Coming of Age in San Francisco

The merest fault darkens his day. Rehearsing with Joan Sutherland, he could notice nothing but the graceless clumber of La Stupendas feet. The curtain bothered him when the orchestra was at its best; the lights annoyed him when the set was perfect; poor acting upset him when the singing was glorious. With a board of directors that applauds him with rubber-stamp approval, an audience that regularly fills every seat, and a local gentry that promises in advance to make up the final deficit in his budget, San Francisco Opera Director Kurt Herbert Adler remains on the critical list.

Inflaming Ease. In ten years in San Francisco, Adler's furious pursuit of perfection has brought remarkable results. The company has given the first U.S. performances of such works as Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream and Cherubini's Medea, revivals of Nabucco and Ariadne auf Naxos, American opera debuts to such singers as Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, Boris Christoff, Sandor Konya and Sutherland. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who has yet to sing at New York's Metropolitan, has been appearing in San Francisco since 1955. On good nights, the opera's chorus and ballet are matchless in the U.S., and some of San Francisco's stage sets make the Met's look as if they were built by tenors. Still, the Met dwarfs Adler's company with the kind of ease that inflames. The Met has more money, its own orchestra, and a season four times longer than San Francisco's seven weeks.

Matching the Met in size as well as quality is Adler's prime ambition. He approaches the job with enough cheek to propose himself as a cover boy to magazine editors, enough musicality to remain an undisputed favorite among singers, enough energy to stay at the opera house 18 hours a day during the season and turn his vacations into 48-hour jokes.

Adler spends nine months a year in San Francisco and devotes the winter months to scouting trips to New York and Europe. He often spends Christ mas Day in a hotel room talking to singers and agents; two years ago, he saw 42 operas in 25 cities in 44 days. Now 58, Vienna-born Adler traipsed across Europe until 1938, learning opera while lending his hand to such diversions as an Austrian production of Abie's Irish Rose. Then he came to the U.S. and, in 1942, signed on as San Francisco's chorus director. When Founder and Director Gaetano Merola died in 1953, Adler took over.

The Aidatorium. Some vestiges of Merola's Neapolitan hand still persist in the company's top-heavy Italian repertoire. Last week, Adler opened the new season with a week of pure paesani, starting with Aida -- as the company has done so often that a local critic named the War Memorial Opera House the Aidatorium. But the new season also includes Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, Strauss's Capriccio, Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades -- all operas the Met audience will not see.

The season's first week gave Adler more reason than ever to believe the testimonials to his genius that gleam down on him from the walls of his office. Price, Regina Resnik and Giorgio Tozzi gave him an excellent opening night and Sutherland's Sonnambula won love-letter reviews. There was a sparkling new production of The Barber of Seville, and a Mefistofele in which dancers and chorus kindled each other to spectacular performances on sets that sometimes looked like paintings by Tintoretto. San Francisco was seeing some of the best-produced opera the American season can expect.

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