For two decades, Irene Dalis has been at the helm of the opera company she helped to found in her hometown of San Jose. Opera San Jose is a major success story in a tough field, and Dalis gets much of the credit for keeping the company vibrant through good times and bad. “We don’t pretend to be something that we’re not. We’re certainly not going to be a San Francisco Opera. Their budget is around $60 million. Ours is under $3 million. But we have other values. Our company is the only one of its kind in America and it’s not because I’m such a genius. I’m copying the format used in Germany where each city of 100,000 or more has its own opera company and they hire singers by the year.”