Choosing Verdi's Otello for the first production was a deliberate declaration. Otello is one of the most demanding pieces in the operatic repertoire — dramatically complex, vocally brutal, requiring a tenor of rare gifts in the title role. Engaging Plácido Domingo, who was at the height of his powers and international fame in 1986, signaled that the company intended to compete at the highest level from the beginning rather than build modestly toward ambition.

Domingo would return. He became the most significant figure in the company's first three decades, both as a performer and eventually as its general director. The relationship between Domingo and the Los Angeles Opera defined the institution's character and its complications.

The Los Angeles Opera performs at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the 3,197-seat hall that anchors the Music Center campus on Bunker Hill. The Pavilion is a large house by any standard — larger than many of the opera theaters in which the greatest companies in the world regularly perform — and singing in it requires a different technique and projection than more intimate venues.

The relationship between the company and the hall is a defining constraint. Los Angeles Opera productions are scaled for an audience of more than 3,000 people, which shapes casting decisions, staging choices, and production design in ways that would be different if the company had a smaller or more purpose-built home. The Pavilion was designed for multiple types of performance; it was not designed specifically for opera.

Plácido Domingo became general director of the Los Angeles Opera in 2003, taking on administrative responsibility for the company he had helped launch seventeen years earlier. Under his leadership the company expanded its productions, deepened its relationships with major international singers, and raised its profile as a destination for serious operatic work.

In August 2019, the Associated Press published an investigation in which multiple women accused Domingo of sexual harassment spanning decades. Additional accusers came forward in subsequent weeks. Domingo initially denied wrongdoing but resigned as general director in October 2019. An internal investigation by the American Guild of Musical Artists, conducted after his resignation, concluded that Domingo had "engaged in inappropriate activity, ranging from flirting to groping."

The departure was painful for an institution whose identity had been substantially shaped by his involvement. It also required the company to reckon with questions about what had been known and when.

Music director James Conlon led the Los Angeles Opera from 2006 through 2026, departing as conductor laureate after twenty seasons. Among his most significant contributions is the Recovered Voices project — a systematic effort to perform and record operas written by composers who were killed or silenced by the Nazi regime. Composers like Viktor Ullmann, who died at Auschwitz; Erwin Schulhoff, who died in a German concentration camp; Hans Krása and Alexander Zemlinsky — their work had been largely erased from the repertoire by the circumstances of their deaths and by the deliberate suppression of Jewish and dissident art under National Socialism.

The Recovered Voices project has brought these works back into performance, made recordings available to the public, and created a model that other opera companies have adopted. It is, arguably, the most distinctive artistic contribution the Los Angeles Opera has made to the broader operatic world — a project that could only have been conceived and sustained by a conductor who understood what had been lost and was determined to restore it to the living repertoire.