Around Town | Maestro Victor DeRenzi of Sarasota Opera

By Tom Reese | Photos by Nancy Guth | October 2024

Maestro Victor DeRenzi lives and breathes opera. Captured as a young boy by the music, costumes, sets, drama and emotion of opera, Maestro has worked tirelessly to bring diverse audiences pure interpretations of well-known operas as well as educating and entertaining patrons with less known operas. 

His reach and respect is global and his work has put Sarasota Opera on the world opera map. DeRenzi is the only opera director to complete the Verdi cycle (producing every work by Verdi) and he has received tremendous accolades for this achievement.  

For Maestro, opera reflects humanity on many levels, with love, compassion, and acceptance leading the way. His Sarasota Opera legacy is undeniably massive, and his impact on our community is tremendous. We are all better for it.

You’ve been with Sarasota Opera for more than thirty years spanning over five decades. During this time, you’ve seen Sarasota grow exponentially. How has it changed for you?

The only thing that seems not to have changed is the name. The city is still called Sarasota. However, the demographics have drastically changed. We have people from more different parts of the country as well as from around the world. The more obvious changes are the many developments and expansions that have taken place over the years. The biggest reason this city has grown so much is because of the arts. Of course we have beaches, as do many communities in Florida; but what we offer in the arts is unique and unlike any other city in the state, or even the country. The quality of the arts is much higher than in other cities our size in America.

Tell us about your childhood. 

I think I’m fortunate that I grew up in a very small town in our country’s biggest city—a neighborhood in Staten Island, New York where everyone knew each other and our parents had been friends growing up. Our school, church, and shopping were all very close and we didn’t need a car. “The city,” as we called Manhattan, 25 minutes away on the ferry, was the center of the arts in America. That very much influenced me as a young man. There was a sense of community in my town, but an exciting other world across the bay. 

When did you fall in love with the opera and how did it bring you from New York to Sarasota? 

When I was 13, I saw an opera at the urging of one of my schoolteachers. He built the sets for a small opera company on Staten Island, The Matinee Opera Company, and I started helping him as much as I could. The performance was probably not very good, but the music and the drama took hold of me. I quickly became more involved as an extra on stage and then singing in the chorus. And, with the city not far away, I was able to go to performances in Manhattan and hear some of the greatest singers of the generation.

After starting a career as a conductor, I eventually heard about an opportunity at an opera organization in Sarasota that needed an Artistic Director. At that time, the company was called the Asolo Opera and performances were held at the Historic Asolo Theater, but the company was soon transitioning to the newly purchased Sarasota Opera House. I felt that I could be in a place where everything would be new. Before I came the company didn’t have an orchestra or chorus and we were very limited with the operas we could produce. So, it was interesting to me to build a company the way I felt an opera company should function.

What was your inspiration for creating a year-round youth opera program? 

I love opera, and I’ve always loved kids. Many people don’t come to the arts until later in life. Sarasota is a good example since some of our supporters didn’t see their first opera until they were retired and had the time to go to performances. Because I fell in love with opera at a young age, I wanted that to be possible for young people here in Sarasota as well. I wanted kids to at least know that the art form exists. 

Over the years it has become more and more important to make opera available, because arts education in schools has changed so much. When I was in elementary school classical music was taught, and you knew who Beethoven and Brahms were, not in any great depth, but you knew they were somehow important to our society. Even if we didn’t like it, it was there for us to hear. Now it is mostly gone from schools. It has become our job and the job of the whole arts community to continue that education for the young people.

As the longest serving artistic director in the country, you have overseen 210 productions of 122 different operas and conducted over 1,500 performances of opera. What is the process for producing an opera and what does it take behind the scenes for it to be successful? 

I think the hard thing about producing opera is deciding what not to do, because there are thousands and thousands of operas. Putting together a season of four operas, which we do every year, is really about picking the right operas out of many. We have to choose what would make a good season for Sarasota Opera budget-wise and with our ability to perform. 

Our mission is to produce opera the way the composer intended it to be performed with respect to the sets, costumes, staging, and musical values. I think that for a company to be successful we have to be able to see our own limitations, so that whatever we choose to produce, we can do at the highest level. It may have taken us longer to reach certain points in our development than it did for other companies, but we’ve always done only what I could personally oversee, and we’ve done what we could to really make a statement for our company and for our community. 

Your connection to the music of Giuseppe Verdi is widely known and Sarasota Opera is the only company in the world to play all of Verdi’s music. Can you explain your fascination with his music and what it means to you?

First of all, Verdi is a great musician, there’s no question about that. The music he wrote is as great as that of any other composer. There are many reasons I love his operas and love him as a person. But the reason Verdi’s operas are still performed 120 years after his death is that he is a great dramatist, probably the greatest dramatist of the 19th century. Verdi, more than any composer, understood the human condition, and understood humanity in a way that maybe no one else did, other than Shakespeare. He understood what we all go through in life. 

When you see an opera of Verdi’s, he doesn’t tell you what you’re supposed to feel or what you’re supposed to think. He doesn’t attack you with a message. He shows you people who make certain decisions in their lives. We watch the effect of those decisions, and imagine ourselves in those situations. In his operas, Verdi doesn’t say, “this is a good person, and this is a bad person”, he puts the characters in situations and shows us how they are affected; he does not judge them. That’s a great thing about him. He lets us come to our own conclusions. We experience on stage what is important to all of us in our lives.

You have been recognized for your service in Sarasota. What are some of your favorite ways to give back to the place you call home and how do you encourage others to go to the opera?

I want to introduce more people to the arts and more people to the opera. I think all of us who work in the arts have a big challenge to make sure more people in our community know about what we do. One of the things that bothers me is that people assume they’re not going to like opera. There are so many misconceptions about what opera is; that it’s expensive, which it is not, or that it is difficult to understand. It is certainly no more expensive than many sports events, and the stories are less complicated and more believable than some current TV series and movies.

Another assumption is that only a certain kind of person goes to the opera, and that’s just not true. It is important that the opera and the arts act as a melting pot for today’s society. Everyone is welcome at the opera. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, what your political views are, or what your beliefs are, you’re accepted and welcomed. The opera also gets people out of their homes, and it gives them the opportunity to be with other people in their community. We need to be out among people, and we will find that we have a lot in common, and that if we disagree on some issues, we also share basic feelings and desires.

You have traveled a lot throughout the country and overseas. Where are some of your favorite destinations, whether it be for work or pleasure? 

Anyone who knows me will tell you that my favorite place to be is Italy. My choice is always to go back to Italy because I love it. I love the food, the architecture, and the language. I first traveled there when I was 20 years old. It was my dream as a teenager to go. Being Italian-American there was somewhat of a connection. Especially when I became interested in opera the connection became stronger. I try to go every year with my family, and there is always somewhere new for us to see.

When you’re not busy at the Sarasota Opera House, where do you like to spend your time in town, and do you have any interesting hobbies or favorite things to do?

Honestly not really. If I’m not at the Opera House, I’m home working. I have music to learn and a season that I must prepare for. I hear auditions, work with the staff, and prepare rehearsal schedules, and we all work together on different aspects of the season. When January comes, there are 250 to 300 people that make the opera happen: singers, instrumentalists, backstage crew, administrative staff, music staff, and technical people. All those departments must be coordinated and ready before everyone arrives or we would have confusion and inefficiency on our hands. Most of my year is spent preparing for that. My life is really about opera. It has always been. I’ve been in the opera profession for almost 60 years. It is what I spend my days doing. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but it’s also the thing I enjoy doing most.

To learn more about Sarasota Opera, call 941.328.1300 or visit sarasotaopera.org.