100 Years of the San Francisco Opera

The San Francisco Opera celebrated its 100th anniversary season with a gala concert last Friday that was unexpectedly emotional for both performers and audience as many of us realized how pivotal the company has been in so many of our lives.

Civic boosters often announce that something is "world-class" in San Francisco, which is usually a laughably provincial claim, but the San Francisco Opera has genuinely been one of the great opera companies of the world over the course of its 100 years. It helps that its performing home is an extraordinary theater, the 1932 War Memorial Opera House. The beautiful building resonates with the ghosts of rare, magical performances where singers, orchestra, and audience converged in sublime, shared musical experiences.

The Friday concert began with Music Director Eun Sun Kim conducting the Prelude from Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg while a slide show of archival photos were projected on an unobtrusive screen. There were no captions on the names of the operas or the performers which probably irritated some in the audience, but it drew me deeply into the memoryscape with such odd remembrances as: "Oh, there's that ugly set for Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani where Carol Vaness was so awesome."

Fifteen singers closely associated with the company sang a wide range of arias, from Monteverdi to John Adams, and the slide show mini-histories would shift with each performance. In the photo above, baritone Brian Mulligan offered a soulful account of Batter My Heart from Adams's Doctor Atomic, which had its 2005 world premiere at the San Franciso Opera with Gerald Finley (onscreen) as Robert Oppenheimer. The slide show continued with the five Adams opera productions that have been performed by the San Francisco Opera, from the 1992 original Peter Sellars production of The Death of Klinghoffer to this season's cententary commission of Antony and Cleopatra.

I first went to the San Francisco Opera in 1970, seeing Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, unusual fare for a teenager but I was freakishly precocious. Moving to San Francisco in 1974, I joined the wild, wonderful Standing Room crowd who charged through the doors with their $3 tickets like they were in the opening scene of the movie The Red Shoes, where everyone races up the stairs trying to snag the best spot.

In the 1980s I made enough money to buy a subscription in the last row of the top balcony where the sound is the best in the huge auditorium.

In 1991, there was an ad on one of the classical music radio stations announcing that the company needed non-singing extras, known as supernumeraries, for a massive production of Prokofiev's five-hour opera of War and Peace. Backstage turned out to exceed all expectations, and for the next 20 years I joined the circus, marching around with banners, dragging tenors off to execution, and playing with complicated props, all while listening to some of the greatest voices in the world singing straight into my ear.

Much of our supernumerary stage business involved the San Francisco Opera chorus, which is one of the greatest operatic vocal groups in the world. With the right directors, they are also one of the most skilled and flexible acting ensembles besides.

One of the joys of growing old is having generational memories, which means I was able to experience legendary vocalists at the end of their careers (Leontyne Price, Carlo Bergonzi, Birgit Nilsson, Alfredo Kraus, Beverly Sills), the whole length of a career (Carol Vaness, Placido Domingo, Montserrat Caballe, Luciano Pavarotti), and those just coming into their prime (Elza van den Heever, for example). Two of the greatest sopranos I have heard over the years in San Francisco, Nina Stemme and Karita Mattila (pictured above) sang in Friday's program, and it felt like a privilege to have such a history with them.

The San Francisco Opera Orchestra has only been getting better with each succeeding decade that I have been listening to them, and it was a particular delight to have former Music Director Donald Runnicles as part of the evening.

What made the concert so special, however, was the energy from the audience, a sophisticated group who all seemed to be feeling their way through their own individual histories with this company.

May the next 100 years be as wonderful as the first.