Editor’s note: The following story was submitted for the Shaler Area Student Section, a collaboration between TribLive and The Oracle, the student newspaper of Shaler Area High School.
After a nearly 40-year career, Christopher Hahn, the general director of the Pittsburgh Opera Company, is planning to retire after the 2025-26 season.
Born and raised in South Africa, Hahn found an interest in the performing arts at a young age. He participated in choir and various theater programs and played many instruments, including the piano and tuba.
“My original interests were in the theater, but I was also the head of the boys choir at my church. I sang until my voice broke. I had a very early, thorough education in music and became really fascinated about the power of theater because, growing up in South Africa, theater was one of the tools through which one could protest against the Apartheid government,” Hahn said.
Eventually, after familiarizing himself with the world of opera in London for some time, he moved to California and took a backstage job for the San Francisco Opera Company, which involved a variety of general tasks such as scheduling and budgeting. While he did not deal with the musical aspects of opera directly, Hahn came to realize that all of this work helped him to become familiar with the complex operations of behind-the-scenes management in the opera world.
Given his experience, Hahn was asked to run the young artist training program, one of the most prestigious young artist programs in the United States. He eventually stepped away from directing young opera programs to pursue the artistic direction of international groups, naturally segueing into a position as artistic director of the Los Angeles Opera Company. In that role, Hahn led casting procedures and ran all of the artistic operations of the company until he was offered a position as artistic director of the Pittsburgh Opera Company.
After eight years as artistic director in Pittsburgh and once the administrative director left the company, Hahn’s role eventually combined both responsibilities. His new position came to be called general director, and he became one of the few general directors of opera in the world.
One of Hahn’s responsibilities includes the selection of programs, a task he believes should reflect what the audience needs to see.
“The choices reflect my developed convictions about what it is my responsibility to offer to this audience, this community and this region. The assumption is that opera is just 19th century Italian opera, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. And so it’s my job to let this audience explore the great riches of the repertoire and not just be limited by a straitjacket of perception — of a few decades in the 19th century,” Hahn said.
Hahn takes into consideration the eras in which each piece in the program is written in, as seen in the 2025-26 program, which includes 19th century opera with “La Bohème” and “Falstaff,” a touch of 1960s modernism with “Curlew River,” a lesser-known contemporary work titled “Fellow Travelers” and a world premiere, “Time to Act.”
“There’s a mistaken belief that someone like me programs pieces that I like or I want to do. There’s an element of that, but actually the most important things are a whole slew of other considerations, which is not always popularity, although popularity is an important aspect. There’s definitely one, maybe two pieces that are very well known, much loved and will bring in hordes of people, but then it becomes a range of counteracting, counterbalancing those well-known popular pieces with other pieces that are less well known but are really fantastically compelling,” Hahn said.
Hahn has noticed a good bit of change within the opera company since when he first started, noting today there is a new standard of opportunity.
“Now, an opera production doesn’t necessarily have to have some international star to be noteworthy. Now, it’s a much more organic idea that you should have a very high standard of singing across the entire cast, a very high standard of dramatic presentation and a very high standard of musical support from the orchestra and the chorus,” Hahn said.
The Pittsburgh Opera Company also has made breakthroughs within itself, including its home building, the Bitz Opera Factory, becoming a LEED-certified building with a silver ranking. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) recognizes only the most sustainable buildings around the world. Hahn was the leading pioneer in the process of making the building qualify for the recognition.
“It seems to be antipathetical in the theater world because people say, ‘How on Earth can you be green in a theater environment where things are what they are?’ You have to build sets, you have to paint them, you have to do all of that, but if you use as a guiding principle sustainability and reuse and carefulness, it’s not only reserved for the outside. Even in our world, we can be more reasonable, like reusing something rather than throwing it away,” Hahn said.
The Bitz Opera Factory was a difficult building to achieve LEED certification, given it was built in 1869.
“One of the most challenging ones was energy efficiency because the fabric of the brick building is very porous. A lot of the mortar or some cement had deteriorated somewhat. I remember being able to see through the walls outside when we first arrived. So you can imagine how energy bleeds, bleeds out. So a lot of work had to go into trying to seal the building,” Hahn said.
Hahn always had a strong interest in sustainability and the environment, largely inspired by his childhood experiences in South Africa.
“I’ve always been interested in nature and its ability to manage and heal itself and have understood how human activity has a very, very serious effect on that. I’m from South Africa. I grew up being very, very aware of biodiversity and very aware of the deleterious effect that things like cars and gas and roads and buildings have on nature,” Hahn said.
Hahn’s interest in sustainability also has had an impact on his personal life. He has an impressive garden with a variety of plants, with some of his favorites being climbing roses and honeysuckle.
“I find it kind of mostly a joke, but I’m fairly serious about taking out my aggression on snails, which is a good thing. Because there’s nothing good about snails,” Hahn said. “Actually, the nurturing of a garden and plants and whatnot is very similar to the nurturing that I do professionally with the development of this company, in a — it seems like a trite image — but in the same way as you make a garden grow. So with human beings and with an organization, I try to make the organization grow in the same slow, steady, sustainable way that you need in a garden.”