After a nearly 40-year career, the general director of the Pittsburgh Opera Company, Christopher Hahn, is planning his retirement after the 2025-2026 season. 

Born and raised in South Africa, Hahn found an interest with the performing arts at a young age. He participated in choir, various theatre programs, and played many instruments, including the piano and the 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 recalled.

Eventually, after further familiarizing himself with the world of opera in London for sometime, he moved to California and took up a backstage job for the San Francisco Opera Company, including a variety of general tasks like 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 very complex operations of behind the scenes management in the opera world. 

Given his experience, Hahn was then asked to run the young artist training program, which is one of the most prestigious young artist programs in the United States. He eventually felt it right to step away from the world of directing young opera programs in order to pursue artistic direction of international groups, naturally segueing into a position as the artistic director of the Los Angeles Opera Company. In this role, Hahn led casting procedures and ran all of the artistic operations of the company until he was eventually offered a position as the artistic director in the Pittsburgh Opera Company.

Hahn started his first eight years with the company as an artistic director, but once the administrative director left the company, his role eventually combined both sects of responsibility. His new position came to be called the general director, and he became one of the few general directors of opera in the world. 

One of Hahn’s many responsibilities includes the selection of programs, a task that 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 stated. 

Hahn takes into deep consideration the eras in which each piece in the program is written in, as clearly seen in the 2025-2026 program, which includes an aspect of nineteenth century opera with La Bohème and Falstaff, a touch of 1960s modernism with Curlew River, a lesser-known contemporary work entitled Fellow Travellers, and even 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. 

Throughout his extremely long career and wide range of experience, Hahn has noticed a good bit of change within the opera company since when he first started. Not all of these changes were negative, though, as he remarked; the progression of opera in the past decades has actually reached 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 stated. 

The Pittsburgh Opera Company has also 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) is an extremely selective system which recognizes only the most sustainable buildings across the world. Hahn was the leading pioneer in the process of making the building qualify for this. 

“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 stated.

The Bitz Opera Factory was an especially difficult building to reach LEED certification with, given that 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 stated. 

Hahn had always had a strong interest in sustainability and the environment, largely inspired by his childhood experiences in South Africa, which is an extraordinarily unique region on the basis of environment.

“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 recounted. 

Hahn’s interest in sustainability has also had an impact on his personal life. He has an impressive garden with a wide 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.”