THE QUESTION BENEATH THE CURTAIN.

Every performing arts company faces, at some point, a version of the same foundational question: who comes after? The subscriber who has attended for thirty years will not attend forever. The parent who first heard Puccini in a draughty school hall and never forgot it will, eventually, pass from the audience. The art form, however ancient and however resilient, does not renew itself automatically. It renews itself through deliberate, patient, sometimes unglamorous work — the work of education, of encounter, of placing a living voice in a room with a young person and trusting that something permanent might result.

Established in 1981, Opera Queensland delivers a diverse, complex and accessible program of opera and related activities for all Queenslanders. In the forty-plus years since the company was founded — initially as the Lyric Opera of Queensland, with state government backing — the question of who the next generation of audiences would be has never been abstract. Queensland is a state of extraordinary geographic scale and cultural diversity, where the distance between a child growing up in Cairns and the nearest opera stage at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane is not merely a matter of kilometres. It is a question of access, of imagination, and of whether the institutions that hold an art form believe it is worth the effort of reaching outward rather than simply upward.

Opera Queensland’s answer to that question, built incrementally across several decades, is a structured and multi-layered engagement with schools, classrooms, workshops, and touring productions that is as much a part of the company’s identity as its mainstage seasons. This is not supplementary work. It is the infrastructure on which the long-term relationship between Queensland and opera is being constructed. The company’s annual program serves audiences from first-time opera goers, primary and secondary school students, First Nations communities, people with disability to diehard supporters, passionate about the power of opera to transform the way we understand ourselves and each other.

This article concerns itself specifically with that educational infrastructure — how it was built, what it looks like in practice, and why it matters in a state preparing to host the world for the 2032 Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games.

THE FIRST SCHOOLS' OPERA AND THE LONG GAME.

The history of Opera Queensland’s engagement with schools begins further back than is often remembered. The company’s first schools’ opera, Aesop’s Fables, was produced alongside a co-production of Eugene Onegin with Victoria State Opera — an early signal that education and artistic ambition were not treated as separate concerns. That first venture into the classroom set a template: that opera for young audiences should be created with the same care and seriousness as opera for adult ones, not simplified to the point of condescension but adapted with genuine craft.

The conviction that young audiences deserve fully realised work, not diluted versions of it, has remained central to how Opera Queensland approaches its schools program. Productions such as The Frog Prince — a schools touring production presented in partnership with shake & stir theatre co. — and La bohème, a schools touring production likewise developed with that company, both received dedicated Opera Queensland Studio seasons during the September school holidays. The decision to pair with shake & stir, one of Queensland’s most respected theatre companies, speaks to the seriousness with which these productions are conceived. This is not opera performing down to a younger audience. It is opera finding new languages — theatrical, visual, narrative — through which to make itself legible and compelling to people encountering it for the first time.

In 2023, Opera Queensland’s schools’ program included a revival of the production FIZZ! — based on Donizetti’s comic opera, The Elixir of Love — touring to primary schools, and La bohème — Puccini’s masterpiece reimagined as a tale of resilience, friendship and love — touring to secondary schools across the state. The differentiation between primary and secondary offerings is not incidental. It reflects a considered understanding of what different ages can receive, what registers of emotional complexity they are ready for, and how the encounter with opera can be staged to feel genuinely meaningful rather than merely educational.

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE CLASSROOM.

Opera Queensland offers a dedicated program for schools to bring opera to the classroom or help bring a class to the opera. That straightforward description contains a significant structural insight: the program operates in both directions. It takes the company outward into schools, and it draws schools inward into the company’s own spaces. Both vectors matter, and they work differently.

School residencies offer flexible arts engagement opportunities for primary and secondary students. In these programs, students work with highly skilled teaching artists to discover their creative potential through voice, movement, and drama classes that are specially tailored to their abilities. Residencies can range from a single workshop during lunchtime, to a week-long intensive program, to a more extensive semester-long after-school program. The flexibility of this model is significant. Not every school has the budget or timetabling capacity for extended engagement. Not every community sits close enough to Brisbane to make excursions straightforward. By designing the residency model to accommodate everything from a single lunchtime session to a semester-long commitment, the company acknowledges the reality of the schools it serves: varied in resources, varied in circumstance, but unified in the basic capacity of their students to respond to artistic encounter.

