The Rise of American Arias; Opera lovers needn't head to Europe this summer. In U.S. venues from Seattle to New York, great performances abound.

Byline: Andrew Moravcsik

When opera lovers dream of summer festivals, their minds turn naturally to Old World spots like Verona, Salzburg, Bayreuth, Glyndebourne or St. Petersburg. Yet summer opera abounds in the New World as well. No matter which of America's top tourist spots you visit, high-quality opera is probably nearby. In Cooperstown, New York, opera lovers at Glimmerglass mingle with baseball fans at the Hall of Fame. Purple-streaked Southwestern sunsets serve as the backdrop for the Santa Fe Opera's covered outdoor theater. In Colorado, the Central City Opera performs in the restored opera house of an abandoned mining town. At the Wolf Trap Opera's outdoor venue, just outside the nation's capital in Washington, D.C., patrons bring picnics. Dozens of other cities, from St. Louis to San Francisco, offer similar fare.

Culture snobs, take note: just as California Cabernet now competes head to head with Bordeaux, so the United States is challenging Europe as the world's leading location for training and hearing opera singers--particularly younger ones. Americans are recognized worldwide for being as accomplished and experienced as their European counterparts, and they regularly perform not just at U.S. opera houses but in European venues as well.

Consider Sarah Coburn, a svelte 28-year-old with an Oklahoma twang and a silvery soprano voice. Her father is U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn; her mother is a former Miss Oklahoma. Her childhood vocalizing was limited to family sing-alongs, church choir and high-school musicals. Training? "My minister gave me a few lessons," she recalls. She didn't see a live opera or consider singing professionally until she was studying to be a music teacher at Oklahoma State University. Rejected by top training programs like those at Yale and the Manhattan School of Music, she ended up at Oklahoma City University. Soon after she graduated, however, she won apprenticeships to the Seattle Opera and Glimmerglass's Young American Artists program, which led to the big time. Last year Glimmerglass entrusted her with the title role in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," famous for its fiendishly difficult coloratura singing. She triumphed, and is now scheduled to star next season at New York's Metropolitan Opera, alongside PlAcido Domingo, in the world premiere of Tan Dun's new opera, "The First Emperor."

Lawrence Brownlee, a 28-year-old African-American tenor from Youngstown, Ohio, rode a similar path to fame. When he was a high-school senior, a teacher heard him "kidding around" with an opera aria and advised him to study seriously. "I thought it couldn't be serious," Brownlee recalls. "But when I saw my first live opera, I was hooked." A professor at his small Christian college taught him basic technique; prestigious fellowships at Indiana University and Wolf Trap honed his skills. Today, just four years after his professional debut, Brownlee has triumphed everywhere--even in the shrine of Italian opera, Milan's La Scala.

Multiply these stories by a thousand, and the result is a florescence of opera in America. Of the more than 120 American opera companies, two thirds were founded after 1960. Even a post-9/11 slump in U.S. arts funding can't stop their proliferation. Three years ago two married thirty something singers in Princeton, New Jersey, Scott and Lisa Altman, floated $50,000 on their credit cards to found a new company. Today the New Jersey Opera Theater trains young singers, offers dozens of performances and ...