Western wanderings: our man in San Francisco - resurgence of the opera in San Francisco, California

Sunset, Sept, 1997 by Peter Fish

The cult of opera

A few years ago, a friend attended the San Francisco Opera's production of Bellini's I Puritani. The soprano June Anderson starred. My friend was a fan of Ms. Anderson's, but on this occasion she found the performance lacking - so lacking, in fact, that at intermission she decided to leave.

My friend walked out onto Van Ness Avenue. Sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk was a homeless man. As my friend walked past, he looked up at her. Had she enjoyed the opera, he asked. No, my friend said, she had not.

"Ah yes," the man sighed. "I understand that Miss Anderson was not at her best this evening."

My friend insists this story is true. I insist this story could have occurred only in San Francisco.

This month, San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House reopens after an $87.5-million renovation. Shear walls protect it from earthquakes (like the 1989 Loma Prieta quake that established the need for the renovation), and computers steer lighting and scenery. Gilt has been regilded, and the seats from which generations of San Franciscans have booed and bravoed have been reupholstered. These are accomplishments more important than they might at first seem. This particular building and this particular art form lie very close to San Francisco's soul.

"Foreigners came to San Francisco for the Gold Rush," notes Lotfi Mansouri, since 1988 the opera's general director. "They brought the music they were used to." Argonauts and arias arrived almost simultaneously. The city's first opera was La Sonnambula, performed on February 12, 1851, and followed quickly by Norma and Ernani. From that day on, opera entwined itself into the city's rises and falls. Even the greatest fall of all possessed an operatic leitmotif: during the 1906 earthquake, Enrico Caruso - in town to perform in Carmen - grew so terrified he fled the destruction and vowed never to sing in San Francisco again.

People who move to San Francisco from saner cities can find the opera worship befuddling. Each fall the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner cover opera opening night in dumbfounding detail, describing socialites' Chanel gowns bead by bead. But the opera is not merely the province of the rich. Cheap standing-room space is in such demand that a Standees Association formed to protect it. Each year hundreds of people vie to be supernumeraries, hoping to carry a spear behind the likes of Frederica von Stade. Gradually you understand that San Francisco thinks of itself as an opera. It likes public figures who swagger-Emperor Norton, Willie Brown - and it appreciates a good feud. Tragedies are larger than life - a great earthquake, the city hall shootings that became the opera Harvey Milk. On a clear autumn day the city itself is a stage set, the bay and hills and pastel Victorians too lovely to be real.

It can be a little much. When you're feeling cynical, the San Francisco-as-opera metaphor is not flattering. What is opera, after all? An outdated art form, gaudy and self-absorbed. San Francisco can seem beautiful but insular in just the same way. In the years right after the 1989 quake, the city seemed beside the point. Oakland had the port, Silicon Valley the semiconductors, and Los Angeles had everything else. San Francisco was a rouged diva flouncing around an empty stage, her high Cs long behind her.

That view, I know now, is mistaken - both about the city and about the art. It's not just that San Francisco suddenly looks important again, with the opera house and a new library and modern art museum. It's not just that opera is thriving in the age of the satellite dish. ("You just can't create an opera experience at home," notes Mansouri. "No video can do it justice.") What San Francisco and its opera make clear is that the creation of beauty is not as frivolous or transitory an enterprise as it might at first seem.

Here is another opera story, told to me by Philip Eisenberg, for 30 years one of the opera's prompters - the saviors who sit at the ready should singers forget lines or cues. Mr. Eisenberg recalled a performance of La Gioconda with the Hungarian soprano Eva Marton in the title role. In the final act, Gioconda lies prone onstage, her murderous lover brandishing a dagger above her. It is a moment of high drama, yet on this evening some quirk of staging or mood caused the audience to titter.

Ms. Marton would have none of it. She stood up, brushed aside her costar's dagger, and stormed to the front of the stage.

"Vat's so funny, dammit?" she demanded. "Ve are vorking here."

Never forget it.

The War Memorial Opera House reopens with the San Francisco Opera's 75th Gala Celebration on September 5, and a performance of "Tosca, "as well as a free opera fair, on September 6. (415) 864-3330.