FRESH FACES.(New York City Opera )

New York City Opera opened in February, 1944, at the height of the battles of Anzio and Truk. If skeptics thought it frivolous to start an opera company in the middle of a world war, Fiorello LaGuardia straightened them out: the music-loving Mayor believed that opera was essential to city life, and he wanted lower- and middle-class New Yorkers to have it at affordable prices, without pretension. The company was then part of City Center, on West Fifty-fifth Street, which now concentrates on dance and musical theatre. The composer-critic Deems Taylor called the City Center Opera "democracy in action, a democracy realizing the work of the individual." Tickets started at eighty-five cents--nine and a half dollars, in today's currency--and topped out at $2.20. These days, you have to pay quite a bit more to get through the doors of what LaGuardia dubbed "the people's opera company." Tickets go up to a hundred and twenty dollars, which is more than most orchestra seats for "Spamalot."

Don't blame City Opera for falling short of its populist mission. The politics of Lincoln Center, where the company moved in 1966, killed that dream. The new complex had two large-scale theatres: the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theatre. The second was designed for New York City Ballet, but another tenant was needed to fill out the season. If City Opera had not used the space, Martin Sokol explains in his history of the house, the Met would probably have started a secondary company, driving it out of business. So City Opera had little choice but to move in, and, once it did, ticket prices shot up. Many great things have happened at the State Theatre since--Beverly Sills's bel-canto tours de force, Christopher Keene's explorations of modernist music drama, recent art-diva turns by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Lauren Flanigan--but the house has never found an identity as strong as the one that LaGuardia and other city leaders forged.

At the start of this season, City Opera made a gesture toward returning to its roots. It presented two shows under the slogan "Opera-for-All," with every ticket priced at twenty-five dollars. One show featured the opera-friendly pop star Rufus Wainwright alongside City Opera regulars; the other offered "Madama Butterfly." The people came: both shows sold out. How the company could permanently cut prices across the board without running a catastrophic deficit is difficult to imagine, but one thing seems fairly certain: a twenty-five-dollar-a-seat opera house wouldn't have to work very hard to sell out.

Since 1996, City Opera has been led by Paul Kellogg, a courtly and canny administrator. Kellogg recently announced that he will retire at the end of next season. Now sixty-eight, he says that he lacks the energy to keep working fifteen-hour days, much of it spent on fund-raising and marketing. He may also be weary of the city politics in which the company became embroiled three years ago, after it bid to join an arts center at Ground Zero. That plan came to nothing, along with most high hopes for the site. City Opera is still looking to build its own house, perhaps on Amsterdam Avenue near Juilliard.

The Ground Zero setback aside, the Kellogg era at City Opera has been stable and successful--a model balancing act. Productions have followed a sensible formula, breaking down into approximately five categories: stagings of Handel and other Baroque operas, wavering between wit and camp; mildly revisionist productions of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, with young, gifted, good-looking American singers (Rossini's "Il Viaggio a Reims" was a hit this fall); offbeat twentieth-century fare (Strauss's "Capriccio," Paul Dukas's "Ariane et Barbe-Bleue," and Richard Rodney Bennett's "The Mines of Sulphur"); new opera of the not too demanding sort (Rachel Portman's "The Little Prince" arrives in November); and stylish incursions into operetta and musical theatre (Gilbert and Sullivan's "Patience," this fall).

"Il Viaggio a Reims" is the last and possibly the giddiest of Rossini's Italian comedies. It depicts onstage the ...