At the end of a residency, schools may choose to stage a performance for their students to showcase what they have learnt for their peers and families. This element of culmination matters more than it might appear. The shift from passive reception — watching a performance — to active participation — performing for others — is not a marginal pedagogical detail. It is a transformation of relationship. A student who has stood before their school and performed, however briefly and imperfectly, has a fundamentally different relationship to the art form than one who has merely watched it. They have been inside it, even fleetingly.

The educational resource kits produced by the company are designed with links to the Australian curriculum and are created by specialist arts teachers in collaboration with Opera Queensland teaching artists. They include information on the art form of opera, the making of productions, and a plethora of activities to extend learning before and after students see the production. This curriculum alignment is practical, not merely administrative. Teachers in Queensland state schools work within a structured framework of learning areas and general capabilities. By creating resources that connect opera — its history, its construction, its human themes — to that framework, Opera Queensland makes it possible for classroom teachers to integrate the company’s work into their teaching rather than treating an opera excursion as an interruption to real learning.

All resources are linked to Australian Curriculum General Capabilities and Learning Areas and include activities that can be used in the classroom, alongside or separate to watching the production. This means a school need not attend a performance to benefit from the company’s educational output. The resources stand alone. They are an investment in operatic literacy that extends beyond any single event.

MOVING OPERA: THE IN-SCHOOL RESIDENCY MODEL.

Among the longest-running of Opera Queensland’s educational initiatives is the program known as Moving Opera!, which was piloted in 2002. In April 2002, Opera Queensland piloted its Moving Opera! program with students from Brisbane State High School. This in-school residency vocal and drama workshop enables students to work with industry professionals and be introduced to the world of music theatre and build personal confidence and presentation skills.

The framing of that program description is worth dwelling on. Building personal confidence and presentation skills are not distinctively operatic outcomes. They are broadly human ones. The voice, trained or untrained, is one of the most intimate instruments a person carries. Learning to project it, to inhabit a character through it, to make it serve an intention — these are not merely artistic competencies. They are capacities that carry well beyond any performance context. This is part of the implicit argument that programs like Moving Opera! make: that engagement with opera is not primarily about producing future opera-goers, though that is a welcome consequence. It is about developing young people who are more confident, more expressive, more capable of inhabiting their own presence in a room.

The ambition to build personal confidence alongside musical literacy reflects a maturity of thinking about what arts education is for. A company that only seeks to produce future ticket-buyers is operating with a narrow and ultimately self-defeating logic. A company that seeks to develop whole people, and trusts that whole people will find their way to the art form, is working on a longer and more generous horizon.

THE YOUNG ARTIST PIPELINE AND ITS CLASSROOM ROOTS.

Opera Queensland’s educational work does not stop at school-age audiences. It extends into the development of the artists who will, in turn, create the work that the next generation of audiences encounters. The Opera Queensland Young Artist Program provides generations of Australians the opportunity to perform to the highest standards in productions at home and around the world. The program provides artists at the beginning of their careers exceptional opportunities to develop their craft and participate in the creation of productions to the highest standard.

The Young Artist Program was reignited in 2020 thanks to a generous bequest from two patrons, Lois Schultz and June Wheeler. That particular act of civic generosity — two individuals endowing the continuation of an artist development program — speaks to the kind of institutional loyalty that can only be built over decades of genuine engagement with a community. Patrons of that kind do not appear from nowhere. They appear from audiences that were cultivated with care, communities that were genuinely valued rather than merely served.

Participants in the Opera Queensland Young Artist Program have performed with the Royal Opera Covent Garden, the New York Metropolitan Opera, the Berlin Philharmonic, Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Komische Oper Berlin, Oper Leipzig, the English National Opera, the Finnish National Opera, New Zealand Opera, Opera Australia, West Australian Opera, Victorian Opera, and State Opera South Australia, among others. The pathway from a Queensland school residency to a stage at Covent Garden is not a straight line, and no one pretends it is. But the company’s schools program and its Young Artist Program are part of the same continuum: one end opens the door to young people who may never have encountered this art form; the other end opens a door to the world for young Queenslanders who have found their vocation within it.

