The New York City Opera has always been less a business operation than a social and cultural mission. The company has long had a reputation for featuring operas seldom (or never) heard in New York and bringing exciting young talents (often American born and trained) to public attention. But once it was the largest, loudest, pluckiest of several city arts groups that believed passionately in the democratization of the arts.

The city’s other opera house, the Metropolitan, owed its existence to the social pretensions of new-money, Gilded age founders and subsequent generations of benefactors. City Opera had a crusading zeal about it: appreciation of opera was no longer tied to matters of class, an issue that still keeps many from even approaching opera, let alone enjoying it.

Yet if intrepidness is a New York City Opera tradition, so is crisis. Funding problems have continually bedeviled the company. When the company’s biggest star, soprano Beverly Sills, became its general director after retiring from singing in 1979, she coped with a staggering financial crisis, the first wave of funding cutbacks from local and federal governments, and increasing questions of the “Does New York really need two opera companies?” variety. (No one asks “Does New York really need two baseball teams?”)

Currently, City Opera is struggling not only to fill seats but to figure out its own future. Its home, the New York State Theater, was built for ballet, not opera, and tinkering with the acoustics (including the installation of electronic sound enhancement) has been variably successful. An ambition to move the company to the promised performance space to be built over Ground Zero failed. Attempts to reach an entente cordiale with Lincoln Center – a new theater? a revamped State Theater? – seem to have failed.

Ms. Sills eventually put the company on firmer financial footing, but after she resigned from City Opera she switched loyalties to the Metropolitan and its retiring general manager, Joseph Volpe, and together they were not considered to be City Opera’s best friends. The departure of these two may make negotiations easier for the current general manager, Paul Kellogg, but the time is now to contemplate what the company’s mission is in the current culture.

City Opera’s founding mandate was one of reaching over economic divisions. In 1942, the city found itself in possession of one of the town’s oddest theaters, the Mecca Temple on West 55th Street. It was empty and broke, yet the La Guardia administration saw possibilities in it. (At that time, making the fine arts available regardless of social position – really fine art, that is, not the “projects” of art-star cons like Christo and Jean-Claude – was considered one of the duties of city government.)

After the Federal Theater Program and other Works Projects Administration Projects were dissolved by the Supreme Court, the city encouraged the founding of a not-for-profit corporation to raise money for the rechristened City Center, charging only $1 a year for rent. The New York City Opera, which shared the theater with various constituents, including the New York City Ballet, opened on February 21, 1944, with a performance of Puccini’s “Tosca.”

Today there are still as many New Yorkers unable to afford tickets to the Metropolitan as there were in 1944; more to the point, however, there are fewer members of any of Gotham’s classes who want to see opera – or even know the first thing about it. From the 1940s through the 60s, music was still taught in public schools. Opera and concert music were part of the mix on network television (not ghettoized on PBS), and middle-class and affluent children were routinely given dancing and music lessons and bussed or chauffeured to performances. An informed cultural background was part of gaining what were then called “the advantages.” Today there are hordes of 20-, 30-, and 40-somethings with almost no exposure to non-MTV music.

This is a problem for City Opera, just as it is for the Met. But for City Opera, it also presents an opportunity. Even the most mainstream of opera’s repertory is unfamiliar to those poor souls misequating “pop music” with “music,” and the genre’s obscurities are only slightly more obscure than everything else. Such a situation is not for the fainthearted and conventional among opera’s managers and creators, but it can be a golden opportunity for the adventurous.

To regain a slot as an essential element in New York cultural life, City Opera needs to present the kind of project people show off to out-of-town visitors. Crowd-pleasers (and let’s be honest, City Opera doesn’t have nearly as many of these as the Met does, anyway) must be mixed with adventurous, risk-taking productions. Despite some progress, particularly with its Handel repertory, City Opera is still not up to the standard it should be.

