by Iris Fitzpatrick on
IN LATE SUMMER at the Santa Fe Opera, playful light dances on flowers that are not far from their final throes. Waving grasses shimmer greenish gold, lifting and settling in a mild breeze. Underneath the sloping white roof of the opera’s Crosby Theatre, several dozen impeccably dressed young singers are assembled for an end-of-season apprentice performance showcase.
As the orchestra begins to play, the excitement is palpable. One singer steps forward, wind fluttering her long satin skirt. She lifts her arms skyward, beseechingly, as her face contorts with an intense and nameless longing. Her aria is alive—voice climbing, climbing, then abruptly holding at the top before breaking cleanly into a controlled, light-as-a-feather descent.
The success of the world-class Santa Fe Opera largely hinges on young classical soloists like these, who are members of its prestigious Apprentice Program for Singers. Each summer, several dozen aspiring opera stars gather for 13 weeks of intensive, on-the-job opera training in the Tesuque hills just north of Santa Fe. The program is widely acknowledged as a springboard for launching young stars onto global stages. Annual acceptance rates for each cohort hover around 4 percent, making the Santa Fe Opera’s apprenticeship—which can be repeated once—one of the most desirable programs of its kind. This year, 26 of the 45 apprentice singers will also perform named roles, taking on solo parts alongside their work in the chorus. In a field where few paths are guaranteed, the apprenticeship remains one of the most consequential training grounds in the classical arts.
JOHN CROSBY BUILT THE OPERA IN 1956 with $200,000 ($2.5 million today) from his father, a successful New York lawyer and political fixer. The 1957 debut season of the Santa Fe Opera featured an ambitious seven-show repertoire, a mix of warhorses like Madame Butterfly and Cosi fan tutte and then-modern shows like Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Marvin David Levy’s The Tower. After the season closed in late August, Crosby visited university performance halls and college-level singing competitions across the country, scouting for young singers to round out the chorus of his remotely located company. In exchange, they would receive top-tier training—and the chance to audition for career-defining figures, including friends of Crosby such as Stravinsky and Rudolf Bing.
Within just a few years of the program’s existence, hundreds of singers from throughout the country auditioned to become apprentices at the Santa Fe Opera, eager to refine their talents at a buzzy, modern company. Soon, the biggest opera houses in the country—San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis—were creating apprenticeship programs too.
Santa Fe Opera leadership still travels cross-country to cherry-pick aspiring opera singers. The program’s director, Chandler Johnson, says the scouting process is intense. “You’re looking for raw talent, but you’re also considering pitch, musicianship, and command of performance,” he says. “Our singers are already highly trained by the time they arrive here. They need to be ready to handle the pace and rigor of the program.”
Texan soprano Sylvia D’Eramo was finishing up graduate studies at the Yale School of Music when she auditioned to be an apprentice. She found out she’d been accepted while grocery shopping. “I was so excited, I sat down in the middle of the aisle,” remembers D’Eramo, who apprenticed in 2018 and 2019. “Every young singer dreams of going to Santa Fe as an apprentice. It’s magic here. It’s where all of us want to be.”
Not everyone secures a Santa Fe Opera apprenticeship via audition. Chinese bass-baritone Le Bu was invited to join the 2023 class after Johnson saw him performing at Merola Opera Program in San Francisco. For Bu, who grew up in a small city several hours south of Shanghai, getting to know the United States through living in Santa Fe was transformative. Since his Santa Fe apprenticeship, Bu has sung at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Berlin Philharmonic; he recently won a competition presented by Plácido Domingo.
Still, he finds the New Mexico opera experience to be unique. “When the opera starts in Santa Fe, there’s still a bit of sun, and you can see every single audience member from the stage,” Bu says. “When you open your mouth to sing, you can watch the audience’s eyes switch from others to you.” He’s continued a longstanding tradition of following up the apprenticeship with roles in Santa Fe Opera productions: He performed as Count Monterone in the 2025 Rigoletto production, and this summer, he’ll play roles in Madama Butterfly and The Magic Flute.
