As I came up over the hill, I could see the opera's glorious structure on the horizon against a gorgeous backdrop of mountains and nature. I drove cross-country from Pittsburgh, and I went directly to the opera house without even stopping in town. "Twenty years earlier, I came to the Santa Fe Opera as an intern to fulfill my grad school requirements. "It wasn't my first time in Santa Fe," Meya says. Charles McKay, Santa Fe Opera's previous general director, recruited him to The City Different in 2012. After school, he immersed himself in the business of classical music, working at the Boston Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, New York City Opera, and San Francisco Opera. He later earned a Master's in arts management from Carnegie Mellon University. Meya studied international relations in college, graduating from Georgetown University with a Bachelor of Science in foreign service. "My father grew up in Austria, and my mother grew up in Poland, so I would spend a lot of my summers, and I had the opportunity to learn languages." It was popular entertainment, and today should be no different."īesides his grandmother's lullaby influence, summertime visits to Europe contributed to Meya's passionate interest in opera. It was very democratic and accessible and fun. "It works across borders and involves cultural exchange and learning languages, and - of course - music itself is the universal language," Meya says. In the same vein, Meya is committed to honoring the art form's humble roots and far-reaching appeal by making Santa Fe Opera's performances accessible to as many people as possible. Themes such as love, loss, and betrayal - and the sometimes-bawdy humor - resonated with audiences everywhere. Perceived as a rather highbrow affair today, opera first succeeded and has persisted through the centuries because of its appeal to all walks of life. Some 400 years ago, when opera first emerged as a new art form in Italy, it transcended class distinctions. I learned at an early age how grand opera could be." "I started playing classical piano at a pretty young age, and I used to go into New York for the weekend with my mother to attend the Metropolitan Opera. "I heard all the Puccini arias, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, works like that, so I got the bug literally from day one," Meya recalls. Meya's grandmother, a trained opera singer, introduced the art form to him when she sang to him as a baby. Meya is only the fourth director in the Santa Fe Opera's 64-year-long history, and his love of opera stretches back before the Connecticut native could form words. Meya continues the company's tradition of making the art form accessible to all.
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