For over 20 years, International Opera Theater has given emerging professional musicians from around the world the opportunity to live, work, and perform together in Italy.
Most opera companies cast from within their own country, their own language, their own tradition. International Opera Theater does something almost nobody else attempts: it gathers young professional singers from many different countries, hands them a brand-new opera that has never been performed anywhere on earth, and puts them all on the same stage together, often meeting each other for the first time in their lives.
Before any of them sing a note for an audience, the whole cast spends a month living and rehearsing together in Italy. They share meals, cross language barriers, and slowly learn to trust each other one rehearsal at a time, singers from backgrounds that might never otherwise cross paths, building something together instead of just performing alongside strangers. By opening night, the opera on stage is only half the story; the other half is everyone who had to learn to work as one company first.
Two decades in, that process has produced sixteen world premieres, staged everywhere from Rome's oldest opera house to Philadelphia's Academy of Music, with new works commissioned by institutions like the Smithsonian and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It's still the only company in the world built this way, and every new opera adds one more story of cultures meeting on a single stage instead of staying apart.
Karen Saillant has spent more than fifty years on opera stages as a singer, a director, and a teacher, and for over two decades she's poured that into International Opera Theater — the company she built to bring young singers from around the world to Italy each year and create something new together. Her son, Christian Bygott, was part of nearly all of it, serving as IOT's assistant artistic director and her primary collaborator on every project the company staged in Italy and the U.S.