WHETHER THEY’RE PERFORMING star-crossed passion, love-struck frenzy, or grief-riddled sadness, at some point in every show, the opera singer must turn it up to 11. Under chorus director Susanne Sheston, whom Johnson calls “the backbone of the apprentice program,” singers build the stamina and control that hours-long live outdoor theater demands. Sheston also helps apprentices discover something technique alone can’t supply: their own star quality.
“Susanne taught me how to enter a room,” D’Eramo says. “She expects perfection, because that’s what this art form deserves.” The chorus director’s exacting reputation is something she leans into. “It comes down to preparedness,” says Sheston, who joined the house in 2008. “Nerves are going to happen to all of us. How do we develop effective strategies to manage them? Preparation is the key to artistic freedom.”
Sheston thrives on the annual task of shaping a large, unfamiliar group of international singers into a single, cohesive voice. “When people sing together, whether in a church choir, a barbershop quartet, or at the Santa Fe Opera, it’s visceral and unifying,” she says. “It’s an honor to be part of it all.”
For many apprentice singers, their time at Santa Fe Opera is akin to both an incubator and a pressure cooker. On top of intense rehearsals and one-on-one coaching with opera megastars like Joyce DiDonato and Susan Graham, singers confront the realities of outdoor theater in the high desert, where summer monsoons bring slanting rain, and blowing wildfire smoke can parch the throat. Even in ideal conditions, belting out angsty arias at 7,200 dry feet taxes the lungs. The voice is a fragile instrument, so singers learn to pace themselves, guard their breath, and adjust to the altitude. Back at sea level, the air feels noticeably more generous. Bu says he and other apprentices got into the habit of visiting Santa Fe Spa fitness center, a gym where favorite lung-boosting exercises included weight training, cycling, pickleball, and stints on the inclined treadmill. Box breathing, too, is a tool used to quickly bring down one’s heart rate before a big performance.
Diction coaches in German, Italian, and French also ensure clarity, pronunciation, and idiomatic delivery. “Singers have to know exactly what they’re saying in order to communicate,” Johnson says. “Otherwise, it’s a string of sounds.”
FROM ITS INCEPTION, SANTA FE OPERA’S programming has been associated with risk-taking. The house regularly premieres works from outsider librettists and composers, whose nontraditional subjects have included the final, brutal years of Oscar Wilde and the moral reckoning of J. Robert Oppenheimer. When I spoke with D’Eramo last summer, she was days away from her final turn as Mimì in Santa Fe Opera’s 2025 production of La bohème and already preparing to return in 2026 for the American premiere of Lili Elbe, starring as Elbe’s wife, Gerda Wegener. It’s a role she helped create alongside Grammy Award–winning composer Tobias Picker and his husband, librettist Aryeh Lev Stollman, who, incidentally, were married by the Santa Fe Opera’s longtime unofficial doyenne, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The opera traces the life of Elbe, a Danish artist and transgender pioneer who underwent one of the first gender-affirming surgeries. It’s the first grand opera to tackle the trans experience—but the subject matter isn’t the only challenge. The score is demanding, pushing singers to their limits.
“We’re used to melodies being resolved in one way,” says D’Eramo, detailing the difficulties that certain composers present. “I’m not saying it’s easy to learn Mozart, but the pitches and rhymes are more obvious. With Strauss, for instance, it’s not always obvious where the melody is going to end up—but newer operas can be borderline atonal.”
In New York City, the Met gives you shiny chandeliers and Manhattan glamour, but the Santa Fe Opera’s Crosby Theatre offers majestic views: red rocks, juniper-covered hills, and skies that turn from eggshell blue to burnished cerulean to pitch-black over the course of an evening’s performance. For a young singer, the cachet of an apprenticeship here is undeniable, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to handle. There’s the gathering crush of velvet night; the throbbing sounds from the orchestra pit; and wind so sharp, it might steal the breath from your line. Singers rise above it all here, where the rapt audience and setting sun form an ideal backdrop for the pure, electric joy of raising a voice in song.
Iris Fitzpatrick loves the view of the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains from the Santa Fe Opera.