Glimmerglass Festival

[1] It is the second-largest summer opera festival in the United States, currently led by artistic and general director Robert Ainsley, who succeeded Francesca Zambello in 2022.

In addition to rehearsing and performing, Young Artists receive musical coaching, attend classes in diction and acting, and are given instruction in such non-performing skills as audition techniques, role preparation, and the business aspects of managing a career.

In the course of the summer each Young Artist gives a solo song recital at venues in Cooperstown and nearby Cherry Valley, a feature of the Glimmerglass season that has become extremely popular with opera patrons and the local community.

[11] The Glimmerglass Festival's Alice Busch Opera Theater, which opened in June 1987, was built on 43 acres (17 ha) of farmland donated by Tom Goodyear, its first chairman.

The 914-seat theater[12] is notable for its pastoral setting, for being the first American opera house built since 1966, and for its sliding walls, closed only while singers are on-stage and in foul weather.

The exterior design was inspired by local farm buildings to fit with the surrounding landscape and to promote a less formal and more relaxed atmosphere suitable for a summer theater.

[17] The 2017 season included Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, Händel's Xerxes, Donizetti's The Siege of Calais, Victor Simonson and Paige Hernandez's Stomping Grounds, and Derrick Wang's Scalia/Ginsburg.

[18][19] For 2019's season, the festival commissioned Jeanine Tesori und Tazewell Thompsons opera Blue which picks up the issue of African-American teenage boys having become an 'endangered species' and a prime target of police brutality in the United States.