wealthiest families. Like those who sponsored Mozart and Puccini, affluent patrons remain the primary backers of grand institutions like the Met and our very own Portland Opera, which can lend a certain panache.

For starters, a premium seat to a Portland Opera production can cost upward of $250. But a simple lack of exposure is often more forbidding. What does one wear to the opera, and how does one act once inside? If you don’t speak French, Italian, and German, the languages of most traditional operas, can you follow the story? 

Say you do follow the story. Like most Eurocentric art forms, opera has faced a reckoning in recent years. There’s the fetishization of women’s trauma (the suffering and death of Violetta in La Traviata and Mimi in La Bohème, to name a couple), the enduring use of blackface and yellowface (the Met notoriously used blackface until 2015), and a glaring lack of diversity on- and offstage. 

Light Opera of Portland came under fire in 2018 when staging Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, a comic operetta long criticized for its orientalist depictions of Japan. Pivoting to set the opera in outer space did not bode well (how much more exoticizing can you get?), but it did point to a larger question about what opera companies might do with this beloved but fraught art. Do they rely on a centuries-old repertoire? How far can a historical opera be amended before it loses its soul? Is the pomp and circumstance of a grand hall what makes an opera feel like an opera? Or is starting from scratch and performing only modern operas reflecting modern perspectives—maybe even in a botanical garden or school gym—the way to ensure its future?  

In November, nearly 3,000 people crowded into the Keller Auditorium, where Portland Opera staged the most performed opera in its 61-year history: La Bohème, Giacomo Puccini’s tragic love story about impoverished French artists. Operagoers wore suits and gowns. Others dressed up in period costumes. Some people wore jeans, this being Portland. Onstage, lights shone on a towering, handcrafted set of a run-down Parisian garret, and a full orchestra played on the elaborately costumed cast. 

It was a grand, classically styled opera, with a chorus of over 50 singers, but the local production showed its own progressive signs of change. The Indian American tenor Alok Kumar starred as Rodolfo, and he was far from the only person of color in the cast. They sang in the traditional Italian but with English supertitles projected onstage. Even the choice to produce La Bohème was somewhat forward-thinking. It’s popular not so much because it’s beloved by connoisseurs, but because it’s an accessible story. Both Rent and Moulin Rouge! are adapted from it; there’s even a Simpsons episode based on La Bohème. Nearly every local opera company has systems to skirt financial barriers, too, including free ticket options for students and veterans, or discounted rates, like $5 tickets for SNAP recipients. 

While modernizing efforts reflect present-day values, shifting the industry is as much about survival for opera companies as it is aligning their moral compasses. Opera’s audience is aging, donations and ticket sales haven’t recovered from COVID, and the numbers were falling before the pandemic hit. Companies around the country seem to agree that expanding their audience is the way forward. Though overall numbers don’t look great, many of the people showing up to the opera in recent years are doing so for the first time. In 2025, 70 percent of Portland Opera’s audience members were first-time operagoers. 

Collecting data between 2020 and 2024, a national survey commissioned by Opera America found that—as you might guess—returning opera patrons were overwhelmingly white and over 55. However, about a third of respondents seeing their very first opera (12 percent of the group) identified as people of color, and a similar proportion were in the youngest age bracket surveyed, 18 to 34. 

“It’s kind of giving us our marching orders,” says Christina Post, Portland Opera’s director of marketing and communications.   

The most overt changes come in programming. Portland Opera’s approach is generally to keep the classics as classic as possible, like La Bohème, and save the more dramatic shifts for modern works, often by living composers. With the latter, it’s found success in familiar stories retold as operas, like its recent sold-out run of The Shining and a 2022 production of Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer-winning The Central Park Five, about the wrongful conviction and exoneration of five Black and Latinx teens charged in 1989. 

Gene Scheer and Joby Talbot’s Everest, performed in the 200-seat black box theater at the company’s new offices downtown, stretched the bounds of what constitutes an opera even further—most notably, it didn’t feature any live singing. (The opera covers the mountaineering disaster recorded in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, though it relies on independent research.) Instead of a physical set, animations moved across white, glacial-shaped screens as tenor Nathan Granner and bass Kevin Burdette’s recorded voices played. 

Elsewhere in town, companies are taking creative license with the core canon. Chuck Dillard, director of the School of Music and Theater at Portland State University, founded the Queer Opera Experience in 2018, producing classic operas like La Bohème and Romeo and Juliet with an LGBTQ+ spin, switching the gender and sexuality of characters. Maeve Stier, who graduated from PSU’s opera program in 2020 (they’re also the accordion player in Renegade Opera’s Bird Songs), played Rodolfo in Queer Opera’s gender-flipped 2018 rendition of La Bohème alongside six other women and femme performers, some playing traditionally male roles. 

“There were questions already before the pandemic about how opera is going to survive,” Stier says. “I think how we survive is to take risks.”

Under the guise of tradition, retooled, centuries-old operas often land as more radical than new and experimental compositions. OrpheusPDX’s production of Mozart’s The Royal Shepherd (Il Re Pastore) made the 250-year-old opera into a lesbian romance, casting soprano Katherine Whyte as the lead, Aminta, a shepherd who is the rightful heir to the throne of Sidon. The role was written as a male king and historically given to a castrato (a castrated male soprano, a common practice during the baroque period). With Aminta recast as a woman, OrpheusPDX’s rendition transformed the opera’s central love story and commented on societal expectations for female heirs.  

 For Chris Mattaliano, founder and artistic director of OrpheusPDX, representation is key. Expanding who is making opera, and for whom, is the greatest marker of progress. “It really opens it up to a broader group,” he says. 

Financial hardships endure, and attendance is still down across the board. But if opera companies around town, and around the country, are aligned on one approach to keeping opera alive, it’s figuring out what will resonate with today’s evolving crowds. And Portlanders have proven they are here for it. “In my over 20 years of producing opera in the city, for two companies now, I have found Portland audiences to be quite open and receptive,” Mattaliano says. They’ve welcomed changes of gender or race in traditional roles. Most of all, they want the production to feel like an opera. Deducing that essential element is the ongoing struggle. “If I get hate mail,” Mattaliano says, “it’s more about, ‘Why did you do this modern opera which has no arias?’”