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Victor Michael Milenski (born 1941 in Cortez, Colorado, U.S.) founded the Long Beach Opera in 1979,...

Victor Michael Milenski (born 1941 in Cortez, Colorado, U.S.) founded the Long Beach Opera in 1979, and was its general director for 25 seasons, retiring in 2004. Though local opera companies had been organized in the 1920s and 1960s in metropolitan Los Angeles, under Milenski’s direction the Long Beach Opera became the first professional opera company to take root in the modern era and survive. Having predated the formation of Los Angeles Opera and Orange County's Opera Pacific, Long Beach Opera is the Los Angeles area's oldest standing professional opera company. A music graduate of the University of Colorado, Milenski abandoned his doctoral work in Italian Studes at UC Berkeley to join the San Francisco Opera's Merola Training Program in the early 1970s. Rising through the ranks of the company's technical and production departments, he was tapped by the San Jose Symphony to produce Bizet's Carmen in the 1977-78 season and Verdi's La Traviata the following season. In the meantime, the management of the Long Beach Symphony - anxious to present their own opera in the Los Angeles area - invited Milenski to mount his Traviata production under the aegis of Long Beach Grand Opera in