In San Francisco

San Francisco has always been an opera city since the old Tivoli days when beer was the chief attraction and seats sold for 75-c- top. On a rainy night last week San Franciscans began another opera season.

Instead of an Italian melodrama crammed with deaths, the San Francisco opera opened with Smetana's folksy Bartered Bride. Soprano Elisabeth Rethberg sang clearly and cavorted like any plump Czech peasant girl. In the pit was bald old Alfred Hertz who conducted The Bartered Bride at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House before he went West to take over the San Francisco Symphony in 1915.

Jew Hertz lost his Symphony job in 1930 when fashionable gentiles had their own ideas about the San Francisco orchestra. But Hertz liked the cool, moist San Francisco climate, liked his San Francisco home overlooking the Pacific and in San Francisco he remained. San Franciscans generally came to realize that he was as fine a German conductor as they had ever known.

Alfred Hertz gave Impresario Gaetano Merola good cause last week to worry over his budget. For years the San Francisco Opera ran no deficit. Last season there was one of some $30,000. Merola often undertakes a performance with next to no rehearsals; Hertz demands many. But as the solid old German stood in the pit last week, sweat gleaming from his bald pate, his beard pointing eagerly toward the stage. San Franciscans forgot all about dollars and deficits in the fine sweep of his orchestral performance.

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