WCXX

The City Opera board has voted to dissolve the company if it fails to raise the $7 million it required to fund the rest of the current season by midnight on Monday, a goal that seemed well out of reach.

With just a few hours left before the deadline, its plea for funds had elicited just a fraction of the target, meaning that its performance on Saturday was likely to have been the last in its 70-year history.

The company was founded as "the people's opera" by city fathers in 1943 with the goal of making an art form with an elitist reputation more accessible to a wider audience and at lower ticket price. It also sought to deliver a repertoire that varied from the classics and to provide a platform for new and young voices.

The board unveiled a controversial re-launch in 2011, leaving its long-time home at the Lincoln Centre on Manhattan's Upper West Side to perform at a series of smaller locations across the city.

But the downward spiral only intensified. What seems certain to have been the final show was a performance in Brooklyn of Anna Nicole, a libretto about the life and drug-addled death of Anna Nicole Smith, a buxom former model and reality television star.

At one stage, her elderly oil tycoon husband collapses from an apparent heart attack, only to rise from his chair declaring: "Not dead yet!"

Robert Brubaker, the tenor and 35-year company veteran who delivered the line, later told other singers that the words were dedicated to them.

The sobs from the dressing rooms told another story amid the reality that the fat lady has indeed seemingly sung for the City Opera.