Opera came to San Francisco just two years after the Forty-Niners found Joe
Montana... I mean gold. By the end of the 1850s, there were several local
companies, in addition to traveling groups from Europe and the East Coast,
performing dozens of *contemporary* works -- Donizetti, Bellini, etc.
(Some of the traveling troupes went on to Hawaii, where research into 19th
century opera in the Sandwich Islands provided me with enough material for
a dissertation...:)
Then something strange happened on the Barbary Coast, and the small
(200,000+) town at the end of the continent went opera mad, with
torchlight processions for Anna Bishop, people lining up for Adelina Patti
tickets *one week* before they went on sale -- Patti getting $5,000 per
performance, payable *in advance*, of course, her contract specifying her
name to appear in a font at least one-third larger than the other singers.
A dozen opera houses were running daily performances, often year 'round.
The Tivoli was producing seven days a week, so that in the 26 years between
1879 and 1906, there were only 40 dark nights.
Records show 34 consecutive nightly performances for `Otello,' 42 for
`Faust' -- with the same cast. The American Theater (separate entrance
for Chinese) had 2,000 seats, often sold out; of the 59 theaters in
San Francisco in the 1860s, a third featured opera and operetta. When
`Parsifal' came to town, they had to put on *two performances the same
day* in the Mechanics Pavilion, to satisfy the 9,000 people clamoring
for tickets.
Then there was `Carmen' on the night of April 16, 1906, with Caruso, and
the next morning, the Big One put an end to opera until Merola came around
a few years later.
These are just a few hasty notes taken tonight at the Conservatory of
Music where retired Chronicle music critic Robert Commanday presented the
first of three lectures on the history of music in San Francisco. Bob and
Mary (his wife, a cellist with the Marin Symphony) have been researching
the early days and found evidences of one of the most opera-mad cities
of the last century. If all goes well, they'll put all that in a book.
Janos Gereben/SF
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