L’Opera Francais de New York’s recent production of “Pelleas et Melisande,” sung to Debussy’s original piano score, was bold, at times shocking, but always riveting. Brought to life by a briefly rehearsed but nonetheless inspired cast, it was better and more effective than almost any new production I’ve seen at the State Theater in years. (Only Stephen Wadsworth’s direction of Handel’s “Xerxes” and Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” matched it.) I was pleased to see Puccini’s charming, moving “Girl of the Golden West,” an opera seldom programmed even though it is one of Puccini’s greatest, on the city opera’s spring schedule. May it have a production worthy of the inspired idea to put it on in the first place.

Reaching out to the younger demographic is in some ways the easier part out of the city opera dilemma – once benefactors who want opera to live beyond their own generation are found. The company is already working hard to reach this younger demographic, with their “big deal” club, which offers reduced ticket prices for members between the ages of 21 and 35. Getting a few celebrities from that age group to sign on as ex-officio promoters (as Rosie O’Donnell did so well for Broadway) would be a further step to take, and guest stars in cameo or acting roles (like Lypsinka’s recent turn in “Cinderella”) certainly won’t hurt. Other ways to find younger listeners would be to seek extra funding for television (and to program more boldly – the company’s recent PBS outings have been rather pedestrian) and for Internet advertising and broadcasting, and then blizzard local high schools and colleges with advertisements.

More immediately, City Opera should not let the Met, with its Opera in the Schools program, be the only way younger local listeners have to come to opera. They should get to them first. I once sat through a Met schools program in which excerpts from “Die Fledermaus” – loudly sung in corny English, and gauchely acted – turned the audience of grimacing teenagers into opera haters, not lovers. City Opera’s most innovative, iconoclastic productions have an up-to-date excitement. Tied to an aggressive, savvy schools program, they could generate attention and create a younger generation of opera lovers.

Finding directors and performers of daring, led more by inspiration than career-hurdles or CD or video recording plans, should be a priority. Singers like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Paul Agnew, Kresimir Spicer, and Marijana Mijjanovic, conductors like William Christie and Emanuelle Haim, directors like Adrian Noble, Stephen Wadsworth, Jean-Philippe Clarac, and Olivier Delouiel (who did that recent piano “Pelleas”) should be invited to expand and excite the repertory. So, far only Ms. Lieberson and Mr. Wadsworth have appeared at City Opera.

The company should also look to lure back City Opera veterans who’ve moved on by suggesting projects they couldn’t refuse. Ms. Sills, when she finally made her Met debut, made it clear she would not leave her old company behind, an attitude a new generation of one-time City Opera stars should cultivate. Why hasn’t Renee Fleming returned to the State Theater in, say, Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” or “Maria Stuarda”?

City Opera does not have the Met’s roster of international stars and ever mounting endowment – and they should be glad of it. It’s easier for the younger, scrappier company to avoid the temptation of playing it safe, of falling back on a museum mentality with what is a very alive, very transgressive and intoxicating art form. The company can take risks, and in doing so can help lead the charge against the cultural neglect infecting the city’s life. City Opera, by singing and playing its heart out, by challenging audiences to do more when taking their seats than enjoy familiar music, has made a lot of New Yorkers better, happier, wiser people – and it’s in everyone’s interest that they continue doing so.

Springtime for Opera

Traces of the company’s founding spirit can still be felt in the spring season’s offerings. “Candide,” which starts March 4, is a clever if somewhat lengthy spoof on operetta, a way of enjoying old-world musical sparkle while also having a laugh at it, half-schmaltz, half-satire. “Madama Butterfly” and “Carmen” (premiering March 13 and 26, respectively) are operas that, with the right cast and production, can still generate enough excitement to fill seats.

The company premiere of Handel’s “Orlando” (March 20) is part of a broader program to integrate Baroque operas into the mainstream repertory — a move necessitated in part by the scarcity of such opera under any circumstances in New York, the most Baroquely-challenged of any of the world’s major musical cities. And Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” and Puccini’s “The Girl of the Golden West” (premiering, respectively, on April 4 and 10) are enchanting, little-heard works seldom or never staged at the Met — even though that company commissioned and premiered the Puccini more than 90 years ago.

New York State Theater, 212-870-5570