On a Saturday afternoon in June 2008, on the vast campus of Forth Worth's Cultural District, the pickup trucks are out in force, fitted with gun racks and streaked with Bush/Cheney bumper stickers. At the W. E. Scott Theatre, Fort Worth Opera's final performance of Peter Eötvös's Angels in America will start soon. Just over yonder, at the Will Rogers Memorial Center, the gun show is underway. Guess which is the bigger draw? Yet I watch as more than one lanky cowboy in a gimme cap ambles up to the Scott.

Too often dismissed as "Cow Town," Fort Worth is, after all, an artistic dynamo, boasting world-class museums (the Kimbell, the Amon Carter and the Modern) and the Van Cliburn piano competition. In 2001, Darren Keith Woods thought it was ripe for world-class opera, too. Stepping in as general director of FWO, he immediately set about searching for supporters who agreed with him, and he found them. The question now is whether he can maintain the momentum in tough economic times — before a bigger company snatches him up.

Since retiring as a comprimario tenor, the native Texan, now fifty-one, has turned around Shreveport Opera, New York's Seagle Music Colony (where he still serves as artistic director) and now Fort Worth. Though Texas's oldest active company had a proud history (highlights include Plácido Domingo's major-role debut in the U.S.), it had little to show, financially or artistically, for its efforts in recent years. Woods changed that, launching a young-artist program in 2002 and challenging Dallas and Houston for innovation, vitality and money. The biggest shake-up was the switch, in 2007, from a stagione to a festival season, inspired by Woods's old stomping ground, Santa Fe Opera. He hoped to merge FWO with the city's other arts tourism and to stimulate greater interest in the company; so far, it looks as if he's succeeded.

When we sat down in New York, last January, the economic downturn had clobbered a pack of arts organizations nationwide, yet Fort Worth had turned a net profit for the fiscal year just ended, and Woods remained confident about 2009.

"I'm a big strategic planner," he says. While pursuing his singing career, he worked a day job as an assistant in the real estate risk-management group at Chase. He learned then to ask, "What are the outside forces that could cause this risk to fail?" Now he applies that lesson to opera, too. When FWO converted from a stagione to a festival season in 2007, he notes, "We looked at different ways how that would fail, could fail. We looked at how long it would take us before we hit the ticket stride that we're in now, that even in a horrifying economy, we're not seeing any downturn in ticket sales. We're ahead."

Woods remains pragmatic. The company's five-year plan is reviewed annually; a three-month plan is reviewed monthly. Thus, Woods recalls, he and his staff sprang into action when "one of our board members, who's a real-estate attorney, saw the contracts he was writing for sub-prime mortgage loans go from six hundred per month to zero. This was even before last summer's festival, so we made a conscious decision to do three productions [instead of four] this year [2009], long before the bottom fell out. I cut $400,000 out of the budget before we even did the Angels in America season. We said, 'If this doesn't derail like we think it's going to, we may look overly cautious. But if the train does fall off the tracks, then we have already planned to weather that.'" The company plans to return to a four-production season in 2011. "But if we can't, we won't," Woods says. "I'm preparing for '10 to be worse than '09. I wish I had a crystal ball."

He shares this observation with a discussion group at OPERA America's headquarters on January 13, where representatives from smaller, New York-area organizations pepper him with questions. It's a reminder that Woods isn't merely a regional presence. Increasingly, he's a national player, and in recent years he has been a contender for directorships of New York City Opera, where he often sang, and other major companies.

"From a business perspective, we always say that no one's irreplaceable," says Jeff Jones, co-chairman of FWO's Leadership Committee. "We'd love to keep Darren forever. But we're a small company. He might go." The profile he sketches of the ideal successor sounds remarkably like Darren Woods. "There's a lot of good singers out there with good business heads," Jones notes, "and maybe in a few years, they'll be ready."

Woods grew up in Luling, an oil town south of Austin. To hear him tell it (a mile a minute), he was a Texan Candide, blithely caroming from dreams of Broadway to Houston Grand Opera's chorus to an apprenticeship at Santa Fe Opera while still in college. Soprano Janice Hall remembers Woods's voice as a "very present, bright sound," which eventually earned him a reputation for character parts by Mozart, Strauss, Britten, Puccini and Humperdinck. What does he miss about singing? "The creativity," he answers, adding that he can be found in the rehearsal hall whenever he has a free minute.

But free minutes are rare. "I literally lie awake in bed at night and wonder what I have to do," Woods admits; he estimates that fundraising is ninety-five percent of his job. "I see fundraising as different things. It's not only going out and asking for the money. It sounds hokey, but we call it 'friend-raising.' Because right now, I will meet a person that I think will potentially bear fruit for the opera in four years." Toward that end, Woods and his partner of three decades, Steven Bryant (FWO's wig and makeup designer), host donors and prospective donors for multi-course, home-cooked Italian dinners in their home several times a year.

The "friend-raising" strategy worked in Jones's case: though he was unfamiliar with opera and looking primarily to occupy his spare time after his marriage broke up, the engineer has become one of the company's most active boosters, and he says simply, "Darren is my best friend."

In the interest of full disclosure, I note that Darren is my friend, too, ever since I prepared a feature article on him for this magazine, in 2004. That says less about my journalistic objectivity, I think, than it says about Woods: he must bond with anyone who cares about opera. He can't wait to talk about the young singer he just heard at a competition, or his plans for the 2012 season or the next world premiere.

New music is integral to Woods's vision for his company. He inaugurated the festival season with the world premiere of Thomas Pasatieri's Frau Margot, starring Lauren Flanigan, in 2007; 2009 featured Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking; and Jorge Martín's Before Night Falls will see its premiere in 2010. Woods cultivates composers, too, providing what amount to workshops for new operas at Seagle.

The biggest gamble may have been Angels in America. Woods attended the world premiere in Paris, in 2004, and thought, "We can tell this story better." To this observer, reared in conservative Dallas, the piece wasn't a good fit for the community, but Woods managed to unite a new community of artists, healthcare professionals and charities for an ad-hoc organization called "More Life" (after the opera's most prominent aria). Angels was one of a score of well-attended events.

"We were doing it for the love of the project, not really knowing what was going to happen with the audience," says Hall, who played four parts in Angels. "Darren was joking, 'This could be my last production in Fort Worth.' Yes, some of the audience didn't come, but they wouldn't have enjoyed themselves, so it's just as well. He drew the people who really appreciated what we were trying to do."

Hall praises Woods's efforts to "bring the audience along," and he's brought his board along, too. When the 2008 season was planned, it included Angels, Turandot, Lucia di Lammermoor and Don Giovanni. "There's no American opera!" protested one board member. Out went Giovanni, in came Floyd's Of Mice and Men, in the company's usual venue, Bass Hall.

Woods recently bought sets and other materials from Opera Pacific when that company went under. Pleased though his backers were with the bargains, says Woods, "They're determined to see their own company survive. They're galvanized in their resolve that nobody's going to pick over us that way…. In this economy, people are wanting to know that you are not reducing quality, but you are smart with your money, that you're frugal — not frugal to the point of cheapening people out, but that you're taking the money that people are giving you and being extraordinarily good stewards of it.

"You know, we have a mission statement, of course, but we also have a passion statement," Woods goes on. "Our passion is to be recognized internationally as a company that preserves and expands the transcending art, with a capital A, of opera. When we put that, we thought, that has the highest of hubris — 'to be internationally recognized' — little Fort Worth Opera! And yet, if we weren't striving for that, we wouldn't try as hard."

WILLIAM V. MADISON is writing the authorized biography of singing actress Madeline Kahn.

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