BY ERIN WILTGEN

chh@heraldsun.com; 419-6654

CHAPEL HILL — Long Leaf Opera hasn’t skipped a beat since the resignation of its executive director.

Partially because Jim Schaeffer still phones in with assistance and advice.

Schaeffer, the executive director for Long Leaf Opera for four years, announced his resignation over the summer, prompted by a lack of interest in the art by the local community as well as a simultaneous commitment as general manager of The New York Center for Contemporary Opera.

Losing faith in Chapel Hill’s commitment to the arts, Schaeffer decided to dedicate his full efforts to the New York company but continue to offer support to Long Leaf through 2010.

“Although we would have preferred it the other way, it was impossible for him to keep both companies going,” said Randolph Umberger, artistic director. “We look forward to his continued work with us.”

And because Schaeffer has continued supporting Long Leaf Opera by answering questions about paperwork and grant applications, the transition to having an executive director to not has been a smooth one, said Umberger, who has stepped in as the interim executive director and who had been the executive director previously.

“We miss Jim,” Umberger said. “But all three of us worked very closely together so we pretty much knew what the other was doing anyway. So it was very easy for us to step in.”

Even so, the opera company has still felt Schaeffer’s loss. For the spring season, Long Leaf Opera will only put on two productions: the outreach children’s program and the annual vocal competition. The company also canceled its summer festival for the first time in the event’s four-year history.

“Until we have a really permanent home, we will probably return to our normal schedule before we start doing the festivals,” Umberger said.

The company’s normal schedule includes three or four productions a year, and Benjamin Keaton, musical director, said Long Leaf Opera hopes to be in full swing in fall 2010, when it will begin its search for a new executive director. He said they want to wait that long in order to tie up some loose ends.

“Primarily because we need to keep things straight and where we are at the moment,” Keaton said. “After the summer festival and Jim’s leaving, there were a lot of things we had to take care of.”

But the opera will still carry on Schaeffer’s dream of an informal setting featuring modern operas sung in English. The goal remains to make opera — which can be a daunting art form — accessible to families and children.

“We have people who have never been to an opera, they hear it’s in English and they say, ‘Well maybe I’ll understand this,’ and they go, and they’re glad they went,” Keaton said.

Long Leaf Opera also hopes to keep opera writing an accessible dream by creating forum for living composers.

“It wasn’t that we did not like older opera,” Umberger said. “We felt a devotion to living composers, to give them some place to work. Every piece of music that was ever written had to have someone willing to do opera in their language and new opera. And most places are too cautious to do that because it’s the old warhorses that people will buy tickets to.”

But that risk is exactly what Long Leaf Opera is willing to take. At many productions, the composer attends and talks to audience members afterward, giving the community a new perspective on the production from the other side of the curtain.

“People that meet the opera composers, they find that they’re real people and they’re very outgoing,” Keaton said. “Their being present gives an impressive feeling that people are actually meeting the person who wrote what they just saw.”