Success can be a complicated business. Ask Esther Nelson, the general director at Glimmerglass Opera.

Ticket sales this season, which opens July 5, have been fabulous, for example. Of 43 performances, 25 have already sold out, and with higher-priced seats selling first, the box office has already achieved more than 92 percent of its revenue goal for the season.

Last year, every performance was a sellout by the time the season was over in late August, with box-office revenue closing in on $1.9 million.

With numbers like that, any CEO would be revving up for expansion, but that's not on the horizon for Glimmerglass for at least several more years, says general director Esther Nelson.

"One way for us to increase earned revenue would be to increase the number of performances we offer," she says. "But that would come at a fairly heavy cost because we would have to add more staff. The infrastructure we currently have in place is already saturated. And we'd have to add three or four performances, because one or two just wouldn't pay."

With its 900-seat house, Glimmerglass would have to sell 70 percent of those extra seats, more than 2,500 tickets, just to break even, she says. That would mean operating at a substantial loss for several seasons if those four extra performances were added right now. The only sensible strategy is to develop a waiting list.

"There are festivals - Beyreuth [the Wagner festival in southern Germany] being one - where you're on a waiting list for years before your name turns up and you get a ticket. We don't want to add to our season until we have the reputation of being completely sold out in advance and we have a waiting list that we can start swinging into those extra performances."

Having a waiting list actually builds subscriber loyalty. People are reluctant to give up their subscriptions if they don't know whether they'll ever get their good seats back, she says. And loyal subscribers are something companies really want because most of their donors come from this group.

Nelson didn't mention it, but there's also the buzz and perceived cash value brought on by scarcity. No one seems to be scalping Glimmerglass tickets quite yet, but resale agencies in this country are getting up to $1,500 a seat for Beyreuth tickets. And it doesn't hurt a company's reputation.

Glimmerglass could always enlarge its theater, but in doing so would lose the intimacy that makes performances there so special.

"In most cases, opera isn't supposed to be an enormous spectacle," she says. "It's delicate, even though some of the stories don't bring the word 'delicate' to mind. The original opera houses of Europe were very much like Glimmerglass [in terms of size and shape, if not decor], and it maintained a certain intimacy, which in part is why the audience loves it here because they feel more drawn into the performance."

For now, at least, Glimmerglass will focus on more oblique areas of growth and improvement, Nelson says. The theater and its support facilities, for example, were designed for a company that presented operas successively, each for a week or two at a time. Instead, Glimmerglass offers its season in what's called "rotating repertory," which is much more appealing at the box office. Visitors to the region can see all four operas on a single weekend.

Glimmerglass could enlarge its scenic shop and build a storage facility for scenery, Nelson says. That way the company could take fuller advantage of a practice common in the opera world today - "coproduction." Glimmerglass now mounts most of its operas in partnership with other companies. This season, three productions are offered in partnership with the New York City Opera, a fourth with the Florida Grand Opera.

"Because we're coproducing so often, our scenery is now built more sturdily and has a much longer useful life," Nelson says. "The productions can be rented out for many years and generate revenue, but currently we have no storage space, so we can maintain very little of the scenery here. Our coproducers have to do that, which means our income is reduced when these productions are rented out."

She hastens to add that Glimmerglass will not build a storage facility on the opera house site. "One of the attractions of Glimmerglass is having 'nature' nearby, so we can't clutter up the campus with lots of buildings."

Another possibility for growth is in area that doesn't involve the theater primarily. "We're talking about establishing a creative environment here for composers and directors and designers to look, in a broader philosophical sense, at 'Where does opera go from here?' and 'Where does contemporary music go from here?'

"We would get people together in something like a think tank or a workshop and have them create something while they're here. It could also be audience-participatory and evolve into something else. So it could be an arm of Glimmerglass, where a piece of a smaller nature would be created here and would start touring to theaters around the country."

The danger in all this, she suggests, would be for the company to conquer the world and lose its soul. Coproduction has its price, for example: "The more partners you have, the more you lose in flexibility, compared to when you play on your own. So we have to be very careful to maintain a good balance between being a smaller, innovative company and one that requires more partnerships for the sake of financial security.

"Also, when your productions get bigger, you need more staff and more professionals on that staff. Currently a third of our production staff is made up of student interns, which makes us a significant training institution. So that balance between high-level professionals and student interns is something we want to maintain.

"We have interns from the local schools and hire local kids in our chorus. How many kids growing up in other rural communities have the opportunity to be onstage and have themselves broadcast on the radio all over the country, as happened in 1999 with our world premiere opera, 'Central Park.'"

Peter Wynne reviews classical music for the (Newark) Star Ledger.