One of my very first events in 2005 was a gathering of the Il Cenacolo club, founded just a few years after the birth of the Opera, and in that gathering I felt all of the extraordinary legacy of the Italian community which had founded San Francisco Opera in 1922. I was aware of those origins very early on in my time here with David Gockley. The birth of San Francisco Opera is, like the birth of San Francisco itself, something recent enough to feel connected to yet historic enough to feel the noble weight and tradition of those incipient seasons. He pays tribute to the past while looking ahead to the future: SF Opera’s Tad and Dianne Taube General Director Matthew Shilvock refers to 1922 as the beginning because that’s when the organization was formed to produce the inaugural season. (The only possible rival for that second place is the Cincinnati Opera, established in 1920, but its activity is in brief festival seasons in the summer.) When it comes to established and continuously active opera companies in North America, there is the Metropolitan, founded in 1883. The genre crossed the Atlantic and took root in New Orleans in the 1790s, making an amazing appearance in the 1850s in the faraway Kingdom of Hawaii. Impressive as a century is, the longevity of opera far exceeds it, starting with performances of Jacopo Peri’s Dafne in Florence in 1598. And, before those riches, before creation of the company, between 1851 and the earthquake of 1906, nearly 5,000 opera performances were given in San Francisco in 26 different theaters. The season also offered Puccini’s Il Trittico, Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. ![]() SF Opera performances were heard on the The Standard Hour, a weekly radio broadcast on NBC by the SF Symphony and SF Opera Sunday evenings, for two decades from 1926
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