George Steel has been general manager and artistic director of New York City Opera for exactly nine months now. In that time, he has thrown together an abbreviated but intriguing 2009-2010 season. He has brokered deals with the unions representing almost all of the company’s artistic staff, avoiding crippling strikes. He is on the verge of completing a major renovation of the company’s theater. He has tried to put City Opera’s tumultuous past two years behind it.

But despite his best efforts, Mr. Steel has faced opposition from the beginning of his short sprint to open his first season.

A source with knowledge of the discussions told The Observer that this spring, an effort was mounted among former City Opera board members dissatisfied with Mr. Steel’s selection and the artistic and financial direction of the company to stage a coup on the City Opera board.

The group, individual members of which would not be named by the source for publication, sought to gather enough money to take up space on the board—enough space to oust key leaders there, including chairwoman Susan Baker.

According to the source, the group would have made Joseph Volpe, the former head of the far larger, far richer Metropolitan Opera, their standard-bearer. Mr. Volpe, who at present serves as director of strategic development for Theater Projects, did not respond to requests for comment on this story; neither did the City Opera.

The group ended the discussions when they found they couldn’t raise enough money to pull it off, the source told The Observer.

Of course, around the time of the proposal to Mr. Volpe, public prognoses for City Opera were dire. “I don’t see how they could not close,” Robert W. Wilson, a former City Opera chairman who now serves on the Metropolitan Opera board, told The Times in June. “There is a slight chance that they can remain open, but where would the money come from?”

That money situation remains deeply problematic, and the company has raided its endowment to cover its expenses. The Times reported that the endowment stood in June at $16 million, down from $57 million in December 2003. Bloomberg News reported an $11 million deficit for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2008, with little chance of better news in the following year.

“The primary questions are the equilibrium state of the company financially and putting us on a course to get there,” Mr. Steel recently told The Observer in an interview over artichokes and cheeseburgers near Lincoln Center.

Those questions are hard enough, and Mr. Steel has to answer them while also creating a satisfying artistic experience. The stakes are high, and the challenges plenty, but Mr. Steel, a boyish and sandy-haired 43-year-old former choirboy, is as persuasive as your favorite college professor, the one who inspired you to change your major from poli-sci to music.

The first production of the new season, opening Nov. 5, is Hugo Weisgall’s Esther, a formidably atonal work that had a well-received world premiere at City Opera in 1993. “The top-selling opera of the year is Esther,” Mr. Steel said with pride, and the company has added a fifth performance “due to popular demand” (though the City Opera Web site’s “Select Your Own Seats” feature shows that only one of the performances is even nearly sold out).

The other fall opera will be a new production of Don Giovanni, opening Nov. 8 and directed by Christopher Alden. Mr. Alden is known for boldly theatrical work that’s often graphically sexual and violent. It’s a type of opera production for which Mr. Steel seems to have little natural affinity. “The controversy should begin with the artwork and not the approach to the artwork,” he said.

But that’s the way productions have to be these days. And the choice of Mr. Alden for a major repertory restaging neatly encapsulates the problem City Opera faces living next door to Peter Gelb’s Met, which is abandoning productions with too much pageantry and aggressively going after the reputation for theatrically vibrant opera that City Opera had for decades.

“There’s no confusion in anyone’s mind what one stands for or the other stands for,” Mr. Steel said, about the distinction between the two companies.

He pointed to the City Opera standard, Mark Lamos’ elegent, minimalist Madama Butterfly, a production that Mr. Steel characterized as having an “anti-Zeffirelli approach,” and so lobbing a stone through the window of the Metropolitan Opera’s famous director.

Of course, the Met is itself currently in the process of weeding out and replacing its Zeffirelli productions, and in fact the Lamos pales next to the Met’s own recent new production of Butterfly by Anthony Minghella, which is like minimalism on steroids.

Mr. Steel is reluctant to send out “smoke signals” about future plans, but expects to present, as soon as next season, about 10 productions a year. More specifically, he said that City Opera “should be and probably will be the first company in New York to mount Saint Francois,” Messiaen’s epic 1983 opera about Saint Francis of Assisi, which has never been given a New York production and which, along with Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, was the focal point of the planned first season of Gerard Mortier, the French impresario who briefly held Mr. Steel’s position.

The company is still dealing with the legacy of Mr. Mortier, whose tenure was cut short when the recession ensured lower budgets than he’d been promised. It was Mr. Mortier who insisted that the New York State (now David H. Koch) Theater be renovated rather than abandoned, ending the company’s long search for a new home away from Lincoln Center. That renovation, a $100 million project that is adding two aisles in the orchestra section, enlarging the pit and improving acoustics, will be completed in time for opening night.

Mr. Mortier’s plans were seductive, especially for music lovers of a certain age for whom the first performances of Einstein on the Beach in 1976 may have been a formative experience. Indeed, in the guise of the avant-garde, Mr. Mortier was offering a nostalgia trip, a tour through highlights of 20th-century opera that wasn’t nearly as out-there as he implied. “I mean, Janáček, Stravinsky? Come on!” Mr. Steel protested. “[Mr. Mortier] is really about the production. That’s where the radical stuff happens,” not in the music.

Mr. Steel wants to present operas that aren’t just the ones you haven’t seen in a while, but are ones you’ve never heard of. Yet despite his taste for the obscure, his basic vision is much more in line than Mr. Mortier’s with the company’s history and strengths, as well as with the eclecticism that characterizes almost all successful classical music programming. He has a chance to succeed if audiences can perceive his seasons to be like a shuffle of his iPod, with a personal curatorial touch that is one of the only things possible at City Opera but not at the Met. He may also want to revisit Glimmerglass, the upstate opera company that was until recently a useful way to share costs and try out productions but was well off Mr. Mortier’s radar screen. And along with the company’s tradition of fostering young voices, perhaps City Opera could become a place for established stars wanting to do operas that just wouldn’t work at the Met—Vivica Genaux’s esoteric bel canto or Cecilia Bartoli’s Vivaldi. Peter Gelb might not be happy, but Ms. Genaux and Ms. Bartoli would be.

Whatever ideas he pursues, Mr. Steel has faith, above all, in City Opera’s goals. “When the company’s doing what its mission says it should do,” he said, “it succeeds.” And so, we can hope, does he.

zwoolfe@observer.com