Maria Luigia Borsi plays Cio-Cio San in 'Madama Butterfly.' (Alyssa Orr / Palm Beach Post)

On the mostly empty stage, Ron Daniels is explaining how he thinks the end of the aria Un bel di should look, with the opera’s heroine, Cio-Cio San, standing strong, gazing out to sea from which she expects her long-absent husband to return.

"When you finish, you finish triumphant," the director says to the soprano Michele Capalbo, as he walks her through the blocking of this most celebrated solo from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.

It’s a slow process – by Daniels, the singers and stage managers, musical director Bruno Aprea and rehearsal pianist Bruce Stasyna – putting together the actions for this first production of Palm Beach Opera’s new season opening Friday at the Kravis Center.

Directions, nearby dining

Yet, it’s worth noting that the Kravis Center did not exist, and the majority of the people gathered this morning had not been born when the company they are working for was created.

It was back in 1961 that Isabel Chatfield, a former opera singer herself, came up with the idea for what is now the Palm Beach Opera.

It began after a meeting at what was then called the Norton Art Gallery. Its members asked her to present a concert version of Jules Massenet’s opera Manon at one of their meetings, and after finding some singers to help, she complied.

The presentation was a success, and that summer, Chatfield and six other prominent local women founded the Civic Opera of the Palm Beaches.

On Jan. 29, 1962, the Civic Opera took its first bows at the Palm Beach High School auditorium with a presentation of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, then as now an operatic staple. The sold-out audience numbered about 1,200 people, according to company lore.

Today, Palm Beach Opera has an annual budget of $4.7 million, nine days of productions at the Kravis Center that employ about 250 people each, a permanent orchestra and a support staff of 10 people in an office on Olive Avenue.

As part of its 50th anniversary season, the company will mount three mainstage operas. After this weekend’s Madama Butterfly, it will present Charles Gounod’s lovely take on Shakespeare, Romeo et Juliette, in February and close in March with Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

Also coming this season are three more workshop presentations of abridged works at the Harriet Himmel Theater in CityPlace, in a series called Opera in One Hour. And there is the annual vocal competition, which has been a springboard for many of the country’s operatic talents.

In a half-century, the company has come a long way from the time it had to share space with a circus.

‘It smelled like a circus’

Tom Carlisle hasn’t forgotten the smell. In the 1970s, the opera migrated from a high school stage to the West Palm Beach Auditorium, also known as "the leaky teepee."

Carlisle, who joined the chorus of the opera in 1975, says productions had to rotate use of the auditorium space with Monday night wrestling matches and annual visits to the city by a circus.

In the latter case, opera patrons often found themselves confronting not just the odor, but the actual presence (many pounds of it, piled 8 to 10 feet high, covered by a sheet in the parking lot), of what could delicately be called elephant byproduct.

"You’d go in to do your stagings, and it smelled like a circus," said Carlisle, a Delray Beach resident.

But there was a rough-and-ready spirit of camaraderie to the company in those days, said Carlisle, a bass-baritone who still sings in the chorus. Even guests such as the legendary diva Beverly Sills, who guest-starred with the opera in the late 1970s, took part in the everyman spirit of the enterprise.

For one thing, the "very personable" Sills loved to go out to Bennigan’s and other area watering holes with the staff when she was in town, he said.

For another, she played a mean hand of bridge, even while she was starring in Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment, he said. She came offstage in midperformance once to find three bridge games going, and she joined in.

"She sat down opposite me, and she did what was called a ‘small slam,’ and made it," Carlisle said, referring to the winning of all but one of the tricks in a hand. "Then she said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to go on stage,’ and she did."

Growing into a real business

The opening of the Kravis Center in 1992 gave the company, which had renamed itself Palm Beach Opera in the 1980s, a home in which it could grow into a real business.

But it continues to experience financial difficulties. The company got sidetracked for years with ambitious plans to build its own opera house next to CityPlace. The opera once put on four main productions a year; now it’s only three. And in September, the company canceled its Monday matinees, citing weak ticket sales.

Financial documents indicate it was just barely in the black last season, and officials say they plan to keep it away from deficit territory this season as well.

Helen Persson, the company’s "angel" and a former singer who once shared the stage with the great soprano Lily Pons, joined the board of directors in 1992 at the urging of entrepreneur Alexander Dreyfoos.

This year, she’s the honorary chairwoman of the 50th anniversary gala, which will feature two concerts in January of operatic favorites, hosted by the eminent American baritone Sherrill Milnes.

"For the last three years, we’ve just had wonderful people performing at the opera, so good that the Met has sent out people to hear them," she said. "And so how could I not help the opera when they need help? Music has been the best accompaniment in my life to everything."

Persson, a North Palm Beach resident whose speaking voice and wealth of entertaining life stories betrays not a whit of her 93 years, acknowledges that her timely donations have allowed some shows to go on. Opera officials say she’s contributed "several million dollars" to the company since coming to the board.

"I have certainly helped, but I don’t want to be known as the guy that saved them. I don’t want to be that," she said, adding that other members of the board have been slow to act. "I’m sorry to say they’re a little lax. And I would say that to remedy that situation, I’ve had to come in and do some solving."

The future depends on some work at the top of the 25-member board, she said.

"We have to be better structured. We have to have better board members," Persson said. "They wait on things, hoping that the next guy is going to do it. That’s unfair."

The result is that the years ahead end with a question mark.

"I know that next year’s opera schedule will (occur)," Persson said. "But beyond that, I do not."

Redefining itself

The direction of the Palm Beach Opera today is in the hands of Daniel Biaggi, a 41-year-old native of the Swiss city of Bern who fell in love with opera as a university student, then came to the United States for vocal studies.

Biaggi said the company is in the middle of "redefining" itself.

"Some things are very easily said: It’s a Level 2 regional opera company. In terms of the artists who go through, in terms of the productions we have had, it’s on a national and international level," Biaggi said. "It’s a very good regional opera company with the fortune of having an audience that demands international quality."

Raising the profile

That means Palm Beach Opera doesn’t need to fear comparisons with other companies like it, he said. But it needs to try new paths in order to survive what looks like several more years of a national economy in the doldrums.

Biaggi said salvation lies in raising the Palm Beach Opera’s community profile, and reaching all those potential audience members who never set foot in the Kravis Center.

"It’s not our job to reproduce what the Met does, it’s not our job to always be ‘grand opera’ in smaller spaces," he said. "It may be much more our job to have a healthy mix between mainstage productions and out-of-the-opera-house impact. In order to gain future audiences, in order to be able to continue, we have to take things out of the opera house and find alternate venues."

From its earliest days in the late 16th century, opera has always been an art form apart, with special characteristics that tend to make passionate devotees of those who take the plunge.

For Carlisle, the chorus member, the totality of the experience resonates.

"For me, it’s the grandeur of the whole thing. We’re not just standing there, oratorio-style, we’re doing the acting. It’s the visual, it’s the sound thing, it’s everyone all around us," Carlisle said.

For Biaggi, the economic benefit an opera company brings to an area might not be as important as what it does for its listeners.

"At the risk of sounding esoteric, there’s just something about culture and art that makes life worth living," he said. "You cannot always put a price tag on it, but the fact that people can hear that kind of music, that they can be immersed in that kind of drama, that they can have the live experience of what we put on stage, makes better human beings.

"I think it’s as simple as that."

Palm Beach Opera’s 50th Season

Madama Butterfly: Friday-Sunday, Kravis Center, West Palm Beach. Information: (561) 832-7469