On October 15, 1923, Gaetano Merola stood on the podium at the Civic Auditorium and raised his baton for the San Francisco Opera's inaugural performance of La Boheme. He had spent years lobbying the city's cultural establishment for a permanent opera company, and the premiere justified his persistence. Merola would lead the company for 30 years, dying of a heart attack while conducting a concert at Stern Grove in 1953. The company he built became the second-largest opera company in North America, a distinction it has maintained for a century. It was also, from the beginning, an institution willing to take artistic risks that East Coast opera houses would not.
Gaetano Merola was a Neapolitan-born conductor who arrived in San Francisco via a career that included stints with the Metropolitan Opera touring company. He understood that California audiences wanted opera but would not tolerate the elitism that characterized the art form in New York. From the start, the San Francisco Opera balanced Italian and German repertoire with newer works and American premieres. Merola secured the War Memorial Opera House as the company's permanent home when it opened in 1932 -- the same building where the plenary sessions of the United Nations founding conference were held in 1945. The Beaux-Arts structure on Van Ness Avenue, with its 3,146-seat auditorium, gave the company an architectural home worthy of its ambitions.
After Merola's death in 1953, Kurt Herbert Adler became general director and transformed the company over the next 28 years. Adler expanded the season, increased the number of productions, and cultivated relationships with the world's leading singers. Under his leadership, the San Francisco Opera premiered more American operas than any other company in the country. He also established training programs for young artists that fed talent back into the company's productions. Adler was demanding and sometimes tyrannical, but his tenure established San Francisco as a genuine rival to the Metropolitan Opera for artistic importance, if not for budget size. The company attracted singers including Leontyne Price, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Beverly Sills during Adler's era.
The San Francisco Opera has consistently distinguished itself through premiere performances. It gave the American premiere of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Janacek's The Makropulos Affair, Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, among many others. This commitment to premieres reflects a West Coast identity that has always been slightly more adventurous, slightly less bound by tradition than its New York counterpart. The company's willingness to stage unfamiliar works alongside the standard repertoire creates seasons that reward both newcomers and connoisseurs. The annual opening night gala remains one of San Francisco's most prominent social events, filling the War Memorial Opera House with an audience that treats opera as living culture rather than museum artifact.
The War Memorial Opera House at 301 Van Ness Avenue is itself a character in the company's story. Completed in 1932 as part of a civic complex honoring World War I veterans, it shares the performing arts campus with Davies Symphony Hall and the Veterans Building. The building's Beaux-Arts grandeur -- vaulted ceilings, ornamental plasterwork, a massive proscenium arch -- creates an acoustic and visual environment that enhances every production. The building also carries historical weight beyond music: the Japanese Peace Treaty was signed here in 1951, and the UN founding conference held its plenary sessions here in 1945 (the Charter itself was signed in the adjacent Veterans Building). Walking into the opera house, audiences enter a space where international diplomacy and artistic expression have shared the same stage.
The War Memorial Opera House is at 37.78N, -122.42W, on Van Ness Avenue at Grove Street in San Francisco's Civic Center. The Beaux-Arts building, with its distinctive portico, is part of a cluster that includes City Hall (with its prominent dome), Davies Symphony Hall, and the Veterans Building. The complex is clearly visible from the air. Nearest airports: KSFO 11nm south, KOAK 9nm east.