Wellington City Opera had become one of the capital's largest performing arts groups by the early 1990s. Since 1989 it had generally staged three operas a year, reducing this to two in alternate years when the biennial New Zealand International Festival of the Arts staged an opera; the first was in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 1990. The company continued a succession of professional productions, including The Merry Widow (1993), Turandot (1994), Peter Grimes (1995), and Rigoletto (1996). Some of its productions were staged in partnership with Canterbury Opera, founded in 1985.