Opera Queensland has been central to the evolution of the art form in Queensland, nurturing the careers of some of the country’s most renowned artists, including Kate Miller-Heidke, Jacqueline Dark, Kiandra Howarth, Mariana Hong and Kanen Breen. These names represent the visible, celebrated outcome of artist development work. What remains invisible — but is no less real — is the vast number of young Queenslanders who passed through an Opera Queensland school program and emerged with something less dramatic but equally durable: a comfort with live performance, an openness to classical music, a memory of having heard a human voice fill a room with something that could not be reproduced by any other means.

REGIONAL SCHOOLS AND THE DECENTRALISED CHALLENGE.

Any honest account of Opera Queensland’s education work must grapple with geography. Serving Australia’s most decentralised state, Opera Queensland connects with regional and remote centres through a rich array of performances, education activities and community programs. That description of Queensland as Australia’s most decentralised state is not rhetorical. It is a material condition that shapes every aspect of how the company operates.

A school in Mount Isa or Longreach is not less deserving of operatic encounter than a school in West End or Paddington. But delivering that encounter to remote and regional communities requires different strategies, different investments, and different measures of success. The touring productions that reach regional schools — adapted, transportable, designed to work in spaces that were not built for opera — represent a form of logistical and artistic problem-solving that is largely invisible to audiences who experience it as effortless.

From touring productions to online tools, school children and teachers right across Queensland can experience opera. The addition of digital resources to the company’s educational toolkit has expanded reach in ways that were not possible a generation ago. A teacher in a remote Queensland school with limited capacity to arrange excursions can still introduce students to opera through curriculum-aligned materials, videos, and digital tools that the company has developed. This is not a replacement for live encounter — nothing is — but it is a meaningful form of access that extends the company’s educational footprint into communities it cannot physically visit each year.

Opera Queensland has, as its Director of Learning, Regional and Community once articulated, “long shifted away from that FIFO — fly-in, fly-out — mentality of rolling into town for a show, rolling back out and having no engagement for the next year or two.” That shift in philosophy is significant. Genuine audience building requires continuity of relationship. A school that encounters Opera Queensland one year and hears nothing for the next three has a different relationship to the company — and to the art form — than one that is visited annually, whose teachers receive resources, whose students see their learning connected to a living performing institution.

"It has been an honour to take opera across such a decentralised state, in a way that not only allows audiences to experience this 450-year-old art form, but actively participate and find their voice."

That observation, from a former Director of Learning, Regional and Community at Opera Queensland, captures something essential about how the company conceives of its educational work. Participation is not a supplement to experience. In the deepest sense, it is the experience.

CHILDREN'S CHORUSES AND THE LIVED ENCOUNTER WITH MAINSTAGE WORK.

One of the most structurally significant points of connection between Opera Queensland’s educational work and its mainstage programming is the involvement of children in full-scale productions. Opera Queensland has sought to cast a Children’s Chorus for its production of Puccini’s La bohème as part of its Season 2025, a co-production presented with West Australian Opera in association with QPAC and Brisbane Festival, directed by Matt Reuben James Ward and conducted by Queensland Symphony Orchestra Chief Conductor Umberto Clerici.

The significance of this is easy to underestimate. A child who rehearses with, and performs alongside, professional principal artists in a fully staged production at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre does not merely observe opera from a safe distance. They are inside it. They experience the architecture of a large concert hall from the stage, not the seats. They work with conductors and directors and experienced singers as collaborators, not spectators. The memory of that experience is of a fundamentally different order than watching the same production from Row P.

The community chorus model was implemented across regional tours commencing in 2014 with Project Puccini, seeing over 300 Queenslanders rehearse and perform in a fully staged production across eight regional centres. Project Puccini — described in Opera Queensland’s official history as “a world-first initiative giving hundreds of Queenslanders in eight regional centres the opportunity to perform in the chorus of a new production of Puccini’s La bohème” — extended the logic of participatory engagement beyond school-age audiences into whole communities. The principle, however, is the same: that the most durable form of audience development is not passive exposure but active belonging.

