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 [log in to unmask]