Longtime supporters of Opera San José are ecstatic about hometown girl Eilana Lappalainen making her debut with the New York City Opera this fall playing the title role in Salome. That's not just because soprano Lappalainen is a hometown girl--she's also a former resident artist with Opera San José.

Local opera fans have been following her career since she was with the company from 1988 to 1992. Keeping track of resident artists as they move on is part of the fun of supporting this unique company, which came to San Jose thanks to another hometown girl, Irene Dalis.

Dalis, whose celebrated career as an international opera star included 20 seasons with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, started at the same place as Lappalainen--San José State University (SJSU). In 1977, when Dalis retired, she accepted a position at SJSU as a full professor in the music department, where she became the director of the opera workshop.

At the university, Lappalainen participated in the workshop, which wasn't available to Dalis when she was there from 1942 to 1946 as a music education major. But she says chances are she might not have been interested if it had existed. "Like most people," she says sitting in her office at Opera San José's administrative headquarters, "I thought I didn't like opera."

Once Dalis began working with the talented students in the workshop, however, it didn't take long for her to set her mind on developing a company where they could build experience in performing. Today applicants come from all over the country apply to the company. Four of the 10 residents this season are from the workshop.

Following her years at SJSU, Dalis was aided in her opera career by her sister and brother-in-law, who provided financial support for her studies at Columbia University as well as paying for voice lessons. Eventually, she studied in Italy and Germany.

It was the training she received in Germany that provided the model for Opera San José--an ensemble opera company for young artists who have completed their musical training and are ready for performance experience. What's unique about the company is that it hires a corps of singers for a year at a time, and all are guaranteed leading roles, something unheard of in other companies. "We don't do lavish, opulent sets like the San Francisco Opera," Dalis says. "We want our singers to also be actors, so our productions tend to be theatrical, rather than just singing."

If Dalis was brilliant on stage, that's nothing compared to her feats as general manager of Opera San José, which has always operated in the black. According to board member Rosa Cohn, Dalis is as disciplined today with her budget as she was with her voice when she was onstage. "Once the budget is set, she won't move from it," Cohn says. "I call her Irene 'It's Not in the Budget' Dalis."

Opera San José pays small salaries to its resident artists, covers their health insurance and houses them, in addition to taking care of voice lessons, all at a cost of some $60,000 per artist per year. The company owns two apartment houses in San Jose for housing its resident and guest artists, and there are several host families as well.

The company also owns its 22,280-square-foot administrative offices in north San Jose. As the company prepares for the opening of the fall season Sept. 7 with a production of La Cenerentola (Cinderella), sets are being built, singers are practicing in the rehearsal room and seamstresses are pinning together costumes on mannequins.

Since its founding in 1984, Opera San José has performed at the 529-seat Montgomery Theater, where an orchestra of just 27 players can be accommodated. Now change is on the horizon.

Opera San José will open its 2004­05 season in the 1,200-seat renovated Fox Theater on First Street in downtown San Jose. For the first time, the company will perform with a full orchestra. The new opera house will share the facility with David Packard, whose Packard Humanities Institute is funding a third of the renovation (with the San Jose Redevelopment Agency funding the other two-thirds). Packard, who renovated the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto for showing classic films, plans to show old films at the Fox as well.

Meanwhile, the curtain is about to rise on the 19th season of the company founded by the San Jose native who attended school locally to study music education but who took a dramatic detour through the opera houses of the world before returning home to fulfill her original goal.