If George Steel had said “I told you so” at the press event announc­ing the New York City Opera 2012–13 sea­son, I don’t think any­one would have begrudged him. Of course, he’s far too charm­ing, smart and gra­cious for that. But what he did say had the same effect: that the com­pany was on track to close the cur­rent sea­son with the first bal­anced bud­get in twelve years.

To that, it was almost inci­den­tal to know that the pre­vi­ous three pro­duc­tions had sold out and the May per­for­mances of Orpheus were expected to sell out. Less than a year ago, the best most could come to say about Steel’s plan to slash an unsus­tain­able bud­get by sixty per­cent and take the com­pany out Lin­coln Cen­ter and into smaller houses in Brook­lyn and Man­hat­tan was that they hoped City Opera might pos­si­bly sur­vived even as its “world class” sta­tus was in doubt.

For the fans and sup­port­ers of the com­pany, the news today was a happy vin­di­ca­tion. Along with announc­ing the four pro­duc­tions for next sea­son, all new, Steel added the sig­nif­i­cant note that they would be return­ing to their truly his­toric home, the ren­o­vated City Cen­ter The­ater (which no one moan­ing about the past last sum­mer and fall could bring them­selves to men­tion) and to BAM, spit­ting the sea­son between the two, and had signed agree­ments with each the­ater to per­form in each over the next three years. So even before fol­low­ing sea­sons are announced, New York­ers know that the com­pany will be there.

And they con­tinue to be the people’s opera. Opera is not reg­u­larly pro­grammed at BAM, but the new agree­ment means the bor­ough has, in part, their own opera com­pany, to go along with their sym­phony. That’s a won­der­ful thing. And the com­pany is, as always, com­mit­ted to mak­ing their art afford­able, with a gen­er­ous amount of $25 tick­ets for each per­for­mance and $100 sub­scrip­tions. To a ques­tion about ticket rev­enue and sub­si­dies, Steel pointed out that all opera ticket prices are sub­si­dized, includ­ing the most expen­sive seats at the Met, and that “if you’re going to sub­si­dize ticket prices, make them affordable.”

Those afford­able pro­duc­tions rep­re­sent taste that is appar­ently knowl­edge­able and inter­ested about the form and his­tory of music drama. There is Thomas Adès Pow­der Her Face, pro­duced by Jay Scheib, Britten’s mys­te­ri­ous The Turn of the Screw, in a pro­duc­tion from Sam Bun­trock that Steel promises will be ter­ri­fy­ing, the orig­i­nal, rarely per­formed three-act ver­sion of Rossini’s Moses in Egypt, from Michael Counts, and under the Christo­pher Alden Offenbach’s comic La Péri­c­hole, another rar­ity. Any­one inter­ested in opera would like a more exten­sive sea­son, and Steel him­self has set a tar­get of eight to ten pro­duc­tions as a full-sized sea­son. A year ago that seemed too opti­mistic. With a fas­ci­nat­ing new sea­son start­ing off with a bal­anced bud­get, after just one year of Steel’s new plan, that might turn out to be modest.