These summer festivals gave many twentieth-century Coloradans their first taste of opera. At the same time, Central City Opera began to stage summer performances at the restored Central City Opera House. In Denver, the Denver Post Opera, the longest-lived group, performed for free outdoors in summer in Cheesman Park from 1934 to 1972. Denver strove to keep ahead of rivals such as Central City, which constructed its own notable opera house. Such visitors often played Denver’s Tabor Grand Opera House, which opened in 1881. Starting in the 1870s, Denver experienced opera through short-lived local groups and traveling troupes, such as Emma Abbott’s Grand English Opera, D’Oyly Carte Opera, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. In a city long hungry for national recognition, the rise of professional opera and a state-of-the-art opera house gives Denver a claim to world-class respectability. Today Opera Colorado typically presents three-to-five full-scale opera productions per year. The Buell remained the home of Opera Colorado until it moved into its current home, the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, which opened in 2005. Founded by the husband-and-wife team of Nathaniel Merrill and Louise Sherman, the company performed at the Denver Performing Arts Complex’s Boettcher Concert Hall before moving to the new Temple Hoyne Buell Theatre in 1992. Opera Colorado started in the early 1980s as Denver’s main opera-production company.
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