This logic carries forward into the company’s broader educational philosophy. A child who performed in a regional chorus, or who sang in a children’s chorus at QPAC, is not merely a future audience member. They are a person for whom opera is, in some irreducible sense, theirs. That ownership — the felt sense that this art form has made room for you, that you have stood within it — is what no amount of marketing or outreach can manufacture. It must be earned through genuine encounter.

TOWARDS 2032: EDUCATION AS CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE.

The approach of the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games brings a renewed urgency to questions of cultural identity and institutional permanence. When the world arrives in Brisbane in 2032, it will encounter a city and a state whose cultural institutions carry the accumulated weight of decades of public investment, artistic risk-taking, and community engagement. Opera Queensland is among those institutions. A major infrastructure project is already underway at QPAC — already Australia’s largest performing arts complex — to build a new 1,500-seat theatre, with the newly opened Neville Bonner Bridge forming a stronger connection between South Bank and Brisbane’s Queen’s Wharf precinct, positioning the home of opera in Queensland at the heart of a new world-class cultural hub.

But the physical infrastructure, however impressive, is not the whole story. The other infrastructure — the less visible one — is the audience. An audience takes generations to build. It requires years of patient, unglamorous, sometimes expensive work in classrooms and school halls and regional community spaces. It requires a company that believes, with genuine conviction, that a child in a Townsville primary school who watches an opera performed by professional singers in their gymnasium is as important to the long-term health of the art form as a subscriber in the front stalls of QPAC’s Concert Hall.

In 2019, Opera Queensland reached an audience of 254,524 through 183 events including 16 main stage performances. The gap between those two numbers — 183 events, 16 of them on the main stage — is precisely the space in which education and community engagement live. Those 167 non-mainstage events include school tours, workshops, residencies, regional performances, community chorus programs, and participatory events of every kind. They represent the company’s investment in the audience that does not yet exist, the relationship that has not yet formed, the future that can only be reached through the present work.

As Opera Queensland moves deeper into the decade that culminates in 2032, its educational work carries a civic dimension that extends beyond the art form itself. The children who encounter opera in Queensland classrooms today are the adults who will welcome the world in seven years. The cultural confidence that comes from knowing your own state’s performing arts institutions, from having been inside them as a participant rather than merely a spectator, is a form of civic readiness. It is the condition under which a great city knows how to receive greatness, because it has spent years making room for it.

The onchain civic record being built for Queensland’s institutional identity — anchored through namespaces like operaqld.queensland — understands this continuity. An institution’s public identity is not only its current programming or its headline productions. It is the accumulated record of every school it has visited, every child it has placed on a stage, every community it has invited into the chorus. That record deserves a permanent address as much as any concert or season.

THE WORK THAT DOESN'T END.

There is no final state of completion in audience development. No point at which a company can declare the work done, the next generation secured, the long-term relationship with opera guaranteed. The work is continuous because the audience renews continuously: every year, children arrive at school age who have never heard a human voice trained to fill an unamplified hall, who have no prior relationship with this 450-year-old art form, who stand at the beginning of a potential encounter that may become, for some of them, one of the defining experiences of their lives.

Opera Queensland’s schools program — in all its forms, from the single lunchtime workshop in a regional school to the season-long residency culminating in a student performance, from the children’s chorus rehearsing at the Opera Queensland Studio on Grey Street to the touring production that arrives in a school gymnasium with a cast of professional singers — is the institution’s answer to that annual renewal. It is unglamorous work, relative to opening night. It does not attract the same reviews or the same photographs. But it is, in the deepest sense, the work that makes everything else possible.

The permanent civic identity being established for Queensland’s performing arts institutions — represented in the digital record through the namespace operaqld.queensland — holds space not only for the art that is produced on main stages but for the quieter, longer, more foundational work of building the communities that will receive it. In a state as large and as varied as Queensland, the classroom has always been the first stage. It remains the most important one.