There’s a question that crosses my mind fairly regularly, and since we’ve just gone through a wave of season announcements by some of North America’s largest opera companies, I’m finally deciding to seek out an answer or two.

I’m outsourcing my question to you, readers, since I think the answer needs to be a group effort:

What is the function of a major opera company in a large city?

I’ll explain my question a bit: in most North American metropolises with an opera scene, there is one large opera house, and a few small (and very small) companies. The large house has the money and man-power to do things like Ring Cycles and Turandots and operas by John Adams; the smaller companies are more agile, with fewer resources but less to lose, and they can put up chamber opera, lower-risk new works, and fun adaptations of classics like La bohème and The Barber of Seville.

For the more hardcore opera fans, the combination of large and small opera companies is what covers their bases; they can see the large-scale works sung by the well-known artists at the big houses, and the intimate, inventive surprises among the small companies.

With the notable exceptions of The Metropolitan Opera and San Francisco Opera - two houses with their own civic histories - it seems to me that the major opera companies of North America are not representative of their cities. The Canadian Opera Company, Houston Grand Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, LA Opera - these places have much more in common with each other than with their respective communities.

To be fair, these big houses aren’t entire tone-deaf, and within their season line-ups are details that pop up to announce the immediate culture: Spanish-language operas in Houston and LA, Renée Fleming recitals in Chicago, Rufus Wainwright operas in Toronto.

But these big houses feature many (most?) of the same big-name artists, the in-demand productions - Ariodantes by Richard Jones, Eugene Onegins by Robert Carsen, Elektras by David McVicar.

Here in Canada, there’s a huge pool of skilled artists who have busy calendars - conspicuously at every Canadian opera house except the big one; the same goes for Canadian composers and librettists.

And yet, the big company in Canada is, without hesitation, considered a part of the Canadian opera scene; its productions even fill up the nominations for the Dora Awards, which are meant to honour excellents in Toronto-based opera, dance, and theatre.

I figure that Toronto isn’t unique, and this kind of odd divide happens in Chicago, New York, and LA, too.

It irks me sometimes, that there is domestic talent that seems overlooked by the country’s biggest stage, but I wonder if I’m justified in being irked.

I guess I’m asking, are these major opera houses part of their cities, or not? Their audiences are local, and likely so are members of their choruses, orchestras, stage crews, and administrative teams.

But what’s being put up onstage seems to be more of a portal for localized audiences to see what’s happening in the broader opera scene. They get to see that Carsen Midsummer and that Kosky Magic Flute and hear Sondra Radvanovsky sing one or all of the Three Queens.

• are the major houses a network connecting cities to the broader scene?
• why are the headlining talents not more often local? Is that naive to ask of opera, which is inherently international? would it be robbing a city of great opera to limit the pool to their area?