Merola's Requiem
Like its rivals, from Milan to Manhattan, the San Francisco Opera makes most of the popular stops on the grand-opera highway, e.g., Carmen, Aida, La Boheme. But San Francisco takes peculiar pride in traveling the byways as well. For its opener last week, San Francisco characteristically chose a seldom-heard version of the Faust legend, Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele, instead of Gounod's war horse, Faust.*
The audience glittered, for San Francisco takes first nights with silk-and-sable seriousness. But the best show was onstage. The Devil (Italian Basso Nicola Rossi-Lemeni) was gusty enough to shake the chandeliers. Visiting Met Stars Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce (as Marguerite and Faust) brought down the house with their prison scene. Nonetheless, there was a sense of melancholy on both sides of the footlights: General Director Gaetano Merola, the man who founded the company 30 years ago and built it to second rank in the U.S. (after the Met), had died two weeks before the opening (TIME, Sept. 7). The prologue's angels sang their harmonies almost as a Requiem.
Practical Payment. It was Merola's personal taste and his astute judgment of his audiences that brought to the San Francisco stage such rarities as Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz, Vittadini's Anima Allegra and Giordano's La Cena delle Beffe. It was also his doing that a good many famed singers made their U.S. opera bows in San Francisco, e.g., Italian Soprano Renata Tebaldi, Greek Contralto Elena Nikolaidi, Italian Tenor Mario Del Monaco. Some Merola discoveries resulted from his travels. Others were noted by diligent San Franciscans who are glad to spend as much holiday time in Salzburg and Bayreuth as in London and Paris.
Some of San Francisco's best financial brains are at work on the opera's board of directors. Among them: Utilities Executive Robert Watt Miller, Investment Banker Charles R. Blyth, Banker William W. Crocker, Broker Marco Hellman, Publisher (San Francisco Chronicle) George Cameron, Paper Magnate J. D. Zellerbach. These men have developed a practical method for handling annual deficits : holders of top-price season tickets (931 this year) pledge $50 each, get charged on a pro rata basis when the season's deficit is added up (last year: a nearly nominal $36,000). Cost of each year's new production (from $20,000 to $50,000) is covered by the active Opera Guild.
Singers First. Since the season is planned as far ahead as February, the present run still bears the Merola trademark. It was put together, according to one board member, "like a jigsaw puzzle." First the big-name singers were collected, then the repertory was fitted together to fill 22 evenings. Basso Rossi-Lemeni's commanding presence made it possible to schedule Mefistofele, Boris Godunov and Don Giovanni. Wagnerian Soprano Gertrude Grob-Prandl and Tenor Ludwig Suthaus were imported from Germany to do Tristan and Isolde and Die Walkuere. At week's end, Italian Coloratura Contralto Giulietta Simionato and Tenor Cesare Valletti drew ovations in Massenet's rarely heard Werther. German Soprano Inge Borkh is on tap for Strauss's Elektra and Puccini's Turandot.
The opera board says it will not even think about Merola's successor while the season is under way, although interested San Franciscans think they see several possibilities. Among them: Metropolitan Conductor Fausto Cleva, Assistant General Director Kurt Herbert Adler and Carl Ebert, director of England's Glyndebourne Opera. Once upon a time the death of the founder might have raised a question about carrying on, but not any more. "If we started to close," says President Miller, "there would be more racket than there is now when [Club Owner] Paul Fagan threatens to close the San Francisco Seals."
* With which Manhattan's Metropolitan will open its own season in November.
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