Word: merola
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sentiment & Flair. Much of the credit for San Francisco's success goes to Vienna-born General Director Kurt Herbert Adler, 52, who took over the company three years ago, after the death of Impresario Gaetano Merola. A sentimental Neapolitan, Merola had built up the company and fenced it in with a traditional repertory. But Adler inherited not only a flourishing company but a sophisticated audience ready for new and different opera...
...week's end Artistic Director Kurt Herbert Adler (successor to the San Francisco Opera's founder, the late Gaetano Merola) had reason to be satisfied with the way his first season was going. With his divas backed by a solid company (including Metropolitan Opera Singers Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren and Lorenzo Alvary), he could be sure of top musical quality for the next six weeks. Adler has another novelty in store for next month: the first U.S. performance in operatic form of Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake, with Cinemactress Dorothy McGuire speaking the name...
...Devil (Italian Basso Nicola Rossi-Lemeni) was gusty enough to shake the chandeliers. Visiting Met Stars Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce (as Marguerite and Faust) brought down the house with their prison scene. Nonetheless, there was a sense of melancholy on both sides of the footlights: General Director Gaetano Merola, the man who founded the company 30 years ago and built it to second rank in the U.S. (after the Met), had died two weeks before the opening (TIME, Sept. 7). The prologue's angels sang their harmonies almost as a Requiem...
Practical Payment. It was Merola's personal taste and his astute judgment of his audiences that brought to the San Francisco stage such rarities as Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz, Vittadini's Anima Allegra and Giordano's La Cena delle Beffe. It was also his doing that a good many famed singers made their U.S. opera bows in San Francisco, e.g., Italian Soprano Renata Tebaldi, Greek Contralto Elena Nikolaidi, Italian Tenor Mario Del Monaco. Some Merola discoveries resulted from his travels. Others were noted by diligent San Franciscans who are glad to spend as much...
Singers First. Since the season is planned as far ahead as February, the present run still bears the Merola trademark. It was put together, according to one board member, "like a jigsaw puzzle." First the big-name singers were collected, then the repertory was fitted together to fill 22 evenings. Basso Rossi-Lemeni's commanding presence made it possible to schedule Mefistofele, Boris Godunov and Don Giovanni. Wagnerian Soprano Gertrude Grob-Prandl and Tenor Ludwig Suthaus were imported from Germany to do Tristan and Isolde and Die Walküre. At week's end, Italian Coloratura Contralto Giulietta...