San Francisco Opera

From a stadium trial to a house of its own

San Francisco Opera began as an experiment. Gaetano Merola, a Neapolitan conductor, tested the city's appetite with a trial season in the Stanford University stadium on 3 June 1922. It worked well enough that the company gave its first full performance on 26 September 1923, a La bohème with Queena Mario and Giovanni Martinelli in the Civic Auditorium. Merola ran the company for thirty years, until his death in 1953, and the summer training scheme that carries his name, launched in the mid-1950s and renamed the Merola Opera Program in 1957, still brings around 23 young singers to the city each year.

The company got a permanent home on 15 October 1932, when the War Memorial Opera House, designed by Arthur Brown Jr and built in 18 months, opened with Tosca and Claudia Muzio in the title role. The building has framed every chapter since. It closed at the end of the 1995 season for a 21-month, 88.5 million dollar repair of damage from the 1989 earthquake and reopened on 5 September 1997. A fourth-floor conversion opened in 2016 as the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera, adding a 299-seat venue. Tosca has marked the reopenings, in 1997 and again after the pandemic closure in 2021, and it is scheduled once more for June and July 2027.

Leadership has been unusually steady. Merola was followed by Kurt Herbert Adler, who ran the house from 1953 to 1981, then Terence McEwen, Lotfi Mansouri, Pamela Rosenberg and David Gockley. Matthew Shilvock has been general director since 2016. Mansouri's tenure gave the industry supertitles, first tried at student matinees of La traviata in the autumn of 1983 and now standard practice in opera houses worldwide.

New work as a habit rather than a gesture

The company's record for commissioning dates from Mansouri's Pacific Visions programme in the 1990s: Conrad Susa's The Dangerous Liaisons in 1994, Stewart Wallace's Harvey Milk in 1996, André Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire in the 1998 season and, in October 2000, Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking. The company also co-commissioned John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer.

Gockley kept the habit going with Philip Glass's Appomattox in 2007, Wallace's The Bonesetter's Daughter in 2008, Tobias Picker's Dolores Claiborne in 2013 and Bright Sheng's Dream of the Red Chamber in the autumn of 2016. Under Shilvock the list has lengthened: Adams's Antony and Cleopatra in 2022, then in 2023 Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels's Omar, Mason Bates's The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs and Gabriela Lena Frank's El último sueño de Frida y Diego, followed by Kaija Saariaho's Innocence in 2024 and Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang's The Monkey King in 2025. Announced for the autumn of 2027 is the American premiere of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek's The Galloping Cure, which moves Kafka's A Country Doctor into the present-day opioid crisis.

The house has also been early with technology. In May 2006 it simulcast Madama Butterfly to Civic Center Plaza, and in 2007 it opened the Koret-Taube Media Suite, the first permanent high-definition broadcast facility in an American opera house, the same year radio broadcasts resumed after a 25-year gap. In 2008 four operas went out to cinemas nationally. Today the third performance of selected runs is livestreamed, with 48 hours of on-demand access for 25 dollars.

Eun Sun Kim and the long road to Valhalla

Eun Sun Kim became music director in 2021, the first woman to hold the post, following Donald Runnicles, who held it from 1992 to 2009, and Nicola Luisotti, who served from 2009 to 2018. She has conducted at least one Wagner opera every season since 2023, working through Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, and a film about her preparation of Lohengrin was nominated for a Northern California Emmy. Her Beethoven symphony concerts with the opera orchestra sold out in 2024 and 2025.

The 2026-27 season is built around her. She conducts Simon Boccanegra from 12 to 27 September in Claus Guth's Hamburg State Opera production, new to San Francisco, with Amartuvshin Enkhbat as the Doge, Eleonora Buratto as Amelia, Christian Van Horn as Fiesco and Joshua Guerrero as Gabriele Adorno. She returns for Massenet's Manon from 15 October to 1 November, with Amina Edris and Pene Pati in Vincent Boussard's production last seen in 2017, and leads a Strauss concert on 6 November with soprano Adela Zaharia that includes the American premiere of a new arrangement of selections from Der Rosenkavalier. From 29 May to 22 June 2027 she conducts Das Rheingold in Francesca Zambello's Gold Rush-tinged staging shared with Washington National Opera, previously seen here in 2011 and 2018, with Brian Mulligan as Wotan and Falk Struckmann as Alberich. Die Walküre follows in the autumn of 2027 and three complete cycles are planned for June and July 2028.

The rest of the season is in other hands. Thea Musgrave's Mary, Queen of Scots, written in 1977 and never before on the main stage here, runs from 20 September to 4 October in a co-production with English National Opera directed and designed by Stewart Laing, with Heidi Stober as Mary and Clelia Cafiero making her company debut in the pit. Sebastian Weigle, also debuting, conducts The Marriage of Figaro from 31 October to 29 November in Michael Cavanagh's production, set in an American manor house at the time of the nation's founding and revived for the United States' 250th anniversary. Cafiero returns for Tosca from 4 June to 2 July 2027, with Rachel Willis-Sørensen in her first Tosca and Quinn Kelsey as Scarpia. Around the operas sit an Adler Fellows showcase at the Herbst Theatre on 20 November, a chorus concert on 22 November and a third annual Pride concert on 25 June 2027.

A contract expired and a mediator in the room

The opening night has a shadow over it. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on 27 August 2026 that the orchestra's contract expired on 31 July and that bargaining, under way since May, had stalled. Management's first proposal was a 26 per cent wage reduction, which the musicians said would return them to 2015 pay levels; a revised offer of 20 per cent would roll them back to 2018 earnings. The musicians announced they would not perform on 12 September without a fair agreement, saying "We cannot begin a season under proposals like these" while adding that "There is nowhere we would rather be on September 12 than in the pit."

Management described its offer differently, as a five-year framework that would gradually change the structure of orchestra compensation while keeping musicians' annual earnings at current levels over the period. Rehearsals resumed on 26 August and talks restarted that evening with a mediator present, both sides describing themselves as actively working towards a deal. There is precedent for brinkmanship: a similar threat in 2024 was settled minutes before opening night. A follow-up report on 28 August recorded no agreement and the musicians still at the table. Nothing more recent was verified for this profile, so whether Simon Boccanegra opens with its orchestra on 12 September remains, as of these reports, an open question.

In the house today

The most recent run to be reviewed was the summer 2026 season, which paired Rossini's The Barber of Seville, double cast and conducted by Benjamin Manis from 28 May to 21 June, with Strauss's Elektra under Kim from 7 to 27 June. KQED's review of 8 June 2026 clocked Elektra at one hour and 44 minutes without an interval and described Keith Warner's 2017 staging, revived by Anja Kühnhold, as a 21st-century museum in which a visitor stows away after closing and the drama unfolds overnight, with rooms sliding in and out of the walls and video tableaux giving the whole thing what the reviewer called a Rear Window quality. Elena Pankratova, in her first Elektra, was judged to have strained at times in a marathon that kept her on stage almost throughout, while Elza van den Heever's Chrysothemis was praised for projection and rounded tone. The reviewer named Kim and the 95 musicians in the pit as the real star of the show.

The practicalities have not changed much in a century. Performances are in the War Memorial Opera House with supertitles, tickets start at 30 dollars, and the season opens with two rituals: the Opera Ball benefit on opening night and, the following afternoon, the free Opera in the Park concert in Golden Gate Park, a fixture since 1971 that draws crowds of roughly 30,000, scheduled this year for 13 September in Robin Williams Meadow. There are no support acts; the closest thing is the Adler Fellows, the company's resident young artists, who fill smaller roles across the season and get a showcase of their own each November.