Storied Madison Opera Venue, Headed by Lifelong Aficionado, Celebrating 40 Years in September

Joan Del Giudice is the president of Opera at Florham, an opera venue which, for the past 40 years, has offered low-cost, top caliber opera performances to the community from its location on the Fairleigh Dickinson University campus in Madison. 

Del Giudice, in her eighth year as president, has worked for the venue for twenty years, and before that had spent much of her professional life working within the opera industry in New Jersey. It was the decline and eventual dissolution of state- and privately-funded programs such as the New Jersey State Opera, which for decades, with the help of FDU music department chairman and founder Charles del Rosso, Ph.D,  brought a rich opera tradition to garden state residents, that prompted Del Giudice to come aboard Opera at Florham. 

Opera at Florham is in residence at the FDU campus and surrounded by lush gardens designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. It has a reception room that can comfortably seat over 200 guests, a beautiful Steinway concert grand piano. Events take place in Lenfell Hall, a former music room in the mansion located in the center of campus. The building itself is a 125-year-old Gilded Age masterpiece, complete with large marble fireplaces, high ceilings, and beautiful winding staircases. 

“When I joined Opera at Florham,” says Del Giudice, “there were enough interested people in the university to hold concerts all over the campus grounds. When I joined they had an opera in the theater—opera in concert form, that is. But we don’t perform opera even in edited form now because it is just so much work and money. If people only knew the effort it takes to put on an opera. The lighting, the choreography, scenery, etc. It’s exhausting, wonderful work.” 

What Opera at Florham does do is concerts—four of them each year to be precise—and a famed vocal competition, which has drawn talent from all across the country since 1987. Violetta DuPont, a local singer and mother of five, cofounded the competition in the late 1980s after discovering that the demands of a career in opera would have simply been too overwhelming while raising her children and helping to run a household. 

“She knew there was a great deal of talent out there,” says Del Giudice of DuPont, “and that many of those talented singers were unable to afford voice lessons, which have always been rather expensive.” 

So DuPont founded the competition and personally gave out the monetary prizes—$5,000 top prize, $3,000 second prize, $1,500 third prize, and a string of honorable awards to help encourage participants to continue to hone their craft. She lived in Watchung, says Del Giudice, and was “instrumental in the organization until the moment she died in 2012 at the age of 100.”

Other individuals Del Giudice cites as instrumental to the running of Opera at Florham include: Marty Jeiven, a philanthropist who runs a pharmaceutical consulting firm, who cofounded the venue with DuPont in 1987. Jeiven still contributes to the organization, and is still very much up to date on the comings and goings within it throughout the year. 

Mary Pinto, opera coach and accompanist, says Del Giudice, is someone “without which we would not be able to function as an organization. She’s an artist, a director, a planner of concerts and performances, and, as an accomplished and classically trained pianist and singer, she has access to a world of talent we rely on to sustain our network. She gets the singers, provides the scenes, plays at the events themselves. People always ask me why don’t we just have a concert exclusively to see her perform. And they’re right. She’s wonderful. She’s our backbone.” 

Del Giudice also wishes to thank its working staff, its large network of dedicated volunteer workers that give so generously of their time and effort, and the family of Violetta DuPont, who so generously remain active within the organization and assure the continued ability of Opera at Florham to award cash prizes to its contestants. 

“This is an active organization, and we meet regularly and with great enthusiasm,” says Del Giudice. “It’s all about the love of the art form for us.”

To keep up to date on upcoming events at Opera at Florham, purchase tickets (including to its upcoming 40th anniversary concert and dinner), or to make a donation, please call 973-443-8620 or visit the organization’s website at operaatflorham.org. Opera at Florham is a 501(c)(3) organization.