Main story: http://www.sfcv.org/
List of companies: http://www.sfcv.org/arts_revs/operalink1_2_28_06.php

   From the beginning, the American West embraced the complex,
   colorful, and passionate art form of opera. An 1851 La Sonnambula
   in San Francisco's Adelphi Theater (and, even more surprising,
   an 1854 Daughter of the Regiment in Honolulu - http://tinyurl.com/d8vnk)
   predates even some basic creature comforts. Just after the
   beginning of the Gold Rush (1848) and statehood (1850), but
   before indoor plumbing for most people, in a city of some 35,000
   brave souls, you could hear Bellini and Donizetti arias soon
   after their first performances in faraway Rome or Milan.

   As opera historian Robert Commanday has observed, "Though San
   Francisco had jumped from a village of tents and frame huts to
   a teeming hub city in two years, in 1851 it was still a frontier
   town with treacherous mud streets that could swallow up drunks
   and animals, with canvas, wooden, and adobe buildings that burned
   regularly in great conflagrations, many saloons, gambling halls,
   and already an international population. When the first visiting
   opera company, the Pellegrini Troupe, landed, it housed itself
   initially in tents made of bedsheets, then in a prefabricated
   house it had brought along." And yet the sound of music suffused
   the air, even with the mud below.

   The tradition continues today, in a somewhat better paved city,
   and its vigor has spread. With the San Francisco Opera on hiatus
   until the summer season, this is the time to get out there and
   hear the regional opera companies, whose spring programs are in
   full swing. When Classical Voice took a quick survey of active
   opera companies in the Bay Area, we found 13 of them - mostly
   alive and well, some impressively so. <snip>

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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