In March 1996, Joseph Volpe, the General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, started a major Customer Care initiative to completely redefine and re-automate customer service at the Met, with a $5 million capital investment approved by its Board of Trustees. The project pursued two paths to improve customer service and operational efficiency: technology tools and organizational restructuring and refocusing. The primary project deliverable was the Impresario software system (renamed Tessitura in 2001), which was designed by the Met's staff and engineered between 1996 and 1998. The Met went live with the Fund Raising functionality of Tessitura in February of 1998 and followed with the Ticketing module and fully integrated application in March 1999 for the 1999-2000 season.

Other North American performing arts organizations, who had experienced the same frustration as the Met in finding software to meet their needs started hearing about the Met's new integrated software and expressed interest in using it. The Met decided to license their software to other arts organizations in early 2000. The software was trademarked "Tessitura" and was licensed to a few arts companies to begin with. The "early adopters" or first licensees of Tessitura were the San Francisco Symphony, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Santa Fe Opera followed quickly by the Seattle Opera, The City Center in New York and The Lyric Opera of Chicago by 2001. Now almost 10 years later, Tessitura is being used by over 175 arts organizations in